East Texas blacks shake hands with Oxford University

[Michael Quinion]

> I'm not sure about 'plunk' at Oxford. Not in my time - 1966-9. Plonk,
> no doubt and I remember a cheap wine, c. 1980, which labelled itself
> 'Plonque'. I just wonder whether what Wilson heard as 'plunk' was
> perhaps an upper/upper-middle class UK pronuinciation of plonk. Think
> of Prince Charles attempting to get his strangulated syllables around
> it. As for the WW1 Tommies, didn't 'vin blanc' come out more as 'vin(g)
> blong' (and thus, no doubt, plonk). Hence, from the WW1 memoirs of
> Frank. Richards _Old Soldiers Never Die_ (1964) 83: 'Ving blong was
> very cheap [...] a man could get a decent pint and a half bottle for a
> franc.' Red wine was 'vongrooge'. Australian troops also called white
> wine 'plinkety-plonk.'

Having written a Q&A piece about this for next week's issue, I am
interested to hear of a British example in reference to WW1 - all the
ones I found were to Australian sources. Have you any others? Would I
still be right in thinking that "plonk" was a (re)introduction of the
Australian term into British English in the 1950s?

--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>