`The Most Commonplace Conversation'

Only once has a fictional character recommended a book to me. This happened almost 40 years ago when I read the never-completed Stephen Hero, Joyce’s proto-A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was written between 1904 and 1906 but not published until three years after the author’s death in 1941. Of the soon-to-be Stephen Dedalus, Joyce writes:

“He read Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary by the hour, and his mind which had from the first been only too submissive to the infant sense of wonder, was often hypnotized by the most commonplace conversation.”

“Skeat,” I learned, was the Rev. Walter W. Skeat (1835-1912), the English philologist and author of An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, published in four parts between 1879 and 1882 (the latter being the year of Joyce’s birth). I acquired a beaten-up paperback copy. At the time I was reading Joyce Talmudically, tracking allusions, but reading Skeat turned out to be a sovereign pleasure. Eventually I acquired the large-format 1989 edition published by Oxford University Press, which I pulled from the shelf on Saturday.

A work I’ve known even longer than Joyce’s and Skeat’s is Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, which premiered on Broadway in 1957. I was 10 when the movie came out, and within two years I was singing "Sincere" and “Lida Rose” in the junior-high-school glee club. I know most of the show’s lyrics by heart, or thought I did, and lately have been playing the soundtrack CD in the car for the kids. The first song, “Rock Island,” is set in a train car and contains the line “cash for the noggins and the piggins and the firkins.”

After almost half a century of listening I finally heard those words and wondered what the hell they meant, so I consulted Skeat. He defines noggin as “a wooden cup, small mug,” and adds “a small cask, a firkin,” citing Swift as a source for this usage (“Lines to Dr. Sheridan,” 1719). Piggin is “a small wooden vessel,” and firkin “the fourth part of a barrel. All are words rendered almost extinct by changing technology. “Rock Island” also mentions the Model-T Ford, first manufactured in 1908.

Taken together, don’t noggin, piggin and firkin sound euphemistically salacious? And like the name of a Dickensian law firm?