Susan Henry, who lives in Sandymount, Dublin, wants to know something about the origin of the disparaging term Hooray Henry, common in England for a loud-mouthed public-school twit, a Sloane Ranger type.
I haven't seen the term used in the public press recently and for all I know it may be gone out of fashion.
It came into being in the early 1950s when it was coined by somebody to describe the hordes of Old Etonians who used to infest the 100 Club in Oxford Street to hear another Old Etonian, Henry Lyttelton, play his jazz trumpet. The performances used to be punctuated by shouts of Hooray, Hooray! which were hard enough to put up with during the band pieces, but which made life very difficult indeed for Humphrey's singers.
When he was asked about the term, which, he felt, did his club no good, Lyttleton said that he believed that the term originated in the US and that in England, "in jazz circles the aggressively upper-class characters are known as Hoorays, an adaptation, I believe, of Damon Runyon's 'Hooray Henries'".
He was right in that, except that Runyon wrote Hoorah Henry. The Runyon story Tight Shoes, written in 1936 features a character described as "strictly a Hoorah Henry".
I myself have a supplementary question for my Irish Times colleague, poet and jazz aficionado, Gerry Smyth. Was it Lyttleton, or John Dankworth, who used to ask the patrons at night's end to stand for Corky's Tune?
I'm not sure, but I think it was Lyttleton. The then young queen's supposed resemblance to Corky the Cat in the comic strip was the cause of this irreverent name for her and for her country's National Anthem.
May I at this point give my blessing to a new 255-page book by Albert Jack called Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheep, which gives the origin of many phrases we use every day. It is published by Penguin Reference in a handsome hardback at a tenner sterling.
Many of the entries have a literary origin. Our author disproves the long-held theory that To bite the dust was coined by the 19th-century poet William Cullen Bryant, who wrote "his fellow warriors, many a one, fall round him to bite the dust". Well, Psalm 72:9 has "They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him, and his enemies shall lick the dust". But the origin of the phrase can be found nearly 3,000 years ago in the Iliad, when Homer speaks of soldiers falling, as though they were "biting the dust".
