Words: Mugwump, n.

FINE RECORDS of Hove is a hive of erudite badinage unknown to chain stores. The CD Beethoven for Dummies made me posit Lord Berners for Dummies. Which prompted The Greatest Schnittke Album in the World . . . Ever! and Now That's What I Call Malcolm Sargent!

Mugwump then popped up, as the Mamas and Papas' first name, and I was told it had been a Victorian endearment. In fact, it is Algonquin for big chief, first used by John Eliot in his 1663 translation of the Bible into Massachusset: mugquomp replaces duke etc. In 1884 it became a term for those Republicans against Blaine as presidential candidate, hence those aloof from politics. The OED omits "a bird who sits with its mug on one side of the fence and its wump on the other": Blue Earth Post (1934).