CHRIS Gwilliam, one of the very nice people involved with the Quaker meeting at Norton-on-Tees, was being less than wholly forthcoming when the At Your Service column sought information about his "church" background.

He'd been a Church of England member and religious affairs producer at Radio Tees and elsewhere, he said, without mentioning that he'd also been a parish priest in Hartlepool and in the villages west of Stockton.

One of the things which appealed about Quakerism was the silence. "The only time a Church of England service was quiet was when something went wrong," he added, memorably.

The name ringing bells, we checked him out in the cuttings library and in an old Crockford's Clerical Directory. "Banged to rights" wrote the admirable Mr Gwilliam - he might have meant "bang" - when the evidence was put to him.

Either way, it's a curious phrase. Entrepreneurial etymologist Nigel Rees supposes "Bang to rights" - you know, "Fair cop, guv" - to be something to do with "Bang on, right", as in absolute certainty.

Ray Puxley's Dictionary of British Slang offers little further enlightenment, but supposes that "bang up" is from the sound of a cell door slamming.

"Bang like an outhouse door in a gale" - slight euphemism, understand - is reckoned to date from the 1930s. Like many of the greater coarsenesses of the English speaking world, it has its roots in Australia.

WHILE down under, and since we had lunch in Darlington last week with an Australian priest with five degrees and a sabbatical, what of the term "Pom" - as in whingeing Pom - or Pommy?

Whatever else the origin, suggests a new book - Word Myths by David Wilton (Oxford, £13.95) - the familiar notion that it's an acronym of "Prisoner of Mother England" is so much antipodean eyewash.

Nor were the words ever written on the walls of Port Arthur jail in Tasmania.

The most popular theory, apparently, is that it's a shortening of "pomegranate", rhyming slang for immigrant - "reinforced" by the fact that pale faced newcomers from Blighty would soon turn bright red in the sunshine.

"This is a plausible origin," adds Mr Wilton disappointingly, "but there is no real evidence to support it."

STILL with the proverbial, recent columns have traced the phrase "All that glisters is not gold" back to Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.

Ian Forsyth in Durham takes the lustre off that theory by quoting The Yeoman's Tale, written by Geoffrey Chaucer two centuries earlier:

All thing that schineth as the gold

Nis not gold as that I have herd it told.

Fool's gold, is that the end of it?

SINCE there's nothing else on the cards, we turn to a letter - on behalf of his grandson, he insists - from Ken Fisher in Darlington.

Why, asks Ken grandpaternally, does the queen of spades face in the opposite direction from the other three queens in a pack of 52?

Why, he might just as easily have asked, does the king of hearts appear to have lost both his moustache and his right hand, why does the jack of hearts hold a leaf or the queen of spades, alone, hold a sceptre?

In connection with that shady lady, he might also have wondered how many different names there are for the game in which she is the principal penalty card - Black Bess, Black Bitch, Rachel - or how many different terms exist for the four of diamonds, inexplicably known on Tyneside as the Blaydon Cow.

Answers on a card (or an email would do just as nicely.)

THE Celebrated Surgeon, sometimes known as the Canny Consultant, fell at the lunchtime planning meeting to discussing medical matters - almost unconsciously referring to a "suite of symptoms".

Apparently it's the profession's preferred term for such things. If it were not, if suite talk were forbidden by the GMC, what might be the collective noun for symptoms?

A diagnosis? A trouble? A malady, malingering or misdemeanour?

The Celebrated Surgeon has a suggestion of his own. He thinks it should be a witter.

NOTHING wittering, of course, about the column's talks to the faithful - on Monday at Newton Aycliffe Methodist Wives, meeting just about every Monday night for the past 50 years. If there's a better Mothers' Meeting chairman than Jessie Musgrove we've yet to meet her - and we got to sing Oh For a Thousand Tongues, an' all.

IN one or other of these columns recently we suggested that if there were officially a "Green" paper it would probably be The Guardian. It is a view with which The Guardian itself might have agreed.

Last week, however, Echo reader Eric Smallwood in Acklam, Middlesbrough, received through the post a package the size of a small paperback. The outer wrapping was two layers of thick cardboard. Inside it, bubblewrap enfolded an uncooked piece of pasta with a machine made bite out of one corner.

It's something to do with "The essential Italian ingredient", though the rest of the wording is indecipherable. On any argument it's a Guardian stunt and Eric is distinctly unimpressed by the waste of natural resources.

He can't even knock up the pasta with half a pound of mince, some peppers and a glass of wine. "For promotional use only and strictly not for consumption," says a sticker on the side.

The Guardian, alas, may be more cabbage looking than it's green.

...and finally, we continue to be grateful for the cards, emails and other messages following the "lifetime achievement" and other recent awards.

It seemed like the vainglorious theme had continued at New Brancepeth Methodist Church, west of Durham, where we were approached on Sunday afternoon by an energetically elderly lady.

"Are you the man from The Northern Echo?" she asked, apparently awestruck. With all possible modesty, which is very little indeed, we replied that it was so.

"Can I just tell you," she continued, "how much I enjoy Horace and Doris?"

Verily it is as recorded in the First Book of Samuel: "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."

Thus today's column bows out not with a bang, but with a well placed whimper.

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Published: 25/05/2005