Rusticated jibs and disapproving skips

This article was published in Trinity News on 30 September, 2008, as the first of my 'Old Trinity' columns, with some sentences cut.

Rusticated jibs and disapproving skips

DOES YOUR skip disapprove of sprees? Has your wife been pestering you to clean your rooms? Has your new jib friend been rusticated?

Trinity College has many peculiar words, turns of phrase and acronyms which are its own. The words used in the above sentences would be more familiar to a student here in the 1960s, but they remain part of our cultural patrimony.

Much of the language used by our predecessors has been obliterated by time and taste. Older ways of talking about things – reading for a degree, or going up to College – have, sadly, become considered slightly embarrassing and have fallen out of use.

Long forgotten is the “skip”. No, not one of the oversized bins which deface our quadrangles, but a college servant who tended to the needs of the student in rooms. Oxford and Cambridge students still have their “scouts” and “gyps” respectively, and skip is likely a combination of these two words.

“Spree” was once – in the late 19th century at least – a term for an alcohol and banter session in rooms. It hardly needs to be said that it is an Anglicisation of the Irish word for fun, spraoi.

The undergraduate in rooms lived with his “wife”. Not the result of marriage, and certainly not a woman, wife simply referred to what we now call a roommate. The word became a little ridiculous when New Square sets were converted for the use of three people each – no one wanted to be accused of polygamy!

Innocent junior freshman students were once condescendingly called “jibs”. The word is over 200 years old: it appears in the irreverent late-18th-century Advice to the University of Dublin with the spelling “gib”.

Thankfully, we do retain some of our vocabulary. The freshman and sophister years have been safeguarded by official use. We attend commencements rather than graduation. We live in rooms in College, even if we only have one room, and even if the office of the Registrar of Chambers insists on “campus accommodation”.

An angry-looking man dressed in a military-style uniform once spoke to me about the dark old days when, he said, “you called us ‘porters’ and we called you ‘sir’.” With all respect to him, porters they were and porters they remain, despite the current fad for “security guards”.

“Trinity College” is a far more dignified title for our establishment than “TCD”, but the three-letter acronym was in use by the mid-18th century, and probably earlier. “UCD”, on the other hand, was not always the common term for University College, Dublin (which now never uses its rightful comma – long may we retain ours). “National” was the Dublin student’s colloquialism for that NUI college until the 1960s.

Trinity’s other special abbreviations are its unique and sought-after postnominals. The illustrious fellows are entitled to write “FTCD” – Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin – after their names. Scholars traditionally write “Sch” after theirs. The frequent use of that abbreviation seems to have fallen victim to the bland spirit of egalitarianism, and even the names of the members of the Scholars’ Committee are not suffixed by “Sch” in the Calendar.

Trinity Hall in Cambridge is colloquially referred to as “Tit Hall”. Not here, where we currently call our own Trinity Hall “Halls”. This plural version is not an old usage, but one which has been in vogue long enough for it to earn a place in the Trinity lexicon.

Another peculiarity is the “extern” examiner: not “external”, as you might expect. Similarly, your bachelor’s degree will be, all going well, an “honors” degree. For some reason the correct spelling is not used in reference to Dublin University degrees. Both of these oddities are preserved in the Calendar.

Of recent origin but in full health is that affectionate term for lady rowers, “mare”.

The word buttery is one of several words which are also used at other universities. It is not related to butter, as one might assume, but is a word for a liquor store room. It comes from the Latin butta – a cask – via the Anglo-French boterie.

We share the name of Michaelmas term with many other universities – Hilary and Trinity terms we share with Oxford. They are named after the feast days of St Michael the Archangel, St Hilary of Poitiers and the Most Holy Trinity, the last being our titular feast. Let us pray to the Holy Trinity, through saints Michael and Hilary, that these old term names be saved from the scourge of semesterisation.

Also in common with other universities are the terms for expulsion and suspension. As one goes up to a city and down to the country, so one is “rusticated” rather than suspended and “sent down” rather than expelled. Rusticus is Latin for “of the country”. Oscar Wilde enjoyed rustication, but after his time at Trinity, when he was at Magdalen College, Oxford.

There are undoubtedly many more examples of words special to our university. Words must have come and gone over the years which were never recorded, or which I have not encountered.

The eager jib shouldn’t be afraid to use these terms – or bring them back into use, as the case may be. At the very least their use will serve to irritate jealous acquaintances from National.