Winchester Has a Word for Parents. It Is ‘Pitch Up’.

The rest of the guide is a working dictionary, and it shows no mercy to the newcomer. A study cubicle is a toys, and “The singular is always toys.” Toytime is evening homework. Ex trumps means unprepared. Spree means “presumptuous; bumptious; cheeky”, which I copied out for use at home. The terrace outside the Headmaster’s office is called Monty Fiasco, and I want that backstory more than I have wanted most things.

Then there are the bollards. Two of them in Michlā Passage are called Humby and Goddard, and before a refurbishment in 2023 they were Adam and Eve.

Somewhere in Hampshire two bollards have been successfully renamed, and I cannot get my own children to answer to theirs.

Not everyone at the school thinks the language is safe. A pupil who had spent about a week of break times reading an old dictionary of Notions with a friend decided, in The Wykehamist, that much of it was too niche to revive. Keep the useful words, he argued, and keep them accurately. He also pronounced one of them dead: Headman, out of use, he said, since a woman became Headmaster in September 2023.

The next issue carried a letter signed EAS, who is that Headmaster. The word was still in regular use, she wrote, “most recently as the salutation in an email addressed to me this morning” from a Year 10 boy who had never known a male head. Notions, she added, are “more resilient than we might think.” It is very hard to declare a word extinct when it is sitting in the inbox of the person it describes.

A second letter, from an old boy who had recently spent five years on the staff, proposed a rescue plan. Print basic vocabulary in the paper regularly, because pupils and dons “still ride bogles”, and the fo, short for foricas, is as much a part of daily life as it ever was. Bicycles and lavatories. A language with the toilet covered will see us all out.

Our house has notions too, none of them illustrated. The drawer of dead chargers is “the drawer”. Being “nearly ready” means twenty minutes. I tried to bring in spree for the youngest, who is eight and has views on bedtime. He looked it up, learned it meant presumptuous, bumptious and cheeky, and has used it on me every day since, correctly.

Yesterday he wrote his grandmother a birthday card. It began: Dear Pitch Up.