The Sparrow

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30977, 5 February 1966, Page 5

The Sparrow

(Specially written for -The Press" by ARNOLD WALL

H E is regarded by writers with a mixture of affection and contempt; he is a cockney, a vulgarian, a symbol of insignificance, a familiar and homely figure.

In France he is “moineau,” the little monk, but that refers only to his appearance. In boys’ slang he is or was “sprugagee” (Scottish) or a spadger. The person here concerned is, of course, the housesparrow, not the tree-sparrow which is a rarer species and no companion to man, nor the hedge-sparrow which is not really a sparrow at all but an “accentor.”

The house-sparrow is one of the most widely known and distributed of all birds and has been a useful symbol for thousands of years. He is in the old Testament: “A sparrow that sitteth alone upon the housetop,” Psalm CII; in the Gospels: “Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings?” (St Luke); “Ye are of more value than many sparrows” (St. Matthew); “One of them shall not fall on the grbund without your father know” (St. Matthew). He is in our literature, “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (Hamlet). Once and once only if I am not mistaken does our little friend appear in any exalted or truly poetic context. This is in the famous and oft-quoted passage in Bede’s History of the English Church, in Latin of course, about A.D. 730. The missionary from Rome having expounded his message to the king and assembled councillors one of them (unnamed) spoke thus: “Such seems to me the present life of men in comparison with that time which is uncertain as if when on a winter’s night a sparrow should fly swiftly into the hall, and coming in at one door, instantly fly out through another. In that time which it is indoors it is indeed not touched by the fury of the winter, but yet, this smallest space being passed almost in a flash, from winter going into winter again, it is lost to your eyes. Somewhat like this appears the life of man; but of what follows or what went before, we are utterly ignorant.”

The councillor went on to recommend that this new doctrine should be tried. It is greatly to be regretted that Bede did not mention the name of that very poetic councillor. Cony, Coney “The conies are but a feeble folk yet they make their houses in the rocks.”—Proverbs XXX, 26. “Cony” is Old French from Latin “cuniculus,” and in English has always meant a rabbit, but in the Bible it means the hyrax or rock-rabbit, a tiny relative of the elephant. “Cony” has been spelt in various ways, now both “cony” and “coney.” Vizetelly gives four ways; couney, 1591, conny, 1625, connie, 1655, and coney, 1669.

The word is now nearly obsolete, but it is in use in heraldic and legal terminology. It still, of course, has a sort of toe-hold in the Bible.

It is now pronounced with long “o" so as to rhyme with “bony” or “pony," but, as the old spellings show, it was formerly pronounced so as to rhyme with "money" and “honey.” Among the authorities of the 18th century only three prescribed “cony” with the long “o,” eight others clung to the old “honey" and “money" sound. The strictly orthodox (not to say pedantic) Great and Shorter Oxford still prescribe both of these, but the Concise, giving “cony,” merely adds “formerly pronounced ‘cunny.’ ”

Daniel Jones rightly records “cony" only with the long “o.” In Elizabethan English cony was much used in the compounds “cony-catch” and “cony catcher.” Originally the cony-catcher would have been a poacher, but the term took on a wider meaning, “to conycatch” was to dupe or gull and the cony-catcher was a professional swindler. The dramatist Greene wrote a series of pamphlets on "cony-catching.” Shakespeare has it in “The Taming of the Shrew," "Take heed. Signor Baptista, lest you be conycatched in this business.” Geranium

STANDARD English “jeraynium,” internationally as a scientific term “gherahnium,” looks ugly but how else can you put it without phonetic symbols? It appears in English in 1548; before that time British wild species were called “Cranesbill.”

The name derives from the Greek “geranos,” crane, from the resemblance of the fruit to a crane’s beak. The closely related “pelargonium,” much confused with “geranium” in the horticul-