ALAS POOR NELL
A name traduced
Some personal names have undoubtedly gone down in the world.
At one time Wally was just a common Northern abbreviation for Walter, but it has relatively recently became transmogrified in Britain into a mild term of abuse for a person who is “foolish, inept, or ineffectual”, to quote the OED. It is also a name given to a type of pickled gherkin in some parts of the country, a use I note which has not yet made either the OED or the new edition of the Concise Oxford. The heir to the British throne has another unfortunate name: in Britain someone called Charles is often familiarly called Charlie, but a Charlie, in full a proper Charlie or a right Charlie, is also a person lacking in common sense, a fool. In this meaning it was originally US slang, I believe, taken up and rapidly naturalised in Britain only after World War Two. It took hold so quickly perhaps because the word has long been used in British slang in various other senses, such as a term for the female breasts and for a nightwatchman. The latter sense came about because — so it is said — the night watch was reorganised by Prince Charles’s eponymous predecessor, Charles I. Even more unfortunately, the next in line for the crown after Charles is his son William, and willie is a rather childish British name for the penis. A more adult word for it is the ancient diminutive for Richard, dick. Come to that, so once was Johnnie, which was also once a term for the condom. (While we’re in this area of life, an American friend was extremely surprised at the response when he announced his name during a visit to London: “I’m Randy”. He hadn’t realised that randy in Britain is not a name but a common slang term meaning “lustful, sexually aroused”. Not a name that travels well.)
But the name that I feel has had the worst deal is Nell or Nellie, originally just an affectionate abbreviation for Eleanor or Helen. I blame the other royal Charlie for this, King Charles II. Somehow the pathos of his supposed dying words to his brother James, “Let not poor Nelly starve”, has stuck to the name ever since. Why else would Charles Dickens choose it for the name of his doomed and pathetic heroine in The Old Curiosity Shop? Oscar Wilde was right: “I defy any man to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing”. And can you imagine Escoffier creating Peach Nellie?
Charles’s deathbed words may have contributed to the establishment of Nell or Nellie in a range of set expressions. The name came to be used particularly of someone of low birth and limited capabilities. For example, Nellie was a fairly common generic name for a lowly servant, a skivvy (a word, incidentally, which is one of the very limited number in English containing two v’s next to each other; searching them out would certainly make a better competition than finding three words ending in “gry”). Someone new in a factory or office would often have been instructed through sitting by Nellie, or in other words learning by watching some conscientious and not too clever person who knew the ropes but who could be relied upon not to inculcate bad habits. The word also became a slang term for an effeminate male or homosexual, and in the US gave rise to the derogatory term nice-nellyism, “prudery; genteelism; excessive prudishness of speech or behaviour”. So that was Mrs Grundy’s given name!
There was a famous old music hall song by Henry Armstrong that I can remember my father singing (he was born a Victorian, so probably heard it in a real music hall shortly after it first appeared in 1905):
There’s an old mill by the stream, Nellie Dean,
Where we used to sit and dream, Nellie Dean.
And the waters as they flow
Seem to murmur sweet and low
“You’re my heart’s desire; I love you, Nellie Dean”.
For a while it became the archetypal maudlin pub drinking song: imagine it lugubriously belted out at closing time with a skinful of beer lubricating every voice.
Another curious expression my father used back in the 1940s was not on your Nellie, which some authorities think had been imported from the USA about ten years beforehand. Like Charlie it sounds home-grown, to the extent that it has been suggested that it is actually a piece of London-based rhyming slang: “Nellie” = “Nellie Duff” = “puff”. There was certainly an older slang phrase in existence: not on your puff, meaning “not on your life; never” in which “puff” means “breath” and so “breath of life” and so life itself.
To suggest that it was in fact rhyming slang needs some explanation of this supposed person Nellie Duff. Now duff has a number of senses. One of them appears in plum duff where it is just a regional pronunciation of dough. Another sense is “useless; rubbish; counterfeit”, once a common British word, and one which was taken to the US by Scottish settlers. So it is probable that the two mildly disparaging words were put together just to make the rhyme. This happened with another defunct expression Nellie Bligh for “fly” (the name of the much-traduced captain of the Bounty had by the late 1930s become a conventional term for someone tyrannical or deeply unpleasant, no doubt helped along by Charles Laughton). It may also have been linked for its inventors with memories of a late nineteenth-century slangy rhyming couplet: “Did he marry poor Nell? / Did he hell!”.
I’d love to find that there really had been a Nellie Duff and that there could be an opportunity to ask her shade (for she surely must by now have passed to her heavenly reward) what she thought of her name. If it were me, I’d have changed it, quick.
Last updated 5 Jul 1997
