Pondering pink perplexities

The purlers - tricoteuses or treat, as they might say with Hallowe'en fast approaching - meet weekly at the Forth Hotel in Pink Lane, Newcastle, across the road from the Central Station.

Pink Lane, the report added, was named after the ladies who "after the Second World War" gathered thereabouts to ply their trade and "punke" or "pink" was a "slang term" for prostitute.

Oh gosh. What does that mean for the Pink Panther, or the Pink Palace - home of BBC North-East, is it not? - or the map of the world when coloured by British colonialism?

The Oxford Dictionary offers countless definitions of the word "pink", from a small boat to an eyelet in a garment and from "the most perfect condition" to an imitation of the note of the chaffinch.

Though "pink" is decently defined as "prostitute, strumpet or harlot", pink appears beyond the pale - and surely not just a post-war term, anyway.

We're talking the oldest profession here.

PINK was also paraffin, of course, which reminded Briggsy in the planning meeting at Number 22 of the old joke about what has four backsides and keeps your house warm in winter. Bum-bum-bum-bum Esso Blue...

THEN there was Lily the Pink, a number one hit in 1968-69 for The Scaffold but - bit of a surprise, this - on a different game altogether.

Lily the Pink was Lydia Estes Pinkham, a 19th century American who patented a "medicinal compound" as a panacea for women's ills from indigestion to infertility - "A baby in every bottle" it once promised - though the men folk also found themselves improbably embraced:

Old Ebenezer, thought he was Julius Caesar

So they put him in a home

Where they gave him medicinal compound

Now he's Emperor of Rome.

The song had been around long before Scaffold exhumed it and cleaned it up a bit:

Mrs Jones, she had no children

And she loved them very dear

So she took three bottles of Pinkham's

Now she has twins every year.

Lydia became a sort of pharmaceutical agony aunt, her staff answering 100 letters a day and her product grossing $300,000 annually in the 1870s. That the elixir secretly contained 20 per cent alcohol might have had something to do with its success.

She died, aged 64, in 1883 - but still the letters kept coming and still the replies were signed by Lydia Pinkham.

It was only in 1905, when the Ladies Home Journal carried a picture of her tombstone, that America began to suppose that Lily might not entirely be in the pink. The company's profits rose for another 50 years, nonetheless.

BY way of nice timing, ten terms for working girls from the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Euphemisms (2000): brass, call girl, camp follower, fallen woman, lady of the night, painted lady, sleepy time girl, tom, totty, unfortunate.

BLOOMSBURY, perchance, have kindly had delivered a copy of their new English Dictionary, billed as the dictionary for the 21st century. With 2,160 large pages and for £30, it seems remarkably good value.

New entries include bling-bling ("having or displaying ostentatious material wealth"), minger ("an unattractive or unpleasant person") It girl ("a fashionable young woman") and shirtlifter (don't ask).

It's also the only dictionary with a list of the 1,000 most commonly misspelt words, each also included in the place where the untutored might expect to find it.

The terrible ten, it's said, are suppose (not "supposed") to, caffiene, recieve, seperate, adress, occured, definately, therefor, usefull and transfered.

Though not strictly a misspelling, the incorrigible North-East use of the phrase "would of" - when "would have" is intended - would head any transgressors' top ten up here. What may be done about it?

THOUGH the Bloomsbury includes "slightly left wing" as a definition of pink, only the Oxford offers "a sporting edition of a newspaper". Perhaps they're almost out of print.

Once every decent sized town had a Saturday night Pink, though the Sunderland Echo turned green - and by no means with envy - when its football team was relegated for the first time from the top division, in 1958.

On September 4, 1965, six days into this journalistic joyride, the column was instructed to provide running reports on the Darlington v Carlisle rugby match to Pinks in Darlington, Middlesbrough, Newcastle and Carlisle.

That (then as now) we didn't know the rules and (ditto) couldn't see the ball was considered neither here nor there. They were what might be termed colour pieces.

One of the two extraordinary things about the Pinks, long redolent of hoary winter nights outside the stowed out paper shop, is that though technology has transformed newspaper production, the surviving sports editions hit the homeward streets precious little earlier.

The other was that those who produced them seemed so utterly unflappable. The week peaked in the Pink.

LAST week's notes on Rudyard Kipling stirred memories for Martin Birtle of his 1960s school days at the then-new Bede Hall Grammar in Billingham, the headmaster a Lancastrian called Dr Smith.

"The Doc had a double Cambridge blue," Martin recalls. "Swimming and chess, I think." Smith, at any rate, decided that each form and form room should be designated a "kipling", or possibly "kiplin" - supposedly red roseate for "piece" or "part".

None of the dictionaries acknowledges it. Susan Jaleel, our lassie from Lancashire, has never heard of it.

Is this another of the just-so stories? Further education welcomed.

THEN there was Kiplin Hall, between Scorton and Northallerton and commandeered during the war - says Ronnie Young in Thornaby - as a "special munitions" depot.

That was a euphemism, too. "Special munitions" meant mustard gas, buried in the woods nearby.

"After the war, RAF men from Thornaby were detailed to clear the mustard from Kiplin and from Bowes Moor and dump it in the Irish Sea," says Ronnie.

"On my last visit, the gates were still kept open by a shell and we found several empty ammunition cases in the woods."

Hostilities over, the lady owner returned from South Africa, discovered ammunition in the cellar and ordered the RAF to get rid of it at once. "It was peace time," says Ronnie,. "They did as they were told."

IT was also Rudyard Kipling, as we recalled, who wrote of the six honest serving men who taught him all he knew - "Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who." Bryan Sykes supposes that he missed one out, added "which" and called them Kipling's Seven Soldiers. "Ah," he writes wistfully, "my children will recognise that."

...and finally, the elder son of this house - a "boomerang kid" as defined by Bloomsbury - has implored us to include the word "bouncebackability".

On the rebound, no doubt, it also featured in Monday's report of Hartlepool United's victory over Chesterfield.

Apparently it's all part of a curious campaign to have the word accepted by the dictionaries, all who use it in print guaranteed a mention on one of the Sky TV channels.

Though characteristically rubber boned, the column's orbit may now be a little longer than usual. We bounce back in a fortnight.

Published: ??/??/2004