Roaring Boy

I’m now a compulsive looker-upper. If I come across a word or phrase I don’t know (and I’ve discovered there are far too many to please me!), I look it up—or ask Joyce—or ask a friend sitting near me in the coffee shop.

I was not always this way. In boyhood this is what I figured: If I don’t know it—or can’t figure it out from context—it must not be important, so I’ll skip it! Not practical or wise, I know. But (in self-defense) it was much harder then to look things up. It meant a visit to a set of encyclopedias or an unabridged dictionary. (The latter had one great virtue: It contained many of the dirty words I wanted to know about.)

But by the time I got to college, I was realizing there were some pretty cool words out there—words like lycanthropy (a delusion that one has become a wolf—or the assumption of the form and characteristics of a wolf held to be possible by witchcraft or magic). That one I learned from Dr. Ravitz when he was telling us about Frank Norris’ novel Vandover and the Brute, 1914, published a dozen years after the author’s death.

Later, I was inspired by the young Jack London, who looked up all the words he didn’t know when he encountered them, wrote them on little slips of paper, and carried them around with him. Reviewed them. Stuck them around his room. The words helped him write his fifty books, I guess.

Mustn’t get side-tracked any longer. Here we go ... and you’ll quickly see the relevance of what has gone before.

I’ve been memorizing W. H. Auden’s wonderful poem, “As I Walked Out One Evening.” Link to the poem.  If you read it, you’ll notice, a ways down, the line: “And the Lily-white boy is a Roarer.”

I wasn’t positive what roarer meant, but I had a pretty good idea, for the expression roaring boy was more common in earlier centuries (see definition below from The Oxford English Dictionary). Quickly: it means a drunken roisterer. A loud and wild party boy.

I’d also come across the term in the 1990s when I was reading my way through the Elizabethan thrillers by Edward Marston. He has a series about Nicholas Bracewell, who’s the book holder (stage manager) in a London theater that produces plays by Lord Westfield’s Men.

Number Seven in the Bracewell series is ... The Roaring Boy (1995). It’s about a play of that name that the Westfield Men present—and chaos ensues. Murder. Threats. Etc.

I raced through all those books back then—had a good time doing so. Like munching Frito’s—which, in pre-girth-worry days, I ate with the abandon of a starving jackal.

So ... in Auden’s poem, the innocent-looking kid is, in fact, not. And that line, as you can see, appears in a stanza that deals with unexpected things. (We’ll not get into the Jill-on-her-back line, agreed?)

And, today, checking out roarer in the OED, I discovered that the term is now rare—and the latest example the dictionary gives is from ... Auden! Our very poem! In 1940!

Oh, the world is not random, is it!

DEFINITION  FROM THE OED

 b. A noisy, riotous reveller; a person who indulges in wild drunken behaviour. Cf. roaring boy n. at roaring adj. and adv. Compounds. Now rare.

In later use chiefly archaic, after Elizabethan and Jacobean examples.

1622   F. Beaumont & J. Fletcher Phylaster (new ed.) v. 72   We are thy Mirmidons, thy Guard, thy Rorers.

1639   T. Walkley tr. J. de Luna Pursuit Hist. Lazarillo xi, in D. Rowland tr. H. de Mendoza Pleasant Hist. Lazarillo (new ed.) sig. R5   Canil was dressed like a Roarer.

1640   ‘Ben-Arod Gad’ Wandering-Jew 49   I am a man of the Sword; a Battoon Gallant,..in rugged English, a Roarer.

a1704   T. Brown tr. Beroaldus Declam. in Def. Gaming in 3rd Vol. Wks. (1708) i. 149   Is there any so besotted to the Bottle, which this Discourse of Pliny's..cannot reclaim..from the Suppers of Roarers to the Dinners of the Cinicks?

1709   R. Steele Tatler No. 40. ⁋3   All your Top-Wits were Scowrers, Rakes, Roarers, and Demolishers of Windows.

1780   T. Holcroft Alwyn I. 21   This fear, however, presently evaporated, and I joined the roarers above.

a1872   E. Atherstone Love, Poetry, Philos., & Gout i. i, in Dramatic Wks. (1888) 198   Hast thou not..been..a roarer among the mirthful over the wine-cups?—and a companion to midnight debauchees?

1873   Judy 16 July 124/2   Not being of the Roaring Lambs, a roarer and reveller, their enjoyment chafes my ruffled spirit somewhat.

1940   W. H. Auden Another Time 43   Where..the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white boy is a roarer And Jill goes down on her back.