Eggs, Beans and Crumpets

I have just started Young Men in Spats and I am wondering if there is any way to tell an Egg from a Bean, let alone a Crumpet, or does it just depend on which side of the bed they got out of that day?

Dunno, but I'm hungry now!

I don't suppose for a moment that Wodehouse knew about it, but courtesy of the OED and Google Books, I came across a splendid parallel to the "E, B and C" idea. In the dedication of an early-18th-century work, A vindication of the Reverend Dr Henry Sacheverell from the false, scandalous and malicious aspersions cast upon him, the author tells the dedicatee (Mr B-----t) that a relative has left him certain items (including the works of "the Devout Baxter"!) in his will, but he would certainly lose them if his relative should hear that "...I have been such a profligate Liver, Egg, and Bird."

... I don't think there's really any distinction, they were all bits of slang that were current in the nineties when Wodehouse was at school. The OED cites Kipling for "good egg", H.G. Wells for "old bean", and Punch for "old crumpet", all round about 1900. Making up affectionate terms by comparing people to everyday objects is a standard sort of pattern in the development of slang, but obviously it took someone with Wodehouse's feeling for language to realise that it was much funnier if you a lot of different examples together. He does the same thing with the Mulliner stories where people are referred to by their drink-orders - "...said a Small Whisky".

If there is a distinction, it could be between eggs (who can be either good or bad) and beans/crumpets, who are invariably old. You wouldn't call someone "old egg" or say that he was a "bad bean".

Crumpet has two quite separate slang senses, neither of which is used in Wodehouse as far as I know: the head (when you say that someone is "barmy on the crumpet" you mean they're not right in the head) - also 1890s; and women, usually in the sense of being available for sex, which possibly originated as military slang around WWII.

That's interesting, as George Orwell (who liked PGW's work) chided him in print for being stuck in Edwardian times - he uses the example of Young Men in Spats, published in 1936, quite some time after young men would have been seen dead in spats.

It certainly makes sense if much of the ongoing vocabulary of Wodehouse's books stemmed from late Victorian and Edwardian times.

>3 thorold: >4 thorold: Thank you, thorold - I knew I could rely on you for something pertinent and interesting ;-)

Casting my mind back sixty years or so, I certainly used 'egg' and 'bean' in the Wodehouse fashion but never 'crumpet' - that applied exclusively to girls (available? - Well, maybe). Come to think of it, your reference to the association with the head might also include 'egg' and 'bean', I suppose.

>5 IanFryer:
I think it's pretty widely accepted that Wodehouse was strongly influenced by the language and culture of the Naughty Nineties - Norman Murphy has dug out a lot of the references to things like Romano's, the Pink 'Un, and the Pelican Club, and of course we know that Wodehouse was a schoolboy in those days, and that he spent his first years as a writer in the theatre and on newspapers working with people of that generation. And the mature Wodehouse style didn't change much after about 1918. But Orwell oversimplifies as well: there's a kind of base-level of Wodehouse language that is his own version of Edwardian schoolboy slang, but you always find a surprising number of rather contemporary references stuck on top of that when you look at a text in detail.

The most obvious example being Roderick Spode and his Blackshorts, I suppose. PGW gets attacked for not mentioning World War One, the defining event for anyone of his generation (something specifically addressed by Sebastion Faulks' Jeeves and the Wedding Bells) but he wasn't totally immune to contemporary references.

"Crumpet" for girl (an attractive one rather than specifically available, I would say) was in very common use when I was young. Nice bit of crumpet.

>9 John5918:: Second that usage. Remember as a (immature?) teenager on a cycling holiday with a schoolfriend reporting back home in a postcard on the "crumpet" we'd seen. A bit older and I'd probably have kept it to myself.

>10 PossMan: A bit older and I'd probably have kept it to myself.

Yes, I don't think I would have dared used it in front of my parents.