Dot and carry one

Here’s a rather obscure expression which I first came across as a boy when I was engrossed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of derring-do that is Treasure Island, published in 1883. In Part Four the Doctor regales us with his narrative of events at the stockade, jolly exciting they were too, and he reports “I was not new to violent death…but I know my pulse went dot and carry one.” I hope from the context I was clever enough to surmise that his pulse was pounding or had an irregular beat.

More recently I read Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End, 1924 – 28, and came across this passage; “And Sandbach went off, dot and carry one, and began a furious row…” The context for the use of this curious phrase is completely different from that of Stevenson’s and can only refer to the gait of the unfortunate Sandbach. And then there is Rudyard Kipling’s tribute to the regimental bhisti or water carrier, Gunga Din. “’E would dot and carry one/ Till the longest day was done.”  This might be mystifying if we didn’t have the chorus, “He was Din! Din! Din!/ You limpin’ lump o’ brick dust, Gunga Din.” Din’s dotting and carrying one was down to his gait.

According to Redding Ware’s Passing English of the Victorian Era, published in 1909, dot and carry one referred to a “person with a wooden leg.” He even helpfully explained the meaning behind the component parts thus; “The dot is the pegged impression made by all wooden legs before the invention of the modelled foot and calf. The one is the widowed leg.”  Francis Grose in his invaluable Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1785, identifies an earlier variant, dot and go one. This, he reveals, is “generally applied to persons who have one leg shorter than the other and who, as the sea phrase is, go upon an uneven keel.”

So it would appear that our phrase deals with irregularity, initially of gait and then by extension more figuratively to pulse.

But then Grose lets slip a rather revealing clue by way of an aside. He notes that our phrase was also “a jeering appellation for an inferior dancing master, or teacher of arithmetic.” I’m blessed with two left feet and when I trip the light fantastic, the verb is literal rather than figurative and so one can see why an incompetent dance teacher could be likened to someone with mobility issues.

But a maths teacher?

It is a while since I had the joys of learning to do my maths but I seem to recall that when I was doing any sort of complicated calculation I was encouraged to set the units down in a column and to carry over the tens to the next column. It seems that this has been the way of inculcating the joys of mathematics into the noddles of the young for centuries, although in the 18^th century dots were used for every unit of ten (or twelve if you were dealing with money) that you wanted to carry over.

Not everyone sees the immediate benefit of learning mathematics and so N Withey – his first name has not carried over – had the bright idea of setting the concepts of arithmetic to song, the result of which was his A Little Young Man’s Companion or Common Arithmetic Turned into a Song, published in 1796. There we find, “the odd pence must go down, sir/ or nought if you have none,/ or for every twelve that you had in pence/ you may dot and carry one.”

It is not too fanciful to think that this mathematical convention was then used figuratively to describe the gait (and more relevantly the mark) of a wooden leg. Stevenson’s usage was a further development still.