P.G. Wodehouse in the OED

College and City: barge, biff, oojah-cum-spiff

As a boy, Wodehouse received a classical education at Dulwich. His instinctive command of the prose sentence, combined with a perfect ear for the music of English, gave him the confidence to trade in school slang (oil; archbish; barge; biff; corking) which would eventually morph into the lingo of his 1940 story collection Eggs, Beans and Crumpets.

The Mayfair of the clubs was in the future. Dulwich College is rooted in the suburbs of south London, a genteel purlieu of sorrowful aspiration, a place of servants, landladies, and clerks. It’s Dulwich (‘Valley Fields’ in the Wodehouse canon) that connects the Wodehouse of the English shires to a mass audience of clerks, insurance salesmen, and minor civil servants for whom chassis becomes slang for body, and giving someone the elbow, meaning to reject, possibly derives from the experience of taking a commuter train to the City. Such suburban clerks would also refer to moustaches as soup strainers or jocularly describe a colleague’s beard as a fungus. At their most uninhibited, they might address one another, as Ukridge does in some of Wodehouse’s earliest stories, as ‘old horse’.

Apple and tipple: ritzy to squiffy

Wodehouse, like all the greatest English writers, was always a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. Two youthful trips to New York before the outbreak of the Great War had a decisive effect on the emergence of his mature style. Throughout his heyday (approximately 1915 to 1939), Wodehouse could always count on selling his work twice over, first in magazine, and then in book, form on both sides of the Atlantic. Zippiness, hotsy-totsy, ritzy, dude, lame-brain, syncopated, zing, and hooched all bear witness to Wodehouse’s love of the US vernacular.

In retrospect, his creative zenith (the years of the first Jeeves and Blandings stories) was the 1920s, one of the great alcoholic decades of the 20th century. Unique in the canon of English literature, almost none of Wodehouse’s characters is indifferent to the temptations of a quiet snort. Wodehouse’s Drones will make for the bar like buffalo for a watering-hole. Their lexicon for inebriated includes: awash; boiled; fried; lathered; illuminated; oiled; ossified; pie-eyed; polluted; primed; scrooched; stinko; squiffy; tanked; and woozled. Every one of these words, and many other phrases, betrays their author’s delight in the vernacular.

Making a language

Wodehouse himself, of course, was always completely in command of his artistic faculties. He was also lucky. His astonishing popularity came at a singular moment in British social history. For the first time, the nation was almost universally literate. Wodehouse’s polished and seemingly effortless combination of the suburban and the classical, matching popular storytelling with brilliantly allusive prose was perfectly suited to a mass audience and the elite Oxbridge readership within it. Newspaper critics, like Gerald Gould in the Observer, expressed a widespread opinion: ‘In the most serious and exact sense of the word [PGW] is a great artist. He has founded a school, a tradition. He has made a language… He has explained a generation.’

Shortly after these words appeared, Wodehouse completed his masterpiece, The Code of the Woosters, a comic tour de force that contains some of his most celebrated felicities:

‘He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled’.

Or:

‘It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.’

Or:

‘You see before you, Jeeves, the toad beneath the harrow.’

The Code of the Woosters is the supreme example of Wodehouse’s marriage of high farce with the inverted poetry of his mature comic style. Today, he is more popular than on the day he died, and reference to his characters appear somewhere in the English-speaking world almost every day. The OED, for example, contains more than 1750 quotations from crispish to zippiness. In lightness and lunacy, life could become bearable, and the unexamined life, left to its own devices, could go like a breeze, especially if crowded with incident, orchestrated by butlers and valets, and dedicated to helping old pals. It was, finally, Wodehouse’s genius to execute his stories in a language that danced on the page, marrying the English style of the academy with the slang of the suburbs.

Robert McCrum is associate editor of the Observer newspaper, UK, and author of Wodehouse: A Life (2004) and Globish: How the English Language became the World’s Language (2009)