"Nick Maclaren" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Franz Heymann wrote:

The fairy cheated me. I only won threepence per tooth.

Was it called a tickie where you were?

Yes. I still have one or two.
The English spelling is "tickey" and in Afrikaans it is "tiekie".
I
am not certain as to which came first. In Afrikaans lessons at
school, it used to be drummed into us that committing an Anglicism
is
equivalent to breaking the eleventh commandment. We had to
memorise
lists of such Anglicisms and "tiekie" was not on the list, so I
presume that it preceded the English version.

Where I was, it effectively didn't HAVE a written form, so there WAS
no 'correct' spelling. That could well indicate that it was
borrowed
from the Africaans, as so many such words were. Everybody used
them,
but formal communication was in Queen's English.

My Kritzinger & Steyn Afrikaans-English dictionary, of 1935 vintage,
has both the English and the Afrikaans entries

Q: How do you spell tickey?
A: Thruppence.

Franz