Martin Fone's Blog, page 220
August 4, 2019
Error Of The Week (6)
Technology is all very well but it needs to be used with discretion and sensitively.
One addition to the box of tricks that cameras and smart phones come with that I can never imagine I would ever want to use is the cat filter. Apparently, it superimposes a cat’s ears and whiskers on to the visage of the subject of your photo. I suppose it could be amusing but it seems to me to smack very much of a solution looking for a problem.
I’m on the way to British Columbia Alaska as you read this and so this story piqued my interest. A couple of people had been murdered on the Alaskan highway and Sergeant Janelle Shoihet of the British Columbia Royal Canadian Mounted Police held a televised news conference to explain how the investigations were going.
Unfortunately, some wag had switched on the cat filter on the camera. It took a while, and a few astonished tweets, for the error to be noticed. Hardly the image of professionalism and diligence that the force was trying to present. Indeed, you could say that someone had made a pig’s ear of it all.
August 3, 2019
Bike Of The Week
Stories about cycling from Land’s End to John o’ Groats are ten a penny but a new twist is to do it on a penny farthing. Intrepid teacher, Richard Thoday, from Matlock not only completed the 874-mile journey on an old bone shaker but smashed the record which had stood for 133 years.
Thoday took four days and 12 hours to complete the journey, some 13 hours and 53 minutes faster than the celebrated Victorian cyclist, George Pilkington Mills, had completed the journey in 1886.
It would be churlish to point out that Thoday’s machine boasted some modern additions that Mills’ would have lacked, like aero extensions, SPD pedals and the all-important rear brake, but it is an astonishing feat, nonetheless.
At least he now has time to recover before school starts again.
August 2, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (242)?…
Cockney
Tradition has it that a cockney is, as Nathan Bailey defined it in his Universal Etymological Dictionary of 1731, someone “born and bred in the City of London or within the sound of Bow Bell; also a Foundling Child born in the City”. In 1851 the bells, the sound of which reputedly persuaded Dick Whittington to abandon his plans to leave London, could be heard as far south as Southwark and across north and east London. These days, they can only be heard in the City and Shoreditch and as there is no maternity ward within earshot, cockneys are a dying breed. The term, though, is still in use, often accompanied by an alliterative adjective like cheerful, as an alternative term for a Londoner. Where did it come from?
Our story starts with Geoffrey Chaucer and The Reeve’s Tale. Oswald, the eponymous reeve, laments, “and when this jape is tald another day,/ I sal been halde a daf, a cokenay”. Used in this context, poor Oswald had been the victim of a prank, it had the sense of a weakling or someone who was easily taken in. A century later an English-Latin dictionary, Promptorium parvolorum sive clericorum from 1440, defined cockney (or kokeney) as “little darling, pet, or poppet; and these two words are insincere, and said derisively; pampered child”. To be described as a cockney was not a string to your bow in those days.
The poet and agriculturalist, Thomas Tusser, also provides some invaluable assistance in tracing the development of this word. In his Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry together with a Book of Huswifery, dating from around 1561, he observed, somewhat drily, “some cockneys with cocking, are made very fools/ fit neither for ‘prentice, for plough, nor for schools”. To cock was to spoil or pamper, a temptation many a parent falls into with their little darlings, and probably came into the English language from the French verb coqueliner. Our old friend, Randle Cotgrave, defined the phrase coqueliner vn enfant in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, published in 1611, as “to dandle, cocker, fedle, pamper, make a wanton of, a child”.
Alternatively, it could come from the old French word coquiné. The Century Dictionary from 1904 noted that it was used variously to describe a “a vagabond who hangs around the kitchen or a child brought up in the kitchen, or a child fed in a kitchen, a pampered child”. Either way we get back to the concept of a spoilt brat.
Cotgrave, though, throws a bit of a curve ball into our considerations by defining coquine as “a beggar woman; also a cockney, simperdedockit (a wonderful word denoting a coquette), nice thing”. And Arthur and Sebastian Evans use cockney in the sense of a dainty, affected woman in their Leicestershire Words, Phrases, and Proverbs of 1881; “shay’s a cockney little thing, shay woon’t ate no fat”.
In trying to make sense of all of this, I think what we are seeing is a country town divide. Those living in cities are so enervated in comparison with the good old English yeoman stock growing up in the countryside that they are positively namby pamby. That this may be the case is suggested by the philologist, Hensleigh Wedgwood, in his Dictionary of English Etymology from 1859. In the pages of this tome he opined that “the original meaning of cockney is a child too tenderly or delicately nurtured, one kept in the house and not hardened by out-of-doors life; hence applied to citizens, as opposed to the hardier inhabitants of the country, and in modern times confined to the citizens of London”.
That being the case, it is curious that these days Londoners take the description as a badge of honour, proof positive, if any were needed, that our language evolves in both form and meaning.
August 1, 2019
Gin O’Clock – Part Seventy One
Well, it had to happen. The crush is such that in order to stand out from the crowd created by the ginaissance distillers have to become increasingly more inventive in their marketing spin. If you are based in the West Midlands, why not throw your cloth cap in the direction of the hit TV show, the Peaky Blinders?
I have always been slightly baffled by the seeming success of a TV series, now four series long and a fifth in the pipeline, that revels in the antics of a group of unsavoury gangsters based in Birmingham who, through violence, murder and corruption, reach the summit of their particular greasy pole. Still, the name of Peaky Blinder, derived from their principal MO of injuring their opponents with blades concealed in their peaked caps, is firmly established in the nation’s consciousness and associated with England’s second city.
Sadler’s are based in Lye, just outside of Stourbridge, and can claim to be in the heart of the Black Country. Established in 1900 they have made their name amongst locals and real aficionados around the country with their fine beers, well worth seeking out if you get the chance. Now they have turned their hand to spirits, a whisky and rum and a Spiced Dry Gin, all under the brand name of Peaky Blinder.
After a night out on the lash in the area, the perfect accompaniment to a skinful of Sadler’s finest is a Balti, a fiery curry served up in a thin, pressed-steel wok. The idea behind the gin, according to Chris Sadler is to combine the glamour of the gin cocktail era of the 1920s when the Thomas Selby gang was in its pomp with the bold flavours of the Balti. Add to the mix a dash of the Blinders’ no-nonsense, whole-hearted approach to life and business and you will get the impression that this is not a spirit for the faint-hearted.
The bottle is clear and bell-shaped with a wax cap and cork stopper. The labelling is striking in its clarity with bold print and a laconic use of words, inevitably including an image of the Sadler’s brewery and a rather morose and fearsome man wearing a hat, a Peaky Blinder, I presume. The front label also informs me that the spirit is “perfectly balanced with exotic spices and botanicals”. We will see. Inevitably it has been produced “by order of Sadler’s Peaky Blinder”.
There are nine botanicals in the mix but as to what they are, the would-be consumer and toper is left somewhat in the dark. You can be a bit obsessive about these things but it is nice to know, it makes the tasting more interesting as you try to identify and tick off each component. Sometimes, though, it is nice just once in a while to have to rely on your own taste buds which means you should drink this before your Balti!
To the nose there is an immediate hit of juniper, always a welcome smell to my nostrils, but also elements of peppery spice and a rather gentle sweetness, perhaps cassia. In the mouth there is an immediate fiery sensation as the juniper and spices take centre stage, there is a hint of ginger there, but the sweeter elements fight back, producing a rather pleasing, balanced spirit. The aftertaste is long, dry with citrus elements to the fore.
If you like your gins juniper led and spicy, then this is one for you. And at 40% ABV its strength is in its taste rather than its alcoholic punch. Like a lenient judge I will even forgive them for their cheesy marketing pitch.
Until the next time, cheers!
July 31, 2019
Book Corner – July 2019 (5)
The Mask of Dimitrios – Eric Ambler
Published in 1939, this book, acknowledged by those who claim to know these things as Ambler’s finest, is known to American audiences as A Coffin for Dimitrios. I haven’t read enough of him to judge but I was astonished how deep the book was, exploring themes that you wouldn’t expect to appear in what at first blush appears to be a page-turning piece of disposable entertainment. Indeed, for a thriller, there is remarkably little direct action, save for the ending which, as the genre might suggest, is exciting and thrilling.
Charles Latimer, a former academic and now a successful writer of English detective fiction, is in Istanbul researching his fifth book. He is introduced to and meets the head of the Turkish intelligence, Colonel Haki, we have met him before in Journey into Fear, an aficionado of detective fiction. Haki shows him the body of a murderer, Dimitrios Makropoulos, and lends Latimer a dossier detailing what the Turks had deduced about the felon’s career. Somewhat bizarrely, Latimer decides to turn his hand to real detective work and reconstruct the biography of Dimitrios. There is a distinct Conradian theme to the book, Latimer’s search resembling that of Marlow’s to find the real Kurtz in Heart of Darkness.
Inevitably, Latimer discovers that Dimitrios is not what he seemed. Rather he is a much more sophisticated individual whose actions are logical and consistent, “as logical and consistent in the European jungle”, Ambler observes, “as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town”. In his travels around central Europe on the trail of Dimitrios’ former associates and enemies, Latimer comes to realise that he was the sort of cold-blooded enforcer that modern-day capitalism in the shape of politics and shady multinational businesses needs to cement its hold on society, taking on the tasks that “civilised men and women” decline to do. There is a very modern feel to the book, the crimes involving people smuggling and drugs with murky financiers in cahoots with corrupt public officials pulling the strings.
Latimer enters the seedy demi-monde of pre-Second World War crime and espionage as he slowly works his way to the truth. Ambler uses lengthy dialogues, principally, in truth, monologues and exchanges of letters to furnish Latimer and the reader with the details necessary to reconstruct Dimitrios’ past. This means that the pace of much of the book is relatively stately but as a reader you find yourself sucked in, wanting to know what Latimer discovers and realising that he too is beginning to put himself into danger. Each character has their own axe to grind and none of them are all that they seem.
Perhaps the most fascinating character is Peters aka Petersen, a Dane who was part of Dimitrios’ gang but was stitched up and served time in jail. He wants his revenge on Dimitrios and his share of the loot that the drug running operation. Realising that Latimer holds a vital piece of information that will unlock the real identity of Dimitrios and his whereabouts, Peters skilfully inveigles the naïve Latimer into helping him in a dangerous enterprise, causing, at the same time, Latimer’s moral sensibilities to wobble.
The book builds up to a thrilling crescendo, which I won’t spoil. Suffice it to say it makes up in action what the earlier portion of the book lacked. It also gives a fascinating insight into pre-war Europe. Well worth taking a copy with you on holiday.
July 30, 2019
Sporting Event Of The Week (23)
News has reached me, slowly of course, that this year’s Snail Racing World Championship has taken place, as it has for the last 50 years, at the Congham Fete in Norfolk.
The competition saw 215 molluscs slugging it out in a series of heats to determine who could complete the 13-inch course in the fastest time. Winner of the prestigious trophy replete with lettuce leaf was Sammy, owned by Maria Welby, the snail recording the respectable time of two minutes 38 seconds.
Festina lente, as the Romans said.
July 29, 2019
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Twenty Four
The spaghetti tree hoax of 1957
In some ways life was a lot simpler in 1957. There were just two television channels and Britons, freed from the restrictions of rationing which ended when the restrictions on the sale of meat and bacon were lifted on July 1, 1954, still eschewed what were seen as foreign foods.
Take spaghetti, now a staple fare in our diet. Only the adventurous were eating it and precious few knew where it came from and how it was produced. Panorama was one of the most prestigious programmes in the BBC’s stable, featuring documentaries on newsworthy stories and current affairs, hosted by one of the most revered public figures of the time, Richard Dimbleby. It went out on Monday evenings. April Fool’s Day in 1957 fell on a Monday and one of the show’s cameramen, Charles de Jaeger, a notorious practical joker, came up with a wheeze to hoax the great British public.
Taking as his theme the English saying, “x doesn’t grow on trees” he came up with a plan to do a short piece for the programme showing spaghetti being harvested – from trees, naturally. Granted a budget of £100 from the show’s producer, Michael Peacock, de Jaeger was allowed to extend his trip to Switzerland to film the piece.
Finding his perfect location, a hotel in Castiglione by Lake Lugano, surrounded by laurel trees, de Jaeger bought twenty pounds of uncooked, homemade spaghetti to hang from the branches of some of the trees. But he immediately encountered a major problem – the strips of spaghetti quickly dried out and would not hang up. His solution was to cook the pasta but this had the effect of making the pasta slippery and the strips rather ungracefully slid off the branches on to the ground.
Eventually, the problem was solved; uncooked spaghetti was wrapped up in damp cloth to keep it sufficiently moist for when it was to be hung on the trees. De Jaeger hired some local girls, dressed in national costume and carrying wicker baskets, to climb ladders and harvest the pasta, which was then laid out in the sun. The spaghetti was then cooked and de Jaeger shot some footage of the locals enjoying the product of their agricultural endeavours.
The piece was the last item on the show, following an item on wine production, and Dimbleby introduced it by saying, “And now from wine to food. We end Panorama tonight with a special report from the Swiss Alps”. When the report was over, Dimbleby signed off by noting with particular emphasis on the final phrase, “Now we say goodnight, on this first day of April”. If you want to see it, follow the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU
As we would say these days, the report went viral. The Beeb was inundated with telephone calls from viewers, either congratulating the broadcasters for a delicious joke or asking for assistance in settling arguments between those who thought that spaghetti grew on trees and those who considered it to be the product of flour and water. That Dimbleby had done the voiceover encouraged many to take the hoax as gospel. Even the Director-General of the Beeb, Sir Ian Jacob, was taken in and sought the answer from the internet of the time, the Encyclopedia Britannica, only to be thwarted because spaghetti didn’t even merit an entry.
Such was the furore that the BBC issued an explanation before the close of that night’s transmission but the outcry was meat and drink to the broadcaster’s army of critics. Some cried foul over the timing, by tradition April Fool’s jokes should be made before noon.
Panorama never broadcast another hoax story but the spaghetti tree story lived long in the memory and spawned a number of imitators. In 1978 San Giorgio ran an advert featuring a spaghetti farm where the pasta grew with the strap line “nobody grows spaghetti like San Giorgio”,
Quite.
If you enjoyed this, why not try Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
July 28, 2019
Plastic Bags Of The Week
The veracity behind Sunstein and Thaler’s nudge theory is amply illustrated by the attempts to ween us off single use plastic bags. I have long objected to having to pay for a receptacle to take away the goods I have bought from a shop. Some shops have shown some imagination by reverting to good old-fashioned paper bags or plastic bags without handles and even old stick in the muds like me remember from time to time to put a bag in my pocket in case I’m tempted to make a purchase.
There are still many though who forget and are forced to buy a bag. A shop in Vancouver, East West Market, is trying to educate the forgetful or the recalcitrant by selling single use plastic bags emblazoned with slogans such as “Wart Ointment Wholesale” and “Into the Weird Adult Video Emporium” to shame them into changing their habits.
I suppose that it is a novel approach to the problem but it has somewhat rebounded on the emporium’s owner, David Lee Kwen. So popular have the become that they are now a collector’s item, defeating Kewn’s original plan. Never one to miss an opportunity, though, he is now selling canvas bags with the slogans on.
The best laid plans of mice and men, it seems.
July 27, 2019
Hair Of The Week
Fortunately, my days of commuting are long over. The experience was often enough to tear my hair out. I was always intrigued, in a gallows humour sort of way, by the imaginative stock of reasons trotted out to explain why the train had failed to travel down a pair of metal tracks in the allotted time. But this is a new one on me.
The overcrowded 06.34 London Northwestern Railway Service from Bletchley to London Euston made an extended stop at Tring the other day. Why? One of the automatic doors wouldn’t shut properly following the scheduled stop at Tring.
And why was that? Apparently, one of the passengers had got her hair extensions caught in the door. Staff took a couple of minutes to release the offending piece of hair, the reports I read do not make it clear whether it was still attached to the woman’s head at this point, and then the train went on its merry way. I imagine the other commuters didn’t mutter hair we go again but I do hope the tannoy announcer apologised for the delay caused by hair on the line.
For those who are folically challenged, a wig can cover up those bald patches. For those contemplating wearing one, there are many other uses to which they can be put. Take the case of a man arrested at Barcelona airport. He drew attention to himself by his nervous disposition and his large, lumpy toupee. When his hairpiece was removed, the authorities found a bag containing a pound of cocaine.
Hardly a narcotics big wig, the man will need to reconsider his smuggling techniques next time. Perhaps hair extensions.
July 26, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (241)?…
In Dicky’s meadow
I was born in Lancashire and I still have some slight vestiges of that distinctive accent in my everyday speech, principally the flat a in words such as grass and bath which mark out the northerner from those from the south. I also retain some Lancastrian phrases like in Dicky’s meadow, fortunately one that I have not had to utter too often.
The Day to Day in Liverpool column in the city’s Daily Post and Mercury of March 20, 1916 gives us a charmingly succinct explanation of the phrases meaning; “No, that would land us in Dicky’s meadow. What does that expression mean? was the natural query. The clerk’s interpretation was that the saying implied a state of difficulty or trouble. He learned it in his boyhood, but he knew nothing it as to its origin”.
The column took pains to point out that the clerk was born and educated in mid-Lancashire as opposed to Liverpool and so it can be assumed that the phrase was unknown to or at least rarely used by Liverpudlians. It also reveals that Liverpool has never really considered itself to be part of Lancashire and most Lancastrians are happy for that to remain so.
That it was a phrase originating in Lancashire is confirmed by a quaint article found in The Blackburn Standard and Weekly Express of December 27, 1890, entitled Sum Lankisher Sayins. It is written in Lancashire dialect or, at least, a phonetic representation of it. The piece about Dicky’s meadow begins; “It’s a quare shop to find yo’rsels in, is Dicky’s meadow, becos ther isn’d th’ ghost ov a chance on yo’ geddin eawt ageean when wonst yo’ve getten in”. The nightmare for all good working folk of the time was to get in such financial straits, either because of lack of work or sickness, often the two went hand-in-hand, that they ended up in the workhouse. Dicky’s meadow was a more pleasing synonym for that grim place.
But who was Dicky?
There is a temptation in etymological searches to assume that a phrase bearing a name alludes to an actual character. Dicky’s meadow is one such case. One theory goes that the Dicky is Richard, Duke of York, who was killed in one of the major battles of the War of the Roses, the Battle of Wakefield, on December 30, 1460. His demise shows that the Duke was really in a difficult situation and historians conclude that he was ill-advised to engage with troops loyal to Henry VI on that field at Sandal Magna.
But there a couple of reasons why this derivation is unlikely. The first is that there is such a long passage of time between the battle and the phrase emerging in mid-nineteenth century Lancashire that it smacks of convenient retro-fitting. And Wakefield is in Yorkshire. The rivalry between Lancashire and Yorkshire is legendary, easily surpassing that between Liverpool and the rest of Lancashire. Why would Lancastrians reference a place in Yorkshire, although you can see the attraction from a pejorative perspective? They may just as easily have referenced the car park attendant, Richard III, who came to a sticky end in the fields of Bosworth in 1485.
There may be a more prosaic explanation at hand. In the early nineteenth century dicky or in its alternative form dickey was an adjective used to describe something that was uncertain, hazardous, or critical. Interestingly, the Preston Herald of June 23, 1866 reports that a crowd of workers, protesting at the importation of labourers from the south, shouted, “We’ll see ‘em in Dickey meadow first”. Whilst it may be a misprint the use of Dickey as an adjective rather than the genitive of a person’s name may suggest that it isn’t necessary to consider identifying a real person. Dickey was indicating that it was simply a terrible position to be in.
There is a more widely used phrase to indicate being in dire straits, queer street. The Burnley Express on October 23, 1920 joined the two; “we shall never be anywhere else nor I’Queer-street or Dicky’s meadow under t’present system”. The inevitable conclusion is that Dicky’s meadow is the Lancastrian version of Queer Street.
