The Banned List #6

An occasional list of far too frequent crimes against writing

As I crept into the house, I didn't see the moonlight pouring in like a silver stream through the recently washed and polished windows. Nor did I observe that the faded burgundy velvet curtains, much in need of dry-cleaning, had not been drawn.

'That's odd,' I would have thought (if I'd clocked it in the first place). 'Shelagh never leaves the curtains open like that.'

A crystal goblet, sparkling in the light of the dying fire, its facets diamond bright, stood ungazed upon; the lingering, oily, pungent scent of gin ignored as a solitary ice-cube melted within its glass prison.

I didn't hear the menacing whine of the rusty door hinges as the bedroom door opened, nor the creaking heavily ponderous footsteps on the staircase. I failed to acknowledge the sinister click of the white plastic light switch.

So the sudden explosion of electric light came as a total surprise. (Once I'd noticed it).

Shelagh, her brows knitted, her mouth tight, her eyes like cross little currants, glowered with the force of a dark thundercloud. I found her expression hard to read.

'What time do you call this, eh?'

I was oblivious to the sharp tone of her voice; the clipped consonants, the elongated vowels which howled like an icy wind across a Russian steppe.

'It's time I stopped describing in intricate and exact detail all of the things which my 1st and 3rd person point of view characters allegedly - and I use that word advisedly - allegedly never blimmin' see, hear, touch, taste or smell,' I said crossly.

The End

Great Hairy Ruins

I wish I could read dictionaries properly. Well, obviously I can read them; I just can't pronounce all the words. They have little symbols above letters which inform one - for example - whether the o is short or long (apparently). Only I can't read the symbols. It's some sort of code, I believe.

I went looking for an explanation and found this, which only made my head hurt.

Thesaurus is one of those words I never really know how to pronounce. Is it thes-aur-us as in tyrannosaurus? Or thes-aur-us as in - well, I can't think of an example.

(In my younger days, I once got into a terrible muddle with a clitoris. I thought the stress fell on the 'or' which isn't good when one is trying to give directions.)

I am thinking about dictionaries today because one of the Sunday papers ran an article on a new book based on A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1785 by Captain Francis Grose. I cannot give you a link to the article as the paper thinks readers should pay for the privilege of being subjected to advertisements for Mercedes Benz motorcars, but I can give you the link to the text of the original book. Here! And don't blame me if you are lost for days wandering amongst totty-headed mopsies, sosse brangles, twiddle poops and fribbles ... Welcome, in fact, to Blowsabella's Pitstop.

By the way, I am hugely amused to read that Capn. Grose was ably assisted by one Hell-fire Dick, Esq. of Cambridge. Now, there's a name that lingers on the tongue.

Slang is a funny affair. Many of Cap'n Grose's words lollop from the mouth charmingly and yet their meanings are lost to us. Modern slang is not nearly so lovely. For example, Twitter is an online thingum - O, I don't know, look it up. Anyway, Twits are people who use Twitter. They tweet to each other. I tweet/you tweet/he/she/it tweets. Twits whose tweets are read by lots of other twits are called The Twitterati. Some of them are Twats - that's past tense, not gratuitous swearing.* And all of this appears (a.k.a. masquerading as News) in respectable broadsheets without a raised eyebrow. Even Cap'n Grose showed greater delicacy:

THINGSTABLE. Mr. Thingstable; Mr. Constable: a ludicrous affectation of delicacy in avoiding the pronunciation of the first syllable in the title of that officer, which in sound has some similarity to an indecent monosyllable.

Perhaps Mr Naughtie should refer to the Culture Secretary as Jeremy Thing?

Anthony Buckeridge knew that slang was ephemeral and invented his own for the boys at Linbury Court School. Ozard (meaning bad) is the opposite of wizard (meaning good). Anyone at all clumsy, irritating or slow on the uptake is a great hairy ruin - which I'm campaigning to bring back into general usage (with some difficulty, I might add).

My society, the Campaign for Usage of Non-standard Terms (abbreviated to T.H.I.N.G. for obvious reasons) will be launched in the New Year. In the meantime, please consider joining Save The Words.

O, and if anyone can tell me another name for thesaurus I'd be ever so grateful.

* And the band played Believe It If You Will.

Two wrongs absolutely do make a right

This post will attempt to combine mathematics, grammar and naughty school boys in a seamless and educative fashion.

Here goes.

I once brought my mathematics teacher close to a nervous breakdown. (At least that's what he said to my mother at parents' evening.)

Mr Kilburn had spent weeks explaining the concept of negative numbers. In one particular lesson, I must have snorted loudly or made some other indication of disdain.

'What was that, Moptop?'
'Nothing, Mr. Kilburn, Sir.'
'Were you sniggering?''
'Not exactly, Sir. It was more of a sigh.'
'A sigh? Why?'
'Well, it's these negative numbers, Sir. I don't believe in 'em.'
'You don't believe in them?'
'No, Sir.'
'But, Moptop, if I gave you an apple and you ate it, you would have minus one apple.'
'No, Sir, I'd have an apple core.'

And so on. The battle over the existence of negative numbers ran three times a week for two years and goes a long way to explaining the Unclassified mark in my Maths 'O' Level.

Today, in a moment of rare joy and rapture, I stumbled across a copy of The Best of Jennings by Anthony Buckeridge. (I stumbled in all senses of the words as it was a pile 'em high, sell 'em low book shop - only the staff had Spoonerised this instruction.) I've been reading it tonight and am half way through Book One.

For most of my childhood, Jennings was my hero - along with Nigel Molesworth and William Brown. (Yes, I've always had a penchant for naughty boys.) In the local library, there was a row of Jennings' books which I worked my way through (1 - 23*) and then started from the beginning again. Tonight, I am beginning to understand that Jennings was clearly a very bad influence on an innocent and impressionable young mind.

Stop laughing.

Jennings has an answer for everything, using an admirable form of logic. For example: instructed to label his gym shoes he writes his name in one shoe and 'ditto' in the other. Half way through Chapter Six tonight, I realised that Jennings is the reason I argued with Mr. Kilburn. He is the reason I failed Maths 'O' Level. He is the reason my bank account likes negative numbers - which I still don't believe in.

I should sue that library.

It was odd that I couldn't bring myself to believe in something that wasn't there (not least because for several years I harboured ambitions to be a missionary). Odd, because I had very much taken to heart William Brown's assertion that 'Two negatives make a positive.' In one** of the Just William  stories, he asks his mother, Mrs Brown, whether he can have a party whilst she is away. 'No, William, you may not,' is the reply. William takes the double negative to mean that, yes, he can have a party - a technique I employed several times myself during my teens.

A double negative in English works thus: No, I do not agree becomes I certainly agree.

Therefore No, you may not have a party becomes Of course you can have a party. Please blow the dust off the Créme de Menthe and make a lethal punch that will bring most guests to their knees after three sips. Also, refilling the whiskey bottles with cold tea and the vodka  bottles with water is absolutely fine by me.

I recently applied the double negative rule to a double double entendre using the logic that one cancelled out the other.

It doesn't.

And neither does eating two apples result in minus two apples, but rather plus two apple cores.

Still, none of this is my fault as I was brainwashed as a child. That's mine, Jennings', William's and Nigel's story and we're sticking to it.

* Books 24 & 25 were written in 1991 & 1994 when I was going through my Virago Modern Classics phase.

** A Question of Grammer is in Just William (1922)

An excellent start to the day

O, what joy! What delight! Though doubtless not in Tunbridge Wells where they are easily offended.

During this morning's BBC Radio 4 Today programme, presenter James Naughtie said a very 'naughtie' word in relation to Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary. Although, it must be said, someone else suggested it first.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS5mVoqJpUk

Warning! Do not click on this link if you reside in Tunbridge Wells. Naughty Naughtie has been inundated by emails from your compatriots. Please do not add to the gentleman's distress.

Naughtie was guilty of a Spoonerism, although many more tongue-tangles were attributed to the Revd. Spooner than he unaged to matter. I wish the Revd. really had said: "Three cheers for our queer old dean!" mostly because I'm hoping to use the line myself - fully credited - in the near future. (Spoonering soon.)

Count Arthur Strong also appears - though it is beyond me how anyone can 'appear' on the wireless - on BBC Radio 4. He could spoon for Britain. I expect it's a Desirable/Essential quality for employment by Auntie. Still, here's a thought: a new Olympic sporting category that we'd have a sporting chance of winning - Spoonerisming . As long as we didn't meet Finland* in the final.

So, with 2012 looming/bearing down fast/hurtling towards us, we - as in The Nation not just the select band who visit Chez Moptop - must get behind the soon-to-be-announced sport of Spoonerisms. Let us start with a warm up exercise. All together now:

I am not the pheasant plucker,
I'm the pheasant plucker's mate.
I am only plucking pheasants
Cos the pheasant plucker's running late.

I am not a pheasant plucker,
I'm a pheasant plucker's son.
I am only plucking pheasants
Till the pheasant plucker comes.

 - though - PLEASE - do not practise in Tunbridge Wells. I'm on their list as it is.

* If you are troubled with insomnia, you might care to read this article about how Finns spoon.

Crack **********

Read. Turn. Finish. Sigh. Think.

Chop, fry, splash, simmer, serve.

Eat.

Watch. Laugh. Nudge. Rewind. Snort. Snigger. Gasp. Consider.

Run. Scrub. Sweat. Stand. Dry. Slump. Retire.Type.

No, this is not a piece of painfully modern verse, but my attempt to bring down the capitalist system with a description of my most recent goings on. (I have goings ons rather than activities as activities are far too, well, active.)

According to  Crack Capitalism (John Holloway: Pluto £17.99),  nouns (car, wall, food) hide the activity that created them. Therefore all 'anti-capitalist literature should abandon nouns and just use verbs'.

Verbs.

My little protest (above) made the Dow Jones Index plunge by 0.000000000003 of a cent.

I wonder if abstract nouns count as anti-capitalist? They cannot be seen, touched, smelled or tasted, have no monetary value - and very little literary value, come to think of it ...

Still, it's a bit rum to charge £17.99 for a book on how to be an anti-capitalist, don't you think?

I studied Sociology at night school when I was sixteen (so I could avoid further Latin) and until then had thought capitalism was WRITING LIKE THIS. Within a week, I was fired up by a whacking big set text - the infamous Haralambos - and subscribed to New Society (as it was then) which resulted in my father thinking we were on one of MI5's lists.

There was a row every Wednesday as my left-wing periodical landed on the doormat. (Making strange noises on the upstairs' phone whilst Pa was talking on the downstairs' phone probably didn't help the situation.) I told him that his morning delivery of The Daily Telegraph would cancel out any suspicions raised by my 'pink rag' but he wasn't reassured.

Capitalism clearly isn't working. The earth will run out of resources if we carry on consuming so greedily. Let's bring down the ********** to its ***** by only using ***** when we write. (Ooh, I believe that last sentence brought about a wobble in the Hostess/Twinkie empire.)

The posters for our protest marches - there'll be several, don't worry - are going to be tricky.

STOP THE ***!

BAN THE ****!

LEGALISE ************!

If you can offer a noun-less solution, I'll be forever in your debt.

Overheard Conversation # 20 (or How To Speak European)

Location: the kitchen of a picturesque (i.e. draughty and damp) farmhouse in small hamlet in the middle of Tuscany.

Characters: (This is an Italian epic, hence the cast of thousands)
Donatella (46), Sergio (54), Zio Elio (indeterminately old), Zia Carla (ditto), Cesare (4), Laura (6), Au Pair (18)

Dinner has been eaten. Over small cups of espresso and torta di noci, the extended family - and the English au pair - discuss the pressing issues of the day: opera, theatre, literature, politics, and - erm - yoghurt ...

N.B. The conversation is in Italian, but for ease of understanding (unless you are actually Italian), it has - mostly - been transcribed into English.

Zio Elio: Where did you get those yoghurts?
Donatella: The lemon ones?
Zio Elio: Yes, the ones we've just eaten.
Sergio: I didn't eat one.
Zio Elio: Yes, you did.
Sergio: No, you ate mine. You ate two.
Cesare: Zio Elio's a greedy pig! Zio Elio's a greedy pig!
Zia Carla: Basta! (Which means enough, not what you thought it meant.)
Donatella: From the shop.
Zio Elio: Which shop?
Donatella: In Lizzano.
Laura: I didn't like mine. I gave it to the dog.
Zio Elio: It's a sin to waste food, Laura.
Laura: I didn't waste it. The dog ate it. Is it a sin to feed the dog?

(FADE OUT as the nature of Sin in regard to dogs is discussed at some length. FADE IN.)

Sergio: I prefer Swiss yoghurt anyway.
Zia Carla: The Swiss don't make good yoghurt!
Sergio: The Swiss make excellent yoghurt!
Zio Elio: That lemon yoghurt was definitely Italian.
Cesare: What yoghurt?
Laura: Cretino!
Donatella: We need a neutral opinion.
(ALL TURN AND STARE AT THE AU PAIR)

Au Pair: O! Hmm, gosh, English yoghurts are not so good. They are full of -

(SEARCHES DESPERATELY FOR A WORD AND REMEMBERS THE GOLDEN RULE: CHOOSE AN ENGLISH WORD AND STICK AN ITALIAN-SOUNDING ENDING ON IT)

- preservatives.

Si, si sono pieno di preservativi!

(SLUMPS EXHAUSTED BUT TRIUMPHANT IN HER SEAT).

All: Eh?
Au Pair (EMPHATICALLY): Sono pieno di preservativi.
Zio Elio: Preservativi?
Au Pair: Si. It is almost impossible to find a yoghurt in England that is not full of preservatives.
Sergio: É vero? Is this true?
Zia Carla: This cannot be true!
Au Pair: É vero! English yoghurts are full of preservativi.
Donatella: Preservativi? Gli Inglese sono animali!

Roll Credits

An Italian woman eating an English yoghurt

I'm a prima donna

dying in the mmmmm
waiting for the mamma
coming with her vest

I am hopeless at remembering song lyrics. The above is my version of Food For Thought by UB40. It was the first single I ever bought and I played it until the grooves on the vinyl were rubbed smooth.

It doesn't help that every singer since Vera Lynn has mumbled into their microphones. I used to put subtitles on when watching Top of the Pops, but the banal lyrical content was ever so depressing. Anyway, I was never sure if UB40's song began with a marina donna, I'm a prima donna, or I'm a green banana. Or - most likely - none of the above.

This mishearing of a phrase is called a mondegreen. Banshee told me this only an hour ago after a vociferous misunderstanding about the whereabouts of an absent bicycle. It was a mystery worthy of the attentions of Poirot and involved a tennis coach, broken brakes, a twisted ankle and TWOCKING (taking without consent). It wasn't my bicycle so I didn't care. I slid beneath the bath water so that all the vociferation was dulled into quite pleasant gobbets of sound. I couldn't tell what anyone was saying - it was like Top of the Pops all over again.

I missed my vocation in life ...

Clat? Well fancy that!

In my previous post - borrowing heavily from the first chapter of H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man - I used the word clat. Wells used it in his chapter and I liked the sound of it. I didn't actually know what it meant.

That'll teach me.

Last time I used a word I didn't know the meaning of, I was twelve and used begotten in a poem as I thought it sounded much more poetic than forgotten. The Begotten Doll was quickly forgotten - thankfully, no trace exists of this juvenilia. (And this admission won't stand up in Court, so sue me.)

(Apologies - it's been a lifelong ambition to say so sue me to someone. I saw the chance and took it.)

The Urban Dictionary has lots of meanings for the word clat - none of them suitable for sensitive souls. If you are a sensitive soul, don't click here.

I imagined that when Wells used it, it was intended as a derivation of éclat meaning a brilliant display or effect. So I checked other texts and - stone me! - he had written éclat in the first place.

Still, suggesting that Mrs Hall carried the cloth, plates, and glasses into the parlour and began to lay them with a group of promiscuous men shows a certain éclat, no?

Browned Off

This post was due to be entitled Whither Phyllis? which is completely different from Wither Phyllis! It is imperative that I point this out. (There's a pun in there somewhere if you look hard enough.) Still, having formed the title, I swiftly realised that I would spend half the post explaining its significance which would have you summoning the usherettes and demanding an immediate refund.

Tangent: Did I tell you I was once employed as an usherette? Once as in forever ago, not as in a singular act of working - if only! I fell asleep in the second act of thirty-three performances of John Arden's The Happy Haven and sold more ices in the interval of Marat/Sade than anyone else. (It was Hot Stuff.)

Ooh, it wasn't a tangent. I've found a way to make a connection.

The reason I fell asleep during thirty-three performances of The Happy Haven was because it was such an unrelentingly dull play, directed in the dullest possible manner, with a cast of dull actors: altogether so very dull that I became browned off and eventually nodded off.

I always thought browned off meant fdup - sorry, slipped into Tyke there - fed up or annoyed. But according to Ivor Brown (get used to this; I shall be quoting from him a lot) browned off means bored and was the Service slang of the Greater War. (That Greater War is heart-wrenching, considering that Mr Brown penned these words in 1942 ...)

Why don't we like brown? We fall into brown studies. Certain toadies (see below) brown-nose. Electricity shortages lead to brown outs*. All right, we may become as brown as a berry but this is a fruit with which I am unfamiliar as, not being partial to acorns, all the berries I eat are either red or purple. In 1942 to do brown meant to cheat. I expect a certain gammon-pink someone will resurrect that expression in the near future and flog it to death over the next five years ...

* There are no subliminal messages in this post, except the one concerning Phyllis.

Toadies and Other Political Animals

After an another afternoon in Albania, I came home to the Icelandic Study (how very European of me) and began to research the word toady. This led me to lickspittle and from there I found a list of synonyms which trundled along at quite a  - well - poetic lick.

Apple-polishing
Arse-licking
Bootlicker
Brown-nosing
Crawler, Fawning,
Flunkey, Groveller
Hanger-on, Kowtowing
Lackey
Lickspittle
Sucking-up Toady
Yes-man, yes-man
Yes-man.

The rhythm needs attention and perhaps the AlphBetiCal orDEr could be juggled a little, but I believe I've got the first draft of a poem to commemorate (commiserate?) the probable next Chancellor of the Exchequer. (I'd better compose one for darling Badger, too, on the remote off-chance.)

The prospect of finding Found Poetry has cheered me immensely today. I was, to be honest, being a miserable old boot. I wept during an item on cyclamens whilst listening to Gardener's Question Time on the wireless. Something in Audrey Hawthorne-Hedge's voice set me off. (Did you know, it takes five years to grow a cyclamen from seed? Five long, politically austere years ...) Anyhow, if Hart Seeley can find lyricism in the words of one Donald Rumsfeld, then I am sure the next five years will bring T.S. Eliot & Forward Prize-winning opportunities.

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

(A poem by D. Rumsfeld aged  78 and three-quarters.)

So, toady. A multi-tasking verb and noun, both short and slimy.

It is an abbreviation of toad-eater. A toad-eater was the sidekick of a Snake Oil Salesman (Ivor Brown calls them medical mountebanks). Toads were commonly believed to be poisonous - touch one and be plagued by warts - and so the toad-eater would ostentatiously eat the toad, or something squished that looked like a toad. (A bit like Ozzy Osbourne - no relation - and his rubber pippistrelles.) The toad-eater would roll about on the ground for a bit, moaning, groaning, clutching his guts, staggering from one onlooker to another, weeping for his wasted life. Then the toad-eater would be miraculously cured by his master prescribing a dose of sugared water and tah-dah! fortunes would be made. A charlatan and a stooge.

In the eighteenth century a politician's hanger-on was called his toad-eater but we must remember that a toady is not the man who resembles a toad but the poor wretch who used to swallow it.

For legal purposes, I am required to state that there is no suggestion whatsoever that Mr. Geo. Osborne has ever swallowed.

Just Another Word

"That brings me back to my original point, the curious carelessness of our time about what was once called rhetoric, the art of stating your case. How often do our propagandists - a class continually increasing in numbers and activity - stop to consider the values of words? It is astonishing to me that people whose profession is to persuade or whose passion is to win converts to a cause should be so careless of their tools and so well content to employ long, tired terms and clichés instead of seeking fresh, brief and apt ones, terms whose value in sound is so easily discoverable. Public men, with policies to urge, continue to drool and drone on platforms and in print with no discoverable awareness that they are killing their own case by the dull and ponderous language they employ."

Ivor Brown (Jonathan Cape, 1943) in a book produced in complete conformity with the authorized war economy standards.

I don't feel I need add to this ...

Bloody Tmesis

Last week, a poet who goes by the unlikely moniker of Ray Speedway, mentioned en passant that inserting an expletive into the middle of a word - as in fanbloodytastic - is called tmesis. Broken Biro and I immediately made a note of this in our pocket books (I with an engraved antique silver pencil; she with a small chewed plastic biro stolen from a Turf Accountant). Then we wrestled for the right to write.

Further investigation (after I'd flattened her) reveals that tmesis has rules. One can say Abso-bloody-lutely, but one cannot say ab-bloody-solutely. Similarly, one cannot say fantas-bloody-tic. Hmmm, I've read my two examples several times and have to admit I really do not understand the Rules of Tmesis.

Never mind. Some people absorb the rules as easily as breathing. I know a builder whose every other word is tmetic. Where's the tea-bloody-pot? he'll demand. I've never fancied Aus-bloody-stralia. Costa-bloody-Brava's good enough for me. Only he doesn't say bloody.

Funny, I should mention Australia because the people of that far distant continent (though not as far distant if you live in New Zealand) are highly skilled at tmesis. Only they call it Tumbarumba. John O'Grady wrote a poem about it :

And the other bloke says "Seen 'im? Owed 'im half a bloody quid.
Forgot to give it back to him, but now I bloody did -
Could've used the thing me bloody self. Been off the bloody booze,
Up at Tumba-bloody-rumba shootin' kanga-bloody-roos."

Now the bar was pretty quiet, and everybody heard
The peculiar integration of this adjectival word,
But no-one there was laughing, and me - I wasn't game,
So I just sits back and lets them think I spoke the bloody same

The rest of the poem is here.

No wonder we're so desperate to beat the Australians at cricket. We've got towns and villages called things like Great Snoring and Piddle. They have Tumbarumba and Iron Knob.

(I fear to direct you to the following website because you are likely to be lost to Blogland forever and never make your way home. Still, on your own head be it. X marks the spot.)

On with the poetry. Our poets have not ignored the bloody power of bloody. Although not strictly tmetic, Captain Hamish Blair was emphatically sanguine on the subject of The (Bloody) Orkneys:

This bloody town's a bloody cuss
No bloody trains, no bloody bus,
And no one cares for bloody us
In bloody Orkney.

The bloody roads are bloody bad,
The bloody folks are bloody mad,
They'd make the brightest bloody sad,
In bloody Orkney.

All bloody clouds, and bloody rains,
No bloody kerbs, no bloody drains,
The Council's got no bloody brains,
In bloody Orkney.

It'll be no surprise that the Orkney Tourist Board asked him to return their bloody advance. He should have written Ork-bloody-ney, but the good Captain insisted that the temetic version of his poem sounded like a joint injury and didn't scan as well as it ought.

As a slight aside, I once read this poem to a strange man in a café. By strange I mean I did not know him from Adam. He became rather emotional and said that he hadn't been read to since he was a small boy. He dabbed at his eyes with a paper napkin. I was delighted; a positive outcome; a convert to poetry. By chance, the following day I met him again, this time in the street. He asked whether I'd consider reading him regular bed time stories and offered payment in cash. He said there was no need for me to bring a book.

John Cooper Clarke, the punk poet with the complexion of a compulsive blood donor, paid homage to Captain Blair in his poem Evidently Chickentown. Only he didn't use bloody either.

I've drifted from my original point, haven't I?

(Abso-bloody-exactly! Ed.)

You're Gorgeous

The supreme wordsmith, Inky Fool, couldn't find an English word that means ugly-beautiful. (Jolie laide, being French and gender-specific, just will not do.)

But as Inky is ever so clever, we can forgive him. And I live in hope that something will turn up ...

It is a huge oversight in terms of the English language that no such word (meaning ugly-beautiful) exists. Surely the Anglo-Saxons - not famous for their faces - had a word for it? Or the Vikings? Something that was absorbed into our common tongue?

The Scots have braw - which can be used ironically - but it's still not exactly what I'm looking for. (Although the Scots also have wallie gowdie which is worth using just for the sheer joy it brings to ones mouth.)

I wanted to write about the beautifully ugly grotesques (not gargoyles) in The Chapter House of York Minster. And I can't. At least not without referring to '90s pop sensation, Babybird who released an album called Ugly Beautiful. (Which is all you'll blimmin' well get when you put that term into a search engine.)

Even Lewis Carroll's invention of uglification hasn't cheered me. (If you don't know what to uglify is, you ARE a simpleton*.)

Some things are just so ugly they become beautiful. Certain breeds of dogs; odd looking babies; politicians.

But the grotesques in The Chapter House are so very ugly - they squish small children, wrestle pigs, stretch their noses and mouths,stick out their tongues, snarl, gibber, and gurn. How could they fail to be beautiful when they've gone to so much bother to achieve ugliness?

I know I shouldn't find this funny, but the UK's three-times National Gurning Champion - a man who had his teeth removed in order to make his face more pliable - died when a cliff face collapsed underneath him. Is there a sort of delicious irony in the man with the collapsible face meeting his end on a collapsible face?

For more examples of the Beautifully Ugly, click here.

* That's a direct quotation, not just me being rude.

Shambles

The economy's in a shambles, as is the airline industry (we can blame Iceland for both), as is my study (should I blame Iceland for that? O, go on then.) My kitchen cupboards have been tidier - all right, they're also in a shambles. I'll skirt over the state of my sock drawer (shambles) and knicker drawer (drawers' drawer?) Do I really need to spell it out? S.H.A.M.B.L.E.S.

And guess where I was yesterday? In The Shambles - in fact, due to the crowds of people who hadn't gone to the Harrogate Flower Show, I was shambling in The Shambles - looking at the shrine of Margaret of Clitherow who was pressed to death for her faith and not buying fudge. To clarify: Margaret wasn't pressed to death for not buying fudge. I wasn't buying fudge - which was difficult as every other shop in The Shambles sold it. (I won't tell you what the shops in Whip-ma-whop-ma-gate sold.)

I apologise if you think I'm being irreverent about Margaret. In my defence, it is as nothing compared to what the junior bugs in the Foreign Office have said about the Pope recently.

Yesterday, someone told me that in ages past, The Shambles were populated with slaughtermen and butchershops: shambles were the innards of butchered beasts which tumbled bloodily onto the street and made a mess - or a right shambles. However, research suggests that a shamble was the table or bench the beast was butchered on. No matter, shambles has come to mean mess and muddle, clutter, ruin or a scene of bloodshed, carnage and great devastation.

Perhaps because the airplanes were grounded and the airline industry propelled into complete shambles, we were saved - quite literally - from complete shambles.

Overheard Conversation # 13

New Feature! Added Analysis! (Poo, Gosh, &c., &c.)

Location: Queue in the inaccurately named Fast Checkout Lane of supermarket.
Characters: Man in steel-capped boots, man in yellow hard-hat - both in their mid 30s.

Boots: So I turns round and goes to the boss I'm not 'aving tha'.
Hard Hat: Yer never!
Boots: And he went Well it's in yer contract, lad.
Hard Hat: Right!
Boots: Then I turns round and goes I've never even seen a bloody contract!
Hard Hat: 'e tried to pull that one on me. I wasn' 'avin' none of it.
Boots: So then I goes None of the Lads'll be 'appy 'bout this, Boss.
Hard Hat: Bloody right. I turns round to Joe and warned 'im Don't be working too fast on tha' wall, kid.
Boots: Then 'e turns round and goes We'll see wha' the Site Manager 'as to say.

And so on. Reader, I was dizzy with the amount of turning around they'd been doing. More pirouetting than a ballerina en pointe - and not nimble looking chaps by any means.

Teenagers - stay with me; all will become clear. Teenagers: we feed them, clothe them, put roofs over their heads, send them to school, straighten their teeth and encourage them to bathe occasionally. They are hardly ill-used if the only joy we get out of this arrangement is annoying and embarrassing them.

One delicious way to annoy teenagers is based on the above conversation:

Banshee: I wasn't happy with Riviera this afternoon. She's that stuck-up cow whose mum's on Hollyoaks. So I went -
Ma: Where? Went where, darling?
Banshee: I didn't go anywhere. Listen. So she turned round -
Ma: In a full circle or only ninety degrees?
Banshee: Are you on something? So I went -
Ma: You left the room?
Banshee: No! I goes -
Ma: Where did you go?
Banshee: I didn't go anywhere! LISTEN. So Riviera goes -
Ma: Riviera left the room?

At this point the Banshee will scream and storm out in High Dudgeon. The Ma smiles (like La Gioconda - subtly satisfied), flicks off the T.V. and picks up Saturday's Times Jumbo Cryptic Crossword which she's been staring at for three days now, yet has still only managed to solve nine clues.

P.S. Blogger won't let me post a picture, and I'd found a very fetching ballerina to illustrate my point. Bah, Blogger, Bah!

P.P.S. O, how lovely. You're fixed again.

Keeping Mum

Schtum, quiet, silent, mute, inaudible, SHUSH! Note the topical title as today is Mothering Sunday. Where would we be without our mas? Unborn, that's where. But, actually, this post is really titled Why Coventry?

Being sent to Coventry is to be given the silent treatment. Why do we send people to Coventry? No-one seems to really know. (Not least the person being sent there.) Why not somewhere in Yorkshire? Huddersfield or Bradford? Places not famous for garrulity. (You can always tell a Yorkshireman. But you cannot tell him much.)

Is the miscreant Mexican also sent to Coventry? What about the degenerate Dane? The criminal Canadian? Is Coventry prepared for this mass immigration? Have they constructed enough doghouses?

If someone talks to you just a little bit, in grudging mumbles, teeth clenched, eyes averted does that mean you've been sent to (hurriedly checks AA Route Map for somewhere slightly north of Coventry) Nuneaton? Or if you're not being spoken to and also - magically - appear to have become invisible, are you being sent to (checks AA Route Map again - next page, further south) Royal Leamington Spa?

A note, printed in block letters. I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU DID THAT. (What? What did I do?) I'M SENDING YOU TO ROYAL LEAMINGTON SPA. (Where? Hurriedly checks AA Route Map). BE GRATEFUL IT'S NOT SWINDON. (I am, I am.)

I'd much rather be sent to Royal Leamington Spa. It sounds like a better class of punishment. Especially if you have a penchant for blue rinses, dentures, bathchairs and gin - I'm speaking hypothetically, of course. (Cough.)

All I know about Coventry is that it was bombed during the war, it has a cathedral and is populated by people (subdued, chastened, mildly contrite) who have no idea why they have been sent there.

(As an aside, am I the only person who assumes that whenever I travel uphill, I'm heading north?)

Let's Form a Collective

Look at that flock of cows!

Herd of Cows.

'Course I've heard of cows.

Cow Herd?

I don't care what the cow heard. I got no secrets from cows.

It's a funny old thing, English. (That's the language not the people though, granted, they're funny too.) I was considering this earlier whilst pondering on the murmuration of starlings swooping above the shopping trolleys in Tesco, Old Swan. (Nary a swan to be seen, mind you.) Murmuration suggests, well, murmuring but these birds were raucous chatterers. A prattle of starlings would be more appropriate. Let's leave the murmuration to Librarians. (Of whom -Welcome to our country!)

Collective nouns are beautiful but bizarre. Prides of lions ... Are lions proud? Are they more noble, arrogant, illustrious and self-satisfied than any other beast? The peacock'd have something to say about that, I'm sure. (Edit: Did have something to say and now, in beastly one-upmanship, comes in an ostentation.)

Or take baboons. They come in a troop, congress, rumpus, or flange. (I suspect flange is a wicked calmuny. Writers of dictionaries invent things all the time, mainly as acts of revenge.)

Buffalos come in gangs, herds or obstinacies. Do mules therefore come in stubbornesses? Alas, the poor mules come in a rake or barren.

Of course, one goes looking for these collective nouns and some wag, wit or Writer of Dictionaries has got there first.

An implausibility of platypi, a parcel of penguins? What fool would try to parcel a penguin? And the name for a group of monks is an abomination. No, quite seriously, it is an abomination.

What have crows and ravens ever done - except help the Vikings find land? - to warrant being grouped in murders and unkindnesses? But a pandemonium of parrots, a parliament of owls, a cloud of bats all are gorgeous and make perfect sense.

Do slimmers and opera singers come in scales? Journalists in columns? How about a wager of gamblers? A thicket of idiots? A number of mathematicians?

I am slapping down the gauntlet. Firstly, what is your favourite collective noun and secondly, how should teachers, writers, poets (gruntled and disgruntled), vicars, students and bloggers be grouped?