Midsomer Norton and Mumby Row

The places identified on the maps shown by TV weather forecasters can seem randomly chosen, but Richard Angwin of BBC Points West has a nice line in whimsical themes. Here he joins the ghosts of John Betjeman, Paul Jennings and Flanders and Swann in the fine tradition of revelling in quaint English placenames. Redmarley D’Abitot, Moreton Valence, Lydiard Millicent, Nempnett Thrubwell, Manningford Bohune, Hornblotton Green, Hatch Beauchamp, Gussage All Saints: quality toponymy. He did well to cram them onto the map.

The horror! The horror!

Writing a book is an undertaking far more horrific than I’d ever imagined. Not only must the writer come up with several tens of thousands of words, not all of them the same, but he or she must arrange them in an order that makes some kind of sense to the first-time reader.

—Armando Iannucci, “On writing a book”, Facts and Fancies

M and S pants

Radio 4 is, for many of us deskbound homeworkers, not so much something you listen to as something you hear: a human voice in the background to stave off cabin fever. The guest on today’s (repeated) Desert Island Discs is Sir Stuart Rose, executive chairman of Marks and Spencer and, so he claims, the only white elder of the Wagogo “tribe” of central Tanzania. He’s a little hazy on the details of that country’s birth, however. “My family and I left Africa in ’60, ’61 when Tanganyika, as it was, became independent Tanzania.”

Not quite. As those who love to flatter TV adverts with parody might say (cue soothing music and sumptuous visuals), “This is not just fact...” — or rather, this is just not fact. For the record, Tanganyika became independent in 1961 as Tanganyika. The island off its eastern seaboard, Zanzibar, gained independence two years later, and only in April 1964 did the two form a brand-new nation, the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, shortly afterwards renamed the United Republic of Tanzania.

So he plays a recording of some Wagogo traditional music and, without a hint of embarrassment or a flicker of irony, follows it up with a piece of hokum performed by a Lithuanian-born American Jew with burnt cork on his face. Yes, pop-pickers, it’s Al Jolson with “Mammy”. Rose remembers his parents “literally falling about laughing” when he would sing them this song as a young child in 1950s Africa.

What’s the one record he’ll cherish above all others? It’s a pop-style rendition by “crossover singer” Phillippa Giordana of “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma. Or as Kirsty Young calls it, “Costa Diva”. Plenty of them hanging around the high-street coffee shops and the Spanish seaside resorts, I expect.

Breakfast was not the best time to hear Kirsty Young flirt and slobber nauseatingly over this tedious plutocrat — “you’re very dashing, and you’re very urbane ... you’d be a bloody good catch for someone, Stuart!” Yes, the underwear rail at Marky’s will never be the same again for Kirsty.

Tits and teeth

Wireless, now there’s a word that’s had a comeback. Everything seems to be wireless these days. Even clothes: I see you can even buy a wireless bra.

(I see this from clicking in aid of free mammograms at thebreastcancersite.com, you understand, something I recommend you do as well, and not from perusing underwear catalogues or anything like that, obviously.)

Nowadays gadgets often talk to each other using something called Bluetooth, apparently named after the tenth-century Scandinavian king. So the obvious name for this amazing wireless technology would be, what, Bluetit?

Bench press

Seagull, seagull, how do you float?
Upon the water without a boat?
He thought to himself and then he frowned
Turned on his side and slowly drowned.
– Leslie Noaks, 1914–2000

Inscription on a park bench, according to The Oldie.

More mince(d)meat

Seasonal specialities tend to have a way of spreading throughout the year. Is the Cadbury’s Creme Egg even associated with Easter any more? One year I actually found an example of Christmas and Easter meeting in the middle, in the form of a table in a supermarket bearing both hot cross buns and mince pies. This photo was taken one April and shows mince pies on special offer. Not just any small mincemeat tartlets, these had little Christmas trees on and everything. With still well over 200 shopping days till Christmas, they had already been reduced. Or are we talking a particularly large and resilient stock left over from four months earlier, refusing to shift? Oh all right then, just a wrong code typed into the central bakery’s computer system?

Minced pies

It’s that time of year again and Morrisons are selling “minced pies”. Presumably some kind of convenience food aimed at the time-poor shopper, like pre-mashed potatoes. And yet as far as I could see these were completely intact. Most puzzling.

“Browse our food”

I love it when a new figurative sense of a word becomes so much more important than its original meaning that an unconscious pun becomes possible. Interestingly, to graze has also taken on a new sense and is still much on our lips¹ today, but still refers to feeding the body rather than the mind. Why did browsing, instead of grazing, come to mean looking through books and now webpages?²

¹ Yes yes, I know
² And why is it good to vet something, but bad to doctor it?

“The Ultimate Hardcover Book”

So, is free text on the internet putting the published book out of business? And are all hardbacks today so shoddily manufactured?

A firm called Kirkham Motorsports have built a bespoke sports car for a millionaire, made almost entirely of aluminium and so shiny it must be a hazard to other road users on a sunny day. For extra rigidity, the chassis is machined from solid metal known as billet aluminium. As a finishing touch they decided to manufacture (“write” doesn’t seem quite the word) a special commemorative book about the project. The book is of course a very special item too, being made of the same materials as the car: the cover uses 25 pounds of precision-engineered aluminium plate which took 26 hours to machine, tan leather of the sort used in the interior, and the same heat-treated stainless steel screws and bolts used to hold the chassis together. It is, in the old sense of the word, a masterpiece, a virtuoso exemplar of the metalworker’s art. They describe it, and who can blame them, as “the ultimate hardcover book”. You can buy a (very) limited-edition copy for $4,500.

Or you can go to the website and download it free as a PDF file.

I mean, have publishers learned nothing?

The definition of erudition

Dictionaries and other reference books are a well-worn not to say clichéd symbol of knowledge, so it is no great surprise that whoever designed the “Listen Again” web graphic for Radio 4’s quiz programme Brain of Britain chose a photo of a shelf of chunky non-fiction tomes (below).
What is slightly odd is that the image should show a shelf of five books no less than 40% of which is made up of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. This is, as the title implies, a publication aimed at learners of English as a foreign language. Yes, two copies of the same title, one a slightly more modern edition than the other — and it’s the old edition that the listener’s hand is reaching for. Of the five works available, that one must surely be the least useful in, well, almost any context really.

Dentists? Tooth burglars, I call ’em

Remember everyone: lock your jaws.

Putting on the style

Those of us who have worked with style guides may enjoy the Twitter parody FakeAPStylebook. An enquirer asks “is it preferable to refer to the country as "Burma" or as "Myanmar"?” Back comes the answer:

If accuracy / Is what you crave / Then you should call it / Myanmar Shave.

Nice.

The curse of the 140-character limit

If it’s true that the appalling Berlusconi has immunity from prose, then the political role of the poet has surely never been more important.

Happy National Poetry Day.

Godderel

I met a man, I can’t think where
Who said that he was Tony Blair.
But what was really very odd
He also said that he was God.

[Kyffin Williams, quoted by Derec Llwyd Morgan in Radio 4's Great Lives]

I can’t quite work out why this is funny. It’s not particularly clever or witty, but it just makes you laugh. Something to do with the rhyme possibly.

Hoodwinked

No sun — no moon!
No morn — no noon
No dawn — no dusk — no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member —
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! —
November!
[Thomas Hood, Whimsicalities (1844), ‘No!’]

Except that it’s supposed to be August.

Milking the gravy train

Two more bloated trough-snufflers are herded into the spotlight. Their names are, wait for it, Bill Cash and Sir John Butterfill.

“Tory grandee Sir John Butterfill is the latest to come under scrutiny after avoiding capital gains tax on £600,000 profit from selling a taxpayer-funded property. He claimed nearly £17,000 just for servants’ quarters, where his housekeeper and odd-job man lived.” (ITN)

The greedy grandee (left), who actually bears a certain physical resemblance to a pig, was knighted (or as he puts it “appointed a Knight Batchelor” [sic]) for, ironically enough, “services to Parliament”. Perhaps in the light of how he’s served the reputation of that institution it would serve him right if they took his K back.

But seriously (by which of course I mean but frivolously), what names! What names for people embroiled in an expenses scandal. You couldn’t make it up. Not even if your creative instincts had been honed by years of making up reasons for helping yourself from the public purse. Sheridan himself couldn’t do better. You know the kind of thing:

Dramatis Personae:
Lord Fillmeboots, an Embezzler from the Public Purse
Mr Cheapwords, his Spokesman to the Press
Whingemore, a troublesome Journalist
Divers scrutineers and petty officials of the House, accused of Complicity
The common people of England, outraged
Sundry Commentators upon the parlous state of Democracy, self-appointed

And of course:
Dame Esther Rantsman, an upstart Opportunist

I mean come on, we might as well get some amusement for our money. No-one can say they’re cheap laughs.

This entry has been sponsored by “Wadges” O’Moolah, your friendly and informal supplier of building and gardening services, tree inspections, duck islands etc. No tedious paperwork, cash welcome, no questions asked in Parliament. Top prices charged — you can't get a good job done for nothing! (Well you can obviously sir, you’re an MP.)

Pedantry and politeness in pop

A lexicographer friend blogged recently about “collocational errors” in songs written by non-native speakers in Eurovision songs. It’s hard to put your finger on what’s wrong when someone sings about “longing for someone’s care”, and we can see what it means, though it does sound slightly odd.

But that hardly compares with Macca’s deathless line “in this ever-changing world in which we’re living in”. I don’t think it’s pedantic to find it pretty surprising that a native speaker could come out with that and think it was OK.

Stan Freburg did valuable work in correcting “Old” Man River. “He doesn’t plant potatoes, he doesn’t plant cotting, because those that plant(s) them are soon forgotting…”

And don’t get me started on factual inaccuracy! Katie Melua was at least 1.7 billion light years out in her song about the bicycles in Beijing. She actually had to go back and re-record the song.

Incorrect song lyrics are a menace. As Mr Tweedly points out, the home is a classroom. Come along chaps, speak properly! “I can’t any satisfaction.” “Slap my bitch up please.”

You’re quite welcome, I’m sure.