Teachers at the Bequia Anglican High School took turns standing at the front door each morning, ensuring that the students formed orderly lines before entering the school. One morning, while surveying the straggling lines, I could see that two young students were having a heated argument, and from the looks on their sweating faces I feared that the argument was going to escalate. Marching down the steps, I pulled the two angry fellows apart and demanded to know what the problem was.
“Miss!” one of them shouted, “Miss! He too liquorice Miss! He too liquorice!”
Well, that one had me stumped! I knew for a fact that liquorice wasn’t sold at any of the shops on Bequia, and knew for SURE that my students wouldn’t have any idea how to spell liquorice, let alone know what the candy looked like. How on earth did the word come into play during an argument between two young boys? Why would one of them accuse the other of being liquorice?
A few days later I heard it again, except it was used in a laughing manner;
“Hahaha! Gurl, you too damn liquorice!”
Now I was REALLY curious, and had my ears on alert for the word, a word I seemed to hear all the time now that I listened for it;
“Ya liquorice bitch ya!”
“She born liquorice!”
“Oh GAWD, he liquorice in truth!”
Sometimes used in anger, in other instances with humour, the word was obviously expressive of something that a person new to the island such as myself simply couldn’t grasp. I finally asked Reny Hill, the wise founder of the Lower Bay School, what it meant when one person called another ”liquorice”.
Reny threw her head back and laughed long and hard before setting me straight;
“It’s not the candy “liquorice”, it’s “lickerish”, and lickerish happens to be one of my favourite local words!”
In a nutshell, “lickerish” (pronounced lickrish) means to be greedy, primarily greedy for food. It can also mean lecherous or corrupt, but the “lickerish” I’ve heard on Bequia over the years is used when referring to greed.
If “lickerish” means greedy, I suppose “lickerishness” means greediness! Like Reny Hill, “Lickerish”, although I don’t hear it as often in these modern times, is one of my favourite West Indian words; it’s quite expressive, and I use it whenever the shoe fits!
