Eurospeak

The Companion to British History defines this as suspect linguistic usage in which familiar expressions convey different concepts from those generally understood.

The most important cases are (fam means the familiar meaning in English, ES the meaning in Eurospeak):

Council: (fam) a local authority; (ES) the European legislature.

Directive: (fam) an important rule requiring obedience enforced by a sanction; (ES) a direction to a member country to alter its law, but not in force until it does so.

European: pertaining to the geographical European continent; (ES) pertaining to the area of the EEC or EU for the time being.

Parliament: (fam) a sovereign legislature; (ES) an official discussion forum at Strasbourg.

Regulation: (fam) a minor rule made under law; (ES) the most important kind of rule, superior even to an Act of Parliament.

On the banks of the cool Shalimar

By special request, another hippopotamus. This one is James Thurber's.

"What have you done with Dr Millmoss?"

Faites simple

...or, avoid all unnecessary complication and elaboration. This was Escoffier's advice to chefs but it applies to websites as well as it does to great cooking.

If you own a restaurant which offers a lunchtime tasting menu at £75 (£6 surcharge if you want the Duck Egg Mimosa with Cornish Lobster Mayonnaise as your starter), or a hotel which is a stunning Elizabethan manor house surrounded by 35 acres of renowned historic gardens and set in 1000 acres of ancient and exquisite forestry land, then you will need to promote it with a stylish website. So you go to the top people in the website design racket and tell them you want something really prestigious.

The trouble is, they need to justify the huge fee they are going to charge, so that they will have to make your website look and feel as if it's worth every penny; it will come replete with videos, music and every kind of whizzy feature, all bearing the hallmarks of top international graphic artists and web designers. It will certainly look terrific; it may also be confusing, awkward and generally irritating.

I know two sisters who inherited from their mother a house by the seaside which they let by the week for holidays. They asked me to make them a website to advertise it and since I was—still am, actually—in a relationship with the younger of the two I was happy to do so without charge. I am not much good at web design but I could make a virtue out of necessity by producing something very simple, with ten pages merely giving all the necessary information and making it easy to book. It was done with a nine-year-old version of Microsoft's now obsolete FrontPage, using one of its rather naff "themes", and the whole thing nowadays looks a touch dreary and old-fashioned (the website, that is, not the house, which is a very nice one). If you're curious, you can see both HERE.

This post is not touting for business, either for the house or my websites: I make websites only for friends and charities, and after several years of almost continuous lets the house is fully booked for a long way ahead. Of course, if you're really keen there are still a few weeks available for next year....

.

The invasion of Afghanistan

Inhabited by some of the most warlike peoples on the face of the earth, the country has always been glowering, secretive and veiled in intrigue, little known to Europeans except by disrepute. The Afghans think trade an ignoble occupation and leave it to foreigners; their general character is at once savagely independent and desperately unpredictable. They can be lively, humorous, courageous and warm-hearted but can also be bigoted, sly and murderous. Split into tribal divisions subdivided into clans, they fight incessantly among themselves and are almost impossible to govern.

We British have known them longer and better than most, and at times have wished, on the whole, to preserve the independence of the nation, but when it became apparent that foreign influences at work there posed a threat to our interests, the decision was taken to invade, while proclaiming that "once the independence and integrity of Afghanistan is established, the British Army will be withdrawn".

The principal invasion force consisted of 9,000 troops, with 6,000 more not under our direct command. Progress was slow and laborious, for behind them there followed 38,000 camp followers. The army was to live off the country but nevertheless took with them thirty days' rations of grain and enough sheep and cattle for ten weeks. Every platoon of every regiment had its water-carriers, its sadlers, its blacksmiths, its cobblers, its tailors, its laundrymen, and there were the men who polished brasses, and the men who put up tents, and the cooks, the orderlies, the stable-boys—together with all their wives, all their children and often aunts, uncles or grandparents—and troops of prostitutes from half India, with fiddlers, dancing-girls, fortune-tellers, wood-gatherers—with herdsmen to look after the cattle, sheep and goats, and butchers to slaughter them. There were carts and wagons by the thousand, palanquins, drays, chargers, ponies and dogs.

All this great multitude stumbled away to war, each corps with its band playing, a regiment of Queen's cavalry, nine regiments of infantry, engineers and gunners. A mighty dust hung in the air behind them, as a sign that the British were coming.

As a military operation the invasion was a qualified success. Organized opposition seemed to be at an end, and on August 6th, 1839, the panoply of British imperial power entered Kabul. At their head was the king, Shah Shuja, whom the British had restored to his throne; he was a splendid sight, scintillating with jewellery, and rode a white charger accoutred in gold, but was greeted with sullen silence by the Kabulis, who didn't much like him.

Much of the army was now sent back to India, leaving a division of infantry, a regiment of cavalry and an artillery battery. The British settled in, built a racetrack, organised amateur dramatics and persuaded a few Kabulis to take up cricket. However, in 1841 a riot became a rising and the head of Her Majesty's Envoy and Plenipotentiary was paraded through the capital while the rest of his corpse was suspended from a meathook in the great bazaar. Despite this discourteous behaviour, General Elphinstone, who was in command in spite of being debilitated by a wound in his buttock, negotiated an agreement with the insurgents, who promised to see the army safely through the passes to Jalalabad on the Indian frontier. No-one really believed them.

On January 6th, 1842, the army began its retreat, the most terrible in the history of British arms, and some 16,500 souls struggled out of their cantonment. The retreat lasted just a week; by January 13th all had died or been slaughtered except for one army surgeon who reached Jalalabad hotly pursued by sabre-waving Afghans.

So the first of Queen Victoria's imperial wars came to its terrible end. The British returned to Kabul within the year, blew up the great bazaar as a reminder of their displeasure and subdued the Afghans until the next Anglo-Afghan war forty years later. Shah Suja was soon murdered, and Afghanistan provided perennial strife for the rest of the century.

The above was adapted from an account by the essayist Jan Morris in her trilogy Pax Britannica. She concludes:
As for the retreat from Kabul, though largely forgotten in Britain it is vividly remembered in Afghanistan. When in 1960 I followed the army's route from Kabul to Jalalabad with an Afghan companion, we found many people ready to point out the sites of the tragedy, and recall family exploits. I asked one patriarch what would happen now if a foreign army invaded the country. "The same", he hissed, between the last of his teeth.

Goldwyn apocrypha*

Yes, I know you've heard them all before and that there are dozens more. The chances are that he never said many of them, or that if he did he knew exactly what he was saying.

A verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on.
Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
Don´t talk to me while I´m interrupting.
Go see it, and see for yourself why it shouldn't be seen.
I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.
I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.
If I could drop dead right now, I would be the happiest man alive.
If we do not succeed, we run the risk of failure.
If you don't disagree with me, how will I know I'm right?
If you want something for free, you have to pay for it.
I'll give you a definite maybe.
In two words: im-possible.
Include me out.
It´s more than magnificent. It´s mediocre.
It´s spreading like wildflowers.
Let's have some new clichés.
Never make predictions, especially about the future.
Spare no expense to save money on this one.
Tell me, how did you love my movie?
The scene is dull. Tell him to put more life into his dying.
This makes me sore, it gets my dandruff up.
We've all passed a lot of water since then.
We´re overpaying him, but he´s worth it.
Do you want me to put my head on a moose?
When I want your opinion I'll give it to you.
Why should people go out and pay to see bad movies when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?
You're going to call him William? What kind of a name is that? Every Tom, Dick and Harry is called William.

*[What you probably didn't know is that to use the word in this sense you have to be a Protestant, or at any rate not a Catholic.]

Poop-poop!

No 23 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century
May 1907: Minnie in Canada writes to her sister Melinda Ahearne in Lawrence, Mass.: this is you and little tommie in your auto, ahah.
Such giant highway speedsters must be what turned the head of Mr Toad. Motoring was new and lacked protocols: women drivers (in the postcard world) were almost as numerous as men.

I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears

This fits nicely into my series of helpful posts about things you can put into or on your ears (pins, candles, your little finger) but is in fact the title of a book I have just acquired. To a Russian the expression means I'm not pulling your leg.

Other idioms from around the world which are featured in the book are When dogs were tied with sausages (= very long ago, in Uruguayan Spanish), To distribute cardamoms (= to invite to a marriage, in Hindi) and To walk around hot porridge (= to beat about the bush, in German).

The book is amusing in a quiet way but not really of much practical use: it would be foolish to learn any of the quainter idioms in the hope of impressing a native speaker of the language, because the chances are that you would misuse them or that they are desperately old-fashioned or hackneyed expressions which would give away the fact that your knowledge comes from a book and that you don't actually speak the language at all; either way you would look silly.

The compiler cheats a bit by including a few proverbs; the English translation of some of these would make good conversation-stoppers, particularly as they are mostly incomprehensible. Come out with "Don't look for yesterday's fish in the house of the otter" and you are bound to get a mystified silence, unless there is a Hindi-speaker present who will recognise it.

So you could invent your own idioms which no-one could challenge. Having checked that there are no Albanians listening, you might say of someone you are discussing: I bet his elbows smell of horseradish and then explain that in Tirana this means that he is a man not to be trusted.

Back again

I am now connected to the internet again after BT cut me off from it for six days; bad scran to their management and all their shareholders.

I reported the fault at 8.30 a.m. on Tuesday 8th and since then have spent a total of eight hours on the telephone to what BT wittily call their Home Fault Help Line. At least, that was where it all began; two days and three or four calls later it had been established that the fault was at the exchange, and as the days went by I made new friends in various increasingly high-powered departments of the organisation, feeling greatly relieved when I was told that my problem had been moved upstairs to a high level Specialist Team in the Engineer's Department.

"Aha!", I thought, "now we're getting somewhere; these top people will get me back on line in a jiffy"; that was three days ago. I never actually got to speak to one of these real experts: after a chat with some lesser beings one of them would say "If you don't mind holding on please, sir, I'll get through to my colleague and find out the situation and then I'll come back and let you know"; then I would get music-on-hold again and after ten minutes he would come back and tell me the same thing I had heard the previous day, perhaps something like: "The Specialist Team have it in hand and have ordered a replacement part; this will take from one to three working days".

Very often I was required during the button game ("If you are suicidal, press 4", etc.) to key in my phone number once or twice (on one occasion four times) before I got to speak to a real person, who would then ask me what my phone number was.

At least the calls were to free numbers. I switched to hands-free while the music played and this meant that I didn't have to go into a trance while I waited: I could fill in the weary hours with such things as watching on TV the 1962 film of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. This has Ralph Richardson's embittered actor, Katharine Hepburn's drug-addicted wife and their sons, one an alcoholic and the other consumptive, tearing each other apart in 1912 Connecticut: a veritable light-hearted feast of fun and gaiety compared to my conversations with BT.

Everyone tells me that I should find another ISP. Well, yes, I suppose so, but I have had ADSL for nine years now and my experiences with other ISPs and webhosts have not led me to believe that any of them are much better than BT; some would certainly be worse. In fairness I have to say that over the last six years I have had only one other period of down-time, and that was a brief one.

Advice for country vets

Samuel Johnson exhibited a rare lack of self-assurance when he gave this definition: "A disease, I suppose, of cattle".

We shall never know whether his supposition was justified, for the word has disappeared from our language; at least, the OED knows it not, though perhaps in some dark corner of rural Somerset that terrible scourge headgargle is still rife and therefore the word remains common currency.

Anyway, the doctor's doubts about its exact meaning did not prevent him from quoting the remedy: "For the headgargle, give powder of fenugreek. Mortimer." He does not tell us which Mortimer made this recommendation but it is worth committing to memory; every vegetarian cook worth his Noirmoutier salt has powder of fenugreek to hand (for flavouring his purée of mung beans) and should know how handy it will be if headgargle breaks out.

The old ones are the best

Paul Crum (Roger Pettiward) drew this for Punch in 1937. I always used to think of it as one of Thurber's; perhaps I confused it with his similarly hippo-based "What have you done with Dr Millmoss?"

"I keep thinking it's Tuesday."

How's that again?

Newspaper headlines are there to catch readers' attention and make them marvel, or at least excite their curiosity. Here are four recent ones which worked on me:

Police arrest 21 after woman in tent is injured by lawn roller

Trial shows new drug better than rat poison at preventing stroke

Pit bull saves four as blaze sweeps toilets

Bus-pass Briton, 67, back fighting bulls



Actually, I wasn't very impressed by that last one. This fellow is very proud of his titanium knee: well, I've got two titanium knees and if only my traje de luces still fitted me I'd be off to the plaza de toros in a flash.



And there's also:
Sixty horses wedged in chimney
.....but this one was invented by Beachcomber and the story to fit it hasn't turned up yet.

And finally, Claud Cockburn claimed to have won a competition in The Times for the dullest headline with:
Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead

Selection 19

Recycled posts from 2005

parody
Not all nannies are wise and kind

francophilia
Shakespeare and subtitles in French

personal
The way Wodehouse posted letters

Try it with cornflakes

Japanese knotweed, fallopia japonica or sachalinensis, has arrived in the UK and established itself over the last few years; huge and costly efforts are being made to eradicate it and there are even proposals to introduce an insect from overseas which might act as a predator and eat the invader.

This seems very risky. Supposing this evil foreign bug takes a fancy to one of our honest British plants, and we woke up one morning to find the country denuded of runner beans, delphiniums or even oak trees?

It might be better to consult the ever-useful Oxford Companion to Food, which notes in its article on Knotweed: "The young shoots make a pleasant vegetable, whose acidity can be tempered by the addition of a little sugar in the cooking. Or, they can be steamed and made into a purée, which can in turn serve as the basis of a sweetened cold soup. The mature stems, peeled, can be treated like rhubarb and it is even possible to make jam or a pie from them".

The trouble is that all this sounds pretty unappetising and it is hard to imagine that people will chomp their way through enough of the stuff to make any substantial inroads into the hundreds of acres of 2-metre shoots already growing. I suppose the TV chefs will have to tempt us with it, demonstrating Knotweed à la Japonaise, Barbecued Knotweed Kebabs or even Knotweed Crumble.

Shamed by your English?

Or, "Does your English let you down?". These are alternative headlines to the longest-running ad in newspaper history. It was placed in national newspapers, often on the front page, in 1963, and has been appearing regularly ever since. The text claims that the answer to the problem posed is to take a correspondence course in speaking and writing from a company based in Cheshire.

It was, and still is, hugely successful: the course has been taken by 400,000 people. The original ad was based on one written—rather well, it has to be said—by an American copywriter and has remained virtually unchanged; the publishers tried different versions, but none proved as effective as this one. It is, quite properly, headed Advertisement, but clearly many readers take it as editorial because it reads like a newspaper article and uses typefaces matching the newspapers in which it was published.

Perhaps that is a little bit sly, but it is hard not to admire the ad, which is basically a simple and honest one for a worthwhile product, and has outlived the greatest marketing campaigns of our time. It would be interesting to know how much the content of the course has been updated over the years; it may not have changed very much, for a piece of good English written half a century ago—like the ad itself—will still read well, give or take a few changes in fashion.

Uncle Stephen reassures us

In a current TV commercial for a car insurance company we hear the warm, avuncular voice of cuddly old Stephen Fry telling us: "...we're not on any price comparison websites, oh crumbs no...".

Is it excessive cynicism or just common sense that makes us wonder what reasons the company could possibly have for this abstention, other than their fear that comparison would not favour them?

One thousand up

What to publish for the millenary* post in Other Men's Flowers? How about some pointless statistics such as that every month for five and a half years around fifteen Omfposts (as aficionados call them) have been published, each month's batch containing on average 4,151 words, 14 links and 8 pictures, and eliciting 22 comments?

No, those figures are all quite accurate but not at bit interesting; better to list a few Omfposts which typify the style and content of the blog. Here are some:

•The Story of Ginger Biscuits;
•A frank account of an embarrassing experience I had in 1958;
•Twenty-five questions about obscure Victorian novels, with answers;
•Something scurrilous about a well-loved national figure;
•Some thoughts on people who profess enthusiasm for the Tory party or Jesus or homeopathy;
•A rude limerick in Portuguese;
•A selection of witticisms lifted without acknowledgement from the works of Frank Muir;
•A review of a play which I very nearly went to see last week;
•Key paragraphs from Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung;
•Some notes on ringworm from an article in the British Medical Journal, August 1925;
•A nice photo of a man in a funny hat;

These are imaginary, but all are typical, and redolent of the profound superficiality, the careful insouciance, the consistently erratic approach and the gentle Schrecklichkeit which have made Other Men's Flowers essential reading for top international Leichenbegleiteren ever since it started publication in January 2004. The list itself gives a good idea of the blog's flavour, so I will leave it at that: THIS IS OMFPOST 1000.

[*i.e. one-thousandth, not to be confused with posts about millinery (women's hats), of which there are many among these.]

Euskaraz badakizu?

No, you probably don't. There's not much point in anyone asking you this question, because it is unlikely that you are one of the handful of adult foreigners who have ever managed to master the Basque language.

This is apparently related to no other language, except perhaps one of the lesser Hungarian dialects. It has a congested look to it, being technically described as agglutinative and polysynthetic, and it is full of Xs and Zs making frightening words like Lerdokiztatu, Edantxar and Xintexuketa.

One must think in an altogether different way to talk Basque, for each transitive verb has fourteen different forms; one word means she gives it to him, another they give it to us, another you give it to them, not to speak of the words for she will give it to us or you would have given it to me or even, for all I know, it might have been given by us to her.

It is an ancient, puzzling and nerve-wracking language but powerful and flexible enough to express even to most recondite of concepts, such as Nire aerolabangailua aingirez beteta dago (My hovercraft is full of eels). The unambitious could always just memorise a few phrases for use in emergencies, like Non dago komuna (where's the lavatory?)

More things to put in your ear

Most of us remember fondly the final, poignant episode of the World War I Blackadder series in which it was made clear that walking around with a pencil hanging from each nostril would be unlikely to get you excused from going over the top to be shot, though it may have worked for some.

When it comes to pushing things into your ears, there is a whole range of objects which can be deployed to achieve a variety of aims. Other Men's Flowers has already dealt in detail with two of the principal ones, here and here; in the first case a modest function is fulfilled and the second is amusing in a quiet way but completely pointless unless you believe in qi forces and other magic.

In this blog I aim at encyclopedic coverage of every aspect of modern life so I am pleased to be able to report on yet another therapy which works wonders when you shove something in your ears. This also requires firm faith in the preposterous: it is called Hopi Ear Candling.

The Hopi tribe have repeatedly requested the manufacturers of the candles sold for this purpose to refrain from using their name since their healing practices do not include any such thing as ear candling, but their plea has fallen on deaf ears (presumably full of wax of one kind or another), and much money is made by selling the things with the assertion that lighting one end while the other is in your ear canal will improve your health. Medical research has shown the procedure to be both ineffective and dangerous.

There is a website called healthypages which has a forum where proponents of alternative medicine can entertain one another with anecdotes about their experiences. Not all of these are encouraging; here, for example, a lady from Ireland reports, with no apparent remorse:

I finally got to do some ear candling on my husband last night. I used the Biosun ones and was really looking forward to his reactions. Immediately after the treatment he got very irritated. Now he has told me that he had nightmares all night, have not gone into the details of these as yet. While I think this is a good sign and he is releasing blocked emotions, he is not too impressed. I used them to relieve sinus and to give him a nice relaxing treatment, I doubt if he will allow me to do this again. Has anyone any ideas on this or had similar experiences??, must go now as I can hear a lot of clattering and swearing in the kitchen.

Yes, I bet. She may need to try out her skills with aromatherapy, reflexology and Hot Stone therapy to save her marriage. Or perhaps a crystal will quieten the poor fellow; crystals will cure anything. Another lady posts in the forum: Is there a crystal that can be placed near walls to help with noisy neighbours please can anyone help? She gets a very sensible answer from someone who suggests asking them to shut up, but then spoils it by recommending getting hold of a piece of haematite and ...when you have found somewhere quiet and secluded, grip the stone tightly, focusing all your anxiety and uncertainty onto the the stones shining surface....then imagine the stone shrugging off the problem of the noisy neighbour with sublime confidence!

Haematite, you see, is used by mineral and crystal healers in their rituals for treating blood-related illnesses such as haemophilia, anaemia, heart, kidney and liver diseases, cardio-vascular weakness, menstrual cramps, and nose bleeds. They also recommend it "for use in treating the stress of jet lag, birth and surgery, tumours, insomnia, leg cramps, nervous disorders and fevers. Haematite was also a Native American remedy for pimples, alcohol abuse and dental problems".

Was? Did they find out that it didn't work, or are they all nowadays smooth-skinned moderate drinkers with flashing smiles who no longer need to carry lumps of rock about?

First of many

No 22 in a series of extracts from The Postcard Century.
July 1906: ...you see I have got you a P.C. like you wanted writes EC in Faygate to Mrs Vine in Newdigate, places local to Britains's first major road accident. On the Kent fireman's outing everyone wanted to sit on the open top of the double decker. When the brakes failed the bus lurched out of control and ten were killed.

Summer eating

At this time of year the magazines are full of ideas for tossing dreary salads and burning stuff on the barbecue, trying to excite us with beautiful photographs of depressing food. Isabella Beeton, though well aware of the importance of eating what is appropriate to the season (in her day you had to), saw no reason to limit the choice just because the sun is shining.

Here are her suggestions for a week of Plain Family Dinners for 6 in July:

Sunday: 1. Julienne soup. 2. Roast lamb, half calf’s head, tongue and brains, boiled ham, peas and potatoes. 3. Cherry tart, custards.

Monday: 1. Hashed calf’s head, cold lamb and salad. 2. Vegetable marrow and white sauce, instead of pudding.

Tuesday: 1. Stewed veal, with peas, young carrots, and potatoes. Small meat pie. 2. Raspberry-and-currant pudding.

Wednesday: 1. Roast ducks stuffed, gravy, peas, and potatoes; the remains of stewed veal rechauffé. 2. Macaroni served as a sweet pudding.

Thursday: 1. Slices of salmon and caper sauce. 2. Boiled knuckle of veal, parsley-and-butter, vegetable marrow and potatoes. 3. Black-currant pudding.

Friday: 1. Roast shoulder of mutton, onion sauce, peas and potatoes. 2. Cherry tart, baked custard pudding.

Saturday: 1. Minced mutton, Rump-steak-and-kidney pudding. 2. Baked lemon pudding.

A little heavy for our tastes, perhaps, and vegetable marrow with white sauce doesn't sound much fun for a pudding. It's all a bit dull, but this is only for the family so there are no guests to impress. Much more interesting is Isabella's menu for a dinner party of eighteen:

First Course
Soup à la Jardinière, Salmon Trout and Parsley-and-Butter. Fillets of Mackerel à la Maître d’Hôtel.

Entrées
Lobster Cutlets, Beef Palates à la Italienne.

Second Course
Roast Lamb, Boiled Capon and White Sauce, Boiled Tongue, garnished with small Vegetable Marrows, Bacon and Beans.

Third Course
Goslings, Whipped Strawberry Cream, Raspberry-and-Currant Tart, Meringues.Cherry Tartlets, Iced Pudding.

Dessert and Ices

And very nice too. But goslings for afters? My first thought was that these must be some kind of joky sweet in the shape of a bird, made out of sponge cake and fondant icing, but the dictionaries have no mention of such a thing; the OED gives 1: A young goose 2: A foolish inexperienced person 3: A catkin or blossom on a tree.

Perhaps they were real baby geese, fried in butter and eaten as a savoury: you pick them up by the head, dip them in anchovy sauce, pop them whole into your mouth and crunch them up. Yum!

Mrs Beeton's great work was originally published in 24 monthly parts and then as a bound volume in 1861. The meals she writes about seem a bit excessive to us, but it would be another forty years before the Edwardians began serious gormandising with 24-course dinners.