Page:Literary Landmarks of Oxford.djvu/141

 HERTFORD

is one of the three colleges of Oxford which do not pronounce themselves as they are spelled the other two being Magdalen and Worcester. HERT sounds like HAR in the vernacular; and as Hertford is spoken it is, sometimes, not easy for the ear to distinguish it from the Harvard College of America. This, however, is colloquial and universal English, not an invention of Oxford, which is wonderfully ingenious in the twisting of local phrases. St. Mary's Hall, for instance, has been known familiarly to generations of undergraduates as "Skimmery," St. Edmund as "Ted's" or "Teddy Hall," and Worcester is further contracted into "Wuggins." In regard to more personal matters the Oxford man of to-day contents himself with cutting off the natural final syllable of a necessary word and replacing it with an inevitable "ER"; or else he adds the "ER" to a consonant of but a single syllable. The freshman is a "fresher," or perhaps a "colleger"; his chair and his couch are his "sitter" and his "bedder"; the exercise he takes in his "ecker"; the lecture he attends is a "lecker"; the Dean before whom he appears is a 109