I'm not going to lose an opportunity like this. It will do me good. They all say -- I mean, the other wiggles all say -- that I'm too flighty; don't take life seriously enough. If they've said it once, they've said it a thousand times. 'Puddleglum,' they've said, 'you're altogether too full of bobance and bounce and high spirits. You've got to learn that life isn't all fricasseed frogs and eel pie. You want something to sober you down a bit. We're only saying it for your own good, Puddleglum.' That's what they say. (Lewis 75-76)
From this use of bobance, bounce, and high spirits, I had the impression that the three words were connected. After all, bounce suggests physical energy -- a natural result of high spirits. And to my mind, partly from context and partly from the sound of the word, bobance suggested a sort of buoyant cheerfulness, in mood and/or energy.
I first got an inkling of my misjudgment from the opening passage of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ll. 8-10):
Fro riche Romulus to Rome ricchis hym swyþe;
With gret bobbaunce þat burȝe he biges vpon fyrst,
& neuenes hit his aune nome, as hit now hat;
[From the time noble Romulus swiftly directs himself to Rome;
With great bobbaunce that city he establishes first,
& names it his own name, as it now has;]
So what is bobance/bobbaunce, then? The OED advises the word is Obsolete, apparently overlooking its use in a 1953 children's book that has remained continually in print ever since. Starting with the glossaries provided with the poem:
- SGGK, 1940 Early English Text Society edition: "bobbaunce, boast, 9; OF. bobance" (Gollancz 137)
- SGGK, Tolkien/Gordon second edition: "bobbaunce n. pomp, pride 9. [OFr. boba(u)nce.]" (Davis 167)
Do the other Marsh-Wiggles think Puddleglum is too full of pride/pomp? Or too full of boasting? They think he needs to become more serious-minded, to understand that life isn't easy. I think pride may work better here, but since a person who is too prideful may be prone to boasting, maybe we can hedge our bets and render their remarks as follows:
'Puddleglum, you're altogether too full of boastful pride and bounce and high spirits. You've got to learn that life isn't all fricasseed frogs and eel pie. You want something to sober you down a bit. We're only saying it for your own good, Puddleglum.'
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Additional ruminations on OED entries:
Significantly, perhaps, the word bob in the current sense of buoyancy is a relative newcomer. The oldest senses of the verb (c1320 and c1280) had to do with cheating/deceiving/defrauding and hitting/striking with a fist or a rounded thing. The first noun form (c1400) involved a knob or cluster, but the sense of trick/deception is attested c1540, and a blow of the fist followed c1566.
The noun bob, n.4 seems to have emerged around 1550 with a sense of "1. An act of bobbing, or suddenly jerking up and down; a light rebounding movement." (Although the OED provides no attestations for this usage.)The verb bob, v.3 seems to be first attested around 1568, although the OED finds one dubious earlier reference in Chaucer in 1386. "1a. intransitive. To move up and down like a buoyant body in water, or an elastic body on land"
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