Mind your language

ARISING from this endless nigger thing (or Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, as nasty old Thomas Carlyle called one of his tracts), a reader asks if I didn't think it a pity when in the Tom and Jerry cartoons they changed the old black mammy, who would chase the cat with a broom, into a fat Irish servant just as racially stereotypical but not having the specific difference of colour.

I can't say I did mind all that much, not having been too keen a fan of Tom and Jerry in the first place. But a Jungian coincidence struck by the same post when another reader, Mr Peter Wesson, who teaches English to the Viennese, asked why Jerome K. Jerome refers to driving away in a hansom cab as the `acme of modern Tom and Jerryism'. It has nothing to do with the cat and mouse, as he realised.

My vague idea was that it was something to do with the sort of book, like Dr Syntax, with illustrations by Rowlandson or Leech, which dealers tear out and sell newly priced to Americans. The precise origin is, I discover, Life in London, or Days and Nights of Jerry Hawthorne and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom by Pierce Egan (1821). They went about amusing themselves by betting on prize fights and horse races, and drinking and breaking windows in a late Georgian way. The illustrators were more than one Cruikshank. Something of the spirit survived in `Cuthbert Bede's Verdant Green books 30 years later, another treasure-house of obsolete references for Mr Wesson.

And Tom cat? That was, I assumed, ages old. The OED, however, places its origin in the anonymous The Life and Adventures of a Cat, published very successfully from 1760. (`Tom the Cat is born of poor but honest parents,' it says in parody of contemporary fiction.)

Tom abounds, I find, in long-dead compounds (Tom Double, Tom Long, Tom Pat, Tom Tumbler), but tom-tit, as in The Mikado, just about survives. Tit used to be tit-mouse in which the -mouse bit has nothing to do with mice (though, because people thought it did, the plural titmice was formed). The -mouse here comes from the Old English mose (first found in a manuscript as early as 700), meaning nothing less than a tit (of the genus Paris). As for tit, it is easy material for mongers of doubles entendres, as coney was till it became extinct and cock is now, to such an extent that the newspapers have started using the Americanism rooster. That is more John Thomas than Tom and Jerry. It makes a change from Uncle Tom, though.

Copyright Spectator Apr 17, 1999
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