I bought some Christmas pudding yesterday, from the brewers Harveys of Lewes, on the recommendation of someone whose taste is as refined and reliable in puddings as it is in literature. I remembered that, in my childhood, Christmas pudding was served not only at Christmas, but on birthdays too, and was always known, in the peculiar family argot that my father, his to brothers and his sister developed in their childhood, and passed on to their children, as Christmas cagmag.
I am straying into the territory of linguistic blogs covered so well by blogs like Lynne Quist's excellent Separated by a common language, but I find that the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word thus:
[app. a word of dialectal origin, widely used in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and adjacent counties: of uncertain derivation.]
1. a. A tough old goose. b. Unwholesome, decayed, or loathsome meat; offal ; hence anything worthless or rubbishy.
2. attrib. or adj. Unwholesome, decaying, refuse. There is also a verbal use, though I never heard this when young, meaning either intransitively to quarrel or transitively to nag.
This makes sense, as my father's family were physicians from the 18th century onwards, first in Norfolk and then in Cambridge, and Lincolnshire is not far away. In our usage, though, cagmag was not necessarily unpleasant. It denoted a substantial, suet-based pudding, often steamed as in Christmas cagmag, treacle cagmag. Cagmag tout court referred to a sultana suet pudding.
A certain patient of my father's, N, who was not an accomplished cook, would each Christmas give him a cake. My father would accept with grace and then give the cake to the dog to play with in the garden. This gift was known as a N..... Cagmag
Other family phrases I remember are Shakespearean in origin. All the family were keen swimmers, and Lady Macbeth's speech to spur her husband on to murder Duncan was plundered for the lines:
Letting I dare not wait upon I would,
Like the poor cat i’ the adage.
So we would say, 'in an adage', to describe any swimmer or diver who took their time getting into the water.
One of my uncles once misquoted the line from Julius Caesar,
Against the Capitol I met a lion,
Who glazed upon me, and went surly by
substituting a bear for a lion, and when challenged, insisted his ursine version was correct. He was never allowed to forget is error an thereafter any malapropism or misattribution would be called a 'surly bear'
I think Julius Caesar might have been my father's favourite Shakespeare play, perhaps because of its references to swimming. He would often recite Cassius's speech in which he describes a dip with the would-be dictator:
For once upon a raw and gusty day
The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,
Caesar said to me "Dar'st thou, Cassius, now
Leap in with me into this angry flood,
And swim to yonder point?" Upon my word,
Accoutred as I was, I plunged in,
And bade him follow. So indeed he did.
The torrent roared, and we did buffet it
With lusty sinews, throwing it aside
And stemming it with hearts of controversy;
But ere we could arrive the point proposed,
Caesar cried "Help me, Cassius, or I sink!"
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