Decorating tips
Well, you see, he’s a white guy.
Downing Street has said it is up to Joe Biden how he decorates the Oval Office, after it was reported that a bust of Winston Churchill, lent by the UK government, has been removed.
“The Oval Office is the president’s private office, and it’s up to the president to decorate it as he wishes,” Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said, adding: “We’re in no doubt about the importance President Biden places on the UK-US relationship, and the prime minister looks forward to having that close relationship with him.”
Really; they’re allowing us to decide how we decorate our own rooms? I’m overwhelmed by the magnanimity.
Johnson’s relaxed attitude is in marked contrast to his criticism of Barack Obama, when the former president moved the Churchill bust aside.
Writing in the Sun in 2016, Johnson, then London mayor, and the author of a Churchill biography, called Obama’s decision a “snub,” suggesting it may have been because of “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.
He did. I posted about it at the time.
I guess the Irish Biden’s ancestral dislike of the British empire is more acceptable to Johnson than the “part-Kenyan Obama’s.”
Yes that must be it.
I’m sure that was one of the things stipulated in the Treaty of Paris by the Americans at the end of the War of Independence.
That, and permission to drop the “u” in words like “colour.”
But also the official opinion of the PM’s office is likely much more constrained than the opinion of a columnist for The Sun.
That story is so unfinished. What were the circumstances of the landing? Do they want it back? Where might it have been moved to, i.e., is it displayed somewhere else? Who is feeding them these details of presidents moving busts around? Why does it matter? Who cares?
But but but… There’s no one as Irish as Barack Obama!
https://youtu.be/DerVmiZeUDw
Sackbut, don’t you mean Barack O’Bama?
Ha!
I remember saying at the time that some Irish guy would win the election, McCain or O’Bama.
Dear Whoever, the infantility of politics, or newspapers and news media peddling what passes for politics, in the UK, the USA & I suppose just about everywhere else. Does this bloody matter? And if it does, why? Boris Johnson, the shape-shifting creep, in the Sun, of all rags, and now getting an ‘official spokesman’ to cover his arse for him.
You’ve never had that permission, stop it.
I’ve read somewhere Biden thinks Johnson is awful. Biden has his head screwed on.
This “special relationship” thing is so cringe-making. Why can’t we accept our not-too-bad place in the world instead of harking back to WWII:? And Churchill has been a terrible influence on the style of some Tory politicians, whatever he was in his day.
@latsot
I endeavour and labour to (hey cheeky red underlining bot – STOP IT) to reverse this barbarism, along with pronouncing the “h” in herbs. I find no favour.
God, yes ‘erbs. Unless you are a cockney, it’s “herbs” with an h.
And if you are a cockney… well, the less said about that the better, I suppose, because you’d probably pronounce the h in h and that’s getting us nowhere.
There is that need, near pathological, to try to centre every event in the world around the UK. The obsession with the Special Relationship is just the most obvious example of that.
In the Daily Telegraph a few days ago one of the paper’s associate editors argues that “Biden’s great, great, great grandfather, Edward Blewitt, left Ballina, Co Mayo, Ireland for America during the Irish Famine 170 years ago, which could mean he is well-disposed towards Great Britain.”
The ignorance here is simply breathtaking and I am not talking ignorance about the Irish Famine (to know anything about it would be to acknowledge that Britain once did something wrong… Unthinkable) but about the new POTUS: it is not Great Britain that Biden hates, it’s Boris Johnson.
I remember when I came home from school one day and complained to my mother that my teacher couldn’t spell. My evidence? Color instead of colour. I had read so many English books and so few American ones that it took me quite a long time to get the spelling correct to please my teachers.
My mother was the first person to explain to me that English and American are actually different languages in a number of ways. She found the whole thing amusing; I didn’t. I can now, but now I am not nine years old (at least not chronologically; mentally I may be).
Re the H in “herb”: I have been convinced, and I try to remember to pronounce the H, even though it makes me confused by the shampoo brand Herbal Essence (‘Erbal Essence? Herbal Hessence? The heck with it, I’m switching brands).
The mandate to silence the H in herb has always felt wrong to me. It felt wrong in childhood. Once I learned that was strictly a US mandate I kicked it into outer darkness. I don’t even know why it felt wrong – maybe because urb seems like such a silly word? Or maybe because we have so many other he words where we don’t have to silence the H. Her he help heavy Hepzibah heaven Hester Henry Henderson…no it just makes no sense and I say to hell with it.
Yeah, never hear most Americans saying urricane.
Funny you should say that because UKnians do say “hurricane” wrong and it always gets on my nerves. They say it hurric’n when it’s hurriCANE. The last syllable is not a schwa. They don’t even GET hurricanes, so they should pronounce it the way we do.
No we don’t.
Who have you been listening to, a pirate?
E elped er eave eavy Epzidah inta Eaven along wiv Ester & Enery Enderson arter they snuffed it inna urric’n.
Being originally a Londoner, I like Cockney.
There’s some tale about the ‘h’ being dropped in London speech after an influx of Huguenot refugees into London following the Massacre in Paris (Priti Pratel wasn’t in charge in those days). And ‘h’ is sometimes added to the first syllable of words that are not supposed to need them. Which reminds me of when I was working at NHK shortly after coming to Japan hundreds of years ago. There was an old Frenchman I was friendly with who went into hospital. I asked a French colleague where the hospital was. ‘in Hakiabara,’ she said. It took me a minute or two to work out she was referring to Akihabara.
There’s an amusing column by Marina Hyde in the Guardian today about the kerfuffle over Churchill’s bust. Nigel Farage, whose name should always be pronounced to rhyme with ‘disparage’ ‘garidge’ and not in the stuck-up, froggy way he inconsistently insists on, makes an appearance in it.
.
Hahaha I tend to lapse into musings, while walking around the landscape, on things like why we (USians) say garahj but not garbahj.
latsot the BBC mostly. But they may all be pirates.
*something about the license fee*
(it’s late)
“Call the Midwife” (as in the first book) has an epilogue-ical final chapter all about the cockney dialect. Fascinating.
I learned some about the Cockney dialect from Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy, years ago. What he learned from his china, Charlie, who taught him a lot of rhyming slang. China plate: mate. See also: use your loaf.
There was also the mistake the bright young middle-class advertising fellows at the Milk Marketing Board perpetrated many years ago when they stuck up posters everywhere proclaiming ‘Milk’s gotta lotta bottle’.
I shan’t spell everything out, but ‘bottle and glass’ stands for ‘arse’, so that if you say ‘He’s lost his bottle’ you mean that the person in question is so scared that he…. The advertising guys assumed ‘bottle’ meant ‘courage’.
Tim,
I have to disagree with you there. That campaign was, by any measure, extraordinarily successful.
Well, yes, it may have been extraordinarily successful, but apparently (or so I remember hearing) the advertising guys hadn’t realised the meaning of ‘bottle’.
I really don’t think that’s true. They might not have understood the origin of the phrase (I’ve no idea), but “bottle” had long come to mean something like courage or bravado, in the way that often happens with rhyming slang. It was definitely understood that way well before the campaign.
On a related note, my sister, who would have been about 16, had a “got a lotta bottle” t-shirt. Fashionable 16 year old girls were wearing slogans on behalf of the Milk Marketing Board. That feels like a false memory, now.
Yes, you are probably right, latsot. I’ve looked up the origins of ‘bottle’ in this sense on the internet, and there are various accounts, and ‘bottle & glass’, standing either for ‘arse’ or ‘class’, gets a mention. But I distinctly remember reading an article years ago in which ‘Milk’s gotta lotta bottle’ and the ‘arse’ version were discussed, particularly in connexion with soccer fans (probably Milwall fans!) jeering at players who shirked a tackle, ‘Lost yer bottle, ave yer?’
Oh, I think you’re right about the origin: bottle & glass = arse and to lose one’s bottle was originally to evacuate one’s bowels through fear*. By the time of the campaign, though, “bottle” had come to mean something like “bravado” and to lose one’s bottle meant to chicken out. I think the scatalogical connotations were known but not a big part of popular culture.
I don’t know whether the advertisers knew about the origins of the phrase, but the fact that some of the adverts were innuendo-laden suggests they might have done. Either way, though, I wouldn’t say they made a mistake, although it’s fun to think about.
* I’ve read about another possible origin for “bottling out” or “having no bottle”, which means to be useless or of no account. I think it comes from young rakes around town not having a bottle (of booze) to their name. From what I can tell, these are separate but overlapping origins.
But I’m boring everyone now. (Again).
Not boring me!
Not boring me latsot. Back in my formative years roughly 5-10 there was only one local TV* channel available in my house and it was the local PBS (Public Broadcast) affiliate. It featured a lot of British shows and every Sunday night we all watched “Masterpiece Theatre” which was the BBC America of the day more or less. It was hosted by Alice the Cook, er, Alistair Cooke who would helpfully discuss and define the britishisms to us clueless Americans. It is certainly the reason why I am a bit of an anglophile to this day.
I particularly remember a series called “Private Schultz”, a comedy about the German attempt to flood the UK with counterfeit bank notes during WW2. In one episode Schultz parachutes into England and AC explained what “plus fours” where and why wearing them and ordering a coffee in a pub (on Sunday perhaps as well) would be big red flags at the time. Fond memories.
* I live in the cradle if not the literal birthplace of cable TV but my parents didn’t get cable until I was 20. The major network channels were just barely watchable.
I still use a bit of rhyming slang, as in “half-inch” for pinch or “take a butcher’s” meaning “look” as in “butcher’s hook.” I imagine in a generation or two it will need footnotes.
See also: trouble and strife: wife: trouble.
Also apples & pears: stairs. I don’t think apples=stairs though – or does it? It’s only some of them that get cut down to the non-rhyming bit, right?
None of this is boring.
It’s… complicated. I’ve heard ‘apples’ used for stairs, but only when they refer to some specific stairs or stairs that are an integral or recurring part of a story (“so, I went back up the apples….”)
I’ve never heard ‘brown bread’ (= dead) shortened to ‘brown’ or ‘Hank Marvin’ (= starving) shortened to ‘Hank’ or ‘tea leaf’ (= thief) shortened to ‘tea’… but I’m struggling to think of any other instances. I’m hardly an expert, though, I’m from the other end of the country.
Following KBPlayer, there are some common terms that a lot of (young, at least) people probably don’t recognise as rhyming slang. Off the top of my head:
China (= china plate, mate)
Loaf (= loaf of bread, head)
Porkies (= pork pie, lie)
Treacle (= treacle tart, sweetheart)
Barney (for ‘fight’, = Barney Rubble, trouble)
Bread (= bread and honey, money)
Cobblers (for ‘nonsense’, = cobblers awls, balls)
I’m sure there are a lot more.
I did know “porkies.” And “cobblers” but not cobblers’ awls. See: consignment of geriatric shoe manufacturers. And barney but not its origin. Bread ditto.
Also “saucepans” for children. “Saucepan lids” = “kids.”
And “bins” for spectacles. “Rubbish receptacles” = spectacles (I’m not sure of this one, but a boyfriend always called spectacles “bins”.)
Paul Theroux has an anecdote when an annoying Australian says, “Dave is butcher’s”.
How can Dave be “butcher’s”? Butcher’s hook = “look.” Dave is look. It doesn’t make sense.
The Australian:- He’s crook. (Antipodean for sick.)
I had read that “dukes” in “put up your dukes” derives from “Duke of York” = “fork”, where “fork” was itself slang for “hand” or “fist”, making the first item doubly slang. I thought this was delightful.