But the incursion into the area of a force of men with sashes around their necks and mayhem on their minds changed that

But the incursion into the area of a force of men with sashes around their necks and mayhem on their minds changed that in a twinkling.The Bogside erupted Two days and nights of fighting followed. “,”Can I just run this by you?”,”How long is a piece of string?”To which I would just add, “I hear what you’re saying” and “There you go then”.. When the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, David Trimble, offered the opinion yesterday that the Orange Order is no more sectarian in its outlook and social role than other Protestant organisations such as the Guides, my mind was suddenly suffused with a disturbingly congenial image of shiny-faced little girls in berets and ankle socks storming up Rossville Street waving light cudgels and squeaking at the top of tiny voices, “Kill the Fenian bastards!”

This was the slogan shouted, more gruffly, by ominous members of the Orange Order and the Apprentice Boys as they erupted into the Bogside on 12 August 1969 with a view to putting manners on uppity “Fenians” who had dared to oppose the annual “Boys” parade along the edge of the overwhelmingly Catholic areas in Derry.
In truth, while there was scarcely anyone in the Bogside who wasn’t thoroughly opposed to the Apprentice Boys’ march, only a minority had gone down to the bottom of Rossville Street to proclaim their hostility. I do know, however, that in Scotland the word “bogle” means a ghost.

Does this add anything to the richness of the debate? The answer, of course, is that it does not.And that concludes this round-up of recent readers’ points – except to say that I am impressed by a fax from Glasgow, bearing Gerry Dunne’s nominations for a competition I mentioned for the Most Annoying Remarks in Daily Life:”Not to put too fine a point on it”,”Not so as you’d notice”,”A word’s as good as a nod to a blind man”,”What’s your problem, then?”,”Cat got your tongue?”,”As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted … The only letter on the subject has come from Mr Paul Dillingham in far off Finland, who says that he was taught at Winchester in the Fifties that “bogle” was a colloquial word for bicycle.I have never heard of this. However, I was really hoping that someone would come up with other slang expressions for a bicycle except for “jigger”, as it seems odd that we have no demotic word for a bike apart from “bike”. I sometimes heard it said of a bandy-legged man that ‘he couldn’t stop a pig in a jigger’. I never met a pig in a jigger, but the idea caught my imagination enough to have stayed with me.”A wonderful expression, and I shall try to adopt it. Quite a handful have written to me to say that there was a peculiarly Scouse meaning of the word, referring to the lane running between back gardens of terraced houses.Janet Laming, now of Cambridge, says: “When I was a child in Liverpool in the Forties and Fifties, streets of terraced houses often had a parallel alley at the bottom of the backyards or gardens, giving pedestrian access to the house.

I said recently I had come across the word “jigger” in a Billy Bunter book, being used to mean “a bicycle” and I took the chance at the time of supplying an exhaustive list of other meanings of “jigger”.But to Liverpudlian readers it was not exhaustive. Even these many years later I can remember whole chunks of these ditties, such as the opening of the “Knitting Song”:Some like footballSome like dartsI like knittingAnd the gentler artsHalf a dozen needles.An ounce or two of wool,Fills my cup of happiness -Chock full …I think I even saw Arthur Askey on stage once, when I was a lad in the Fifties, and we always went to the local pantomime in Liverpool, which brings me miraculously to the next point on which I have been copiously corrected by readers. And the silly thing is that I knew perfectly well that it was Wilfred Pickles who said “Give her the money, Barney!”, and that Arthur Askey was someone quite different, someone whose catchphrases were “Hello playmates!” and “I thang yeow!”.He was also someone who made 78 rpm records of songs like “The Worm”, “The Bee” and “The Knitting Song”, which my father had bought and got tired of, and which I thought were hilarious. The programme bristled with them – eg ‘What’s on the table, Mabel?’ referring to the glittering prizes available like a pair of fur gloves or 30 bob, and also the stunning question, ‘Have you ever had an embarrassing moment?’ (this invariably to shy young women whose knicker elastic had failed them at solemn moments).”My grandmother adored this stuff; my parents dismissed it as ‘corny’ (another dated word ).