Sir – With reference to the article on the use of language in Stonesfield (Past Times, April 8) can I suggest two answers.
First, the soldier’s slang ‘Goosycourt’ in the First World War was probably a bastardisation of ‘Bouzincourt’, a village near the Somme battlefield frequented by British troops.
As to the mystery of why some people say ‘You be’ as opposed to ‘You are’ this is indeed a survivor from Anglo-Saxon times.
In Old English the verb ‘to be’ had three forms (from different roots). For the purposes of this discussion an Anglo-Saxon could have said ‘ic eom’ (‘I am’) or ‘ic beo’ (also meaning ‘I am’).
The second form is the basis for Hardy’s ironical observations in his poem The Pity of It, and survived well into the 1950s in West Mercia and Wessex.
Stuart Lee, Oxford
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