Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Friday 1 October 2021

Coming across the word 'gabble'

in a book I was reading on a train to Spain
(though I alighted at Toulouse)
it occurred to me that it may have come
from  ¿ Habla [español] ?
Indeed a similar word with the same meaning
entered Middle Dutch at the time of the Spanish
occupation of the southern low countries...
Babble comes from Babel and its many-tongued tower,
and Greeks called non-Greek speakers [ba-ba-] Barbaroi.

World War One song
(probably originating in Armentières in 1915)
starts:
Mademoiselle from Armentieres, parley-voo...

A World War 2 version of this began:
Two German officers crossed the Rhine, parley-voo
[repeat}
Two German officers crossed the Rhine
to fuck the women and drink the wine,
inky-pinky parley-voo.

from Wikipedia:
                            'Inky Pinky' was a Scottish children's name for parsnip and potato cakes, but it has been suggested that an onomatopoeic reference to the sound of bed-springs is a more likely soldier's ribald derivation.'

Another version has Inky-Dinky, which might be a jocular corruption of the German Ich denke.

Ich denke, also bin ich.


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