Since they were boys Jack and Warnie had been amused by their father's 'low' Irish pronunciation of 'potatoes' as 'p'daytas'. As a result, Mr Lewis was nicknamed 'The P'dayta' or 'The P'daytabird'. The term came to be applied to anyone displaying the characteristics of their father, in particular an ignorant dogmatism. Jack eventually discovered this characteristic in himself: 'I'm afraid I must be a P'dayta,' he wrote to Warnie on 2 August 1928, 'for I made a P'daytism the other day: I began talking about the world and how it was well explored by now and, said I "We know there are no undiscovered islands." It was left for Maureen to point out the absurdity' (CL I, p. 777).
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, April 20, 2026
P'daytism
The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, Vol. II (San Francisco: Harper, 2009), p. 20, n. 66: