Foreign News: Wenzel Number Four

All over England for the 325th time, stalwart citizens burned effigies of Guy Fawkes last week. Mr. Fawkes, 325 years ago, was employed by some Roman Catholics to ignite a quantity of gunpowder secreted in the cellar of the Houses of Parliament directly under the Throne of His Most Protestant Majesty James I.

In time’s nick Igniter Fawkes was apprehended and the historic “Gunpowder Plot” failed; but every year thereafter Royal guards have searched the Parliamentary cellars just before the King was scheduled to open Parliament.

Today English children wait for Guy Fawkes’ Day with its fireworks and burnings-in-effigy as eagerly as U. S. tots yearn for July 4. English lexicographers know that to “do a guy” is to “do a bunk” or “decamp.” As a noun “guy” means in England any sort of effigy or grotesque figure. The following example of correct usage of this noun is classic:

The king was Wenzel Number Four . . .

I got him guessed, that Wenzel guy harpoons a girl that’s young and spry

And tried to seal her up for life in the Old People’s Home!

(“Wenzel Number Four” is an English allusion to 14th Century King Wenceslaus IV of “Bohemia whose exploits included not only harpooning maidens young and spry but also ordering that his Queen’s confessor, the legendary St. John of Nepomuk, should be thrown into the vltava for refusing to reveal to His Majesty something which Her Majesty had confided to the saint at confessional.)