I wrote, yesterday, that Peter would win Bake Off. It’s not a spoiler; I don’t know but if he doesn’t the nation will get cross. Laura has had death threats, just as the vet, the lovey girl with the lipstick and Priya did in pervious years (what is wrong with people? It’s just cake).
We love Peter, though, not just for his baking. We can’t taste what he makes but it always just looks fine; nothing spectacular but just what he set out to do in the time he was given. He’s clearly a Bake Off super fan and has been watching since he was a baby (and if that doesn’t make you feel old then nothing will.)
What we really love about Peter, though, is his old fashioned sayings.
“Righty ho. We’re good to go,” he says as he tips out his cake.
“Jeepers Creepers. You can’t trust cheesecake,” he complains while explaining that he doesn’t really like cheese.
A colleague made me notice it a few weeks ago when she’d pointed out that he’d said, “Rinky Dink.”
We agreed that we loved that phrase. It sounded upbeat and positive.
“Rinky dink, look at my amazing cake?”
Except that when we looked Rinky Dink up in the dictionary it means old fashioned, amateurish and shoddy.
“That can’t be right,” we said.
I looked for the origin of the phrase. It turns out the first reference to it was in America in the Fresno Morning Republican in 1899, where a journalist made it up to get a nice rhyme with think.
“But I ain’t got nothing to show him what I think. But you’ll bet I’ll not sit by and get the rinky dink.”
I’m sure we don’t use it that way in the UK. So I checked the British News paper Archive and I’m sorry to tell you that it’s confirmed. The earliest reference in the British Papers is in the St James Gazette Saturday 24th December 1904. The article is explaining American scare-head ads, where an American journalist attracts his reader. There was some shock that journalists would stoop to such depths to hook a read; that there wasn’t any room for condolence or compsssion. A British Paper would have said, “Alarming Bulletin,” but an American paper would have written, “Will probably die.” They noted that the most alluring (their word) headline of this type was in a small provincial American paper, which said:
Willy gets the Rinky Dink
The story was about the dismissal of a corrupt Police Captain.
They weren’t confused about the phrase rinky dink but actually quite pleased that it was of better literary quality than the headline that ran, “Goat Monkeys with Explosive. Goes through the Roof.”
I suddenly have more questions.
Wouldn’t it just be rinky dink to find out about those goat monkeys?
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