Bags I

Many a reader, or many an American reader, must have been puzzled by the following passage from E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End (1910).  The speaker is Helen Schlegel, an upper-class young lady who has just received a visit from a decidedly non-upper-class and middle-aged woman (“Mrs. Lanoline”) who thinks Helen might have stolen away her husband.  Helen is reporting to her sister Margaret:

      “We agreed that Mr Lanoline’s a notty, notty man, and hasn’t no business to go on the lardy-da.  But I think she suspected me up to the last.  Bags I writing to Aunt Juley about this.  Now, Meg, remember—bags I.”
      “Bag it by all means,” murmured Margaret, putting down her work.  “I’m not sure that this is so funny, Helen.”

“Notty” is Helen’s snobbish attempt to capture the lower-class pronunciation of “naughty.”  Equally snobbish are her “lardy-da” for “lah-di-dah” and the mockingly ungrammatical “hasn’t no business.”  The intellectual Helen is as it were slumming among unintellectual language habits, and to the distress of her more serious sister Margaret she’s having fun doing it.  Later in the novel Helen will atone by becoming involved with Mr. Lanoline indeed.

Aunt Juley is the elderly aunt of the Schlegel sisters, and a veteran like them of the kind of genteel class warfare that is waged with vocabulary and pronunciation (see pudding).  But what in the world does the sentence “Bags I writing to Aunt Juley about this” mean?  The answer is that with “Bags I,” Helen is claiming the right to write first about the encounter, no doubt as amusingly as possible.  If Helen were an American she would say “Dibs on writing to Aunt Juley . . .”   The OED calls “Bags I” originally a phrase used by children, traces it back as far as 1866, and derives it from the verb “bag” in the sense “claim” or “reserve.”

And “dibs”?   For the OED, the word means solely a thick Middle Eastern syrup made from boiled-down grapes or dates, possibly quite tasty, but not relevant here. Predictably, it’s American reference works that have dibs on explaining the history of the American word.  The Dictionary of American Slang mentions “dibstones,” “a children’s game played with small bones or other counters.”   Or “dibs” may mean “money,” a bit of slang used for example by Raymond Chandler: “How did you make your dibs?”  It’s a little difficult to see how “money” leads to the sense “I get first crack at,” so alternatively we may trace the expression back to “dib” meaning “a share,” especially a share of money.  Chandler’s great predecessor Dashiell Hammett wrote in one of his books “I ought to collect the kid’s dib too.”  From this sense to the “dibs on” sense seems an easy transition, and for my money, or my dibs, this is the derivation I really believe in.