The Palace, Ottawa

It seems that most Canadians have taken the Cambridges to their hearts, and everyone knows what warm hearts Canadians have. Some Québécois did hold up some handmade banners: "Parasite go home", "Kate go UK yourself" and so on, but most did not strongly oppose the visit, merely grumbling about its cost. And the prince got an undeserved cheer for his schoolboy French.

This raises an appealing possibility. When the time comes for the by-then ageing couple to take their thrones, why should they not become permanently resident in Canada? Presumably they will be considered King and Queen of Canada anyway, as well as of Britain, and there seems no reason why they would have to go on living over here: they could appoint a Governor-General to represent them here, and of course they could come over and make a state visit whenever they felt like it.

This scenario is rather less unlikely than the one that Nevil Shute set out in his novel In the Wet. Shute wrote it in 1953 when he had become disenchanted with socialism and such vile institutions as the National Health Service, and he describes how the Queen had become frustrated by her government's treatment of her. While she is on a visit to Ottawa the heir to the throne indicates that he will not succeed her while this situation persists and then, with the support of the "heavily royalist" Australia and Canada, leaves England. The Government falls and the Prince of Wales becomes Governor-General while the Queen confines herself to Commonwealth matters.

(Actually, the plot is much more complicated than this; Shute was strongly anti-racist, and though a naive or even simple-minded writer in some ways, had some ideas which were ahead of his time (metal fatigue in aircraft, for example) and an extraordinary ability to tell preposterous stories with conviction: in Round the Bend he describes the life and death of an aircraft engineer who founds a new religion and may indeed have been divine.)

Australia in recent years has not been strongly royalist, but Canada with a bit of encouragement might one day be persuaded to give a permanent lodging to Kate and Wills, for this would do wonders for their tourist trade and be one in the eye for the Americans, who would be green with envy.

We could still use all our experience of mounting gorgeous spectacles and pull in the tourists every year or two when the couple and their offspring make state visits, while saving ourselves the huge sums of money they cost us as long as they go on living here, and the BBC could dispense with whoever has replaced Nicholas Witchell as Royal Crawler Pursuivant.

Updated words

As always, the report on the latest quarterly update to the Oxford English Dictionary is a good read:

For me, Tex-Mex food is ugh, but I enjoyed hearing about the lengthy search for the origin of "nachos".

Modern technology has some cool new words, but "digital" dates from the fifteenth century

Never forget that the original meaning of "engine" in English was ‘ingenuity, artfulness; cunning, trickery’. Google is a search engine.

Ill-assorted

It does happen sometimes that dog-owners get to look like their dogs. I used to know a girl called Gill who kept a pair of Afghan hounds. As she was a hairdresser (mine, actually) their coat was always beautifully kempt; so of course was hers, and she shared with the hounds a friendly disposition, a lean, fine-drawn and slightly aristocratic appearance as well as a bouncy and cheerful mien, though unlike them her ears were not silky and long and her legs were not a bit shaggy, so far as I could tell.

I saw today an example of the opposite, a totally disparate dog-and-owner pairing.

It was at a little caff usefully sited half-way between the town and the gentle slope up to my home, where it is good to linger for a while to get psyched up for the climb (it's not the South Col exactly, but the last 500 yards make me think). The sun was shining and there were some tables on the pavement where I sat with a double espresso and a toasted tea-cake chatting with the owner who had come out for a cigarette; he has very little English, but he managed to tell me that he had to smoke because of the stress of having a wife and three children; I re-assured him that I once had a comparable family, but after puffing away for half a century was eventually able to give it up (smoking, that is).

Where was I? Oh yes, dogs and their owners. A few yards away there was a man giving water to his dog, using an interesting device consisting of a plastic container with a bottle of water inside; he opened it up and the lid formed a little trough from which the dog was happily lapping. The thing was obviously invented in America; I remember that when my wife and I visited some of her relatives there we found that they were obsessed with carrying water with them at all times. This was in Arizona where it is easy to die of thirst in the desert, so I suppose they were taking no risks even when shopping in downtown Phoenix.

I am digressing again. The point I set out to make was that the dog looked very young, handsome, intelligent and friendly, while his owner appeared to be none of these things. I do not want to traduce the man: he may well have been a kindly, good-natured fellow, fond of flowers and with a gentle, whimsical humour, but his brutish appearance gave the impression that if you annoyed him he would gie yer the heid without compunction.

I think that was what I intended this post to be about, but I can't be sure; it's been a long day. The above is rambling and muddled, without a trace of OMF's usual brisk precision, a feature of omfstyle much admired by omflovers around the world. I shall have to pull myself together, lest two or three of them chuck it in, leaving me with barely enough to make up a synchronised swimming team should the need arise.

D'you like my hips...

...to hipsnotise you? Thus the great Carmen Miranda. She is better still in her native Portuguese.

She came into my mind (not that she has ever been much out of it since I first saw That Night in Rio) when Carl de Souza's picture appeared last week, since the lady at Ascot is wearing a more formal version of the sort of thing that Carmen used to wear stapled to her head.

And very nice too, both the lady and the titfer; her name is Anneka Tanaka-Svenska, which comes trippingly off the tongue. She is a well-known vegetarian Natural History presenter and writer who specialises in the Environment, Green Issues and Wolf Conservation, and has been dubbed the Green Guru; well, she would be, wouldn't she? Her website* does not mention her parentage but I suppose Swedish-Japanese would be a fair guess.

Not much doubt about Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha's parentage, though to me she has something reminiscent of a Teutonic Maria: Maria Magdalene Dietrich. Same facial bone structure, same way of narrowing her eyes. But the Brazilian was the better singer and better dancer, especially with the hands and the hips, and equally seductive in a different way: she smiles rather than smoulders. The German may have had better legs but we shall never know: Carmen never showed hers.

Dietrich was born in 1901, so was eight years older than Miranda; sadly, the Brazilian Bombshell died in 1955, while Marlene hung on until 1999.


* ...which states: "Anneka is experienced in studio, live, autocue and corporate". This statement seems to have a word missing to which each of these categories relates: presentations? talks? sex?

Comment from the Chair of St Augustine

 As a letter to The Guardian pointed out, the colon in a recent headline was misplaced. The headline should have read: The Archbishop no-one voted for: coalition policies.

No reason why His Grace should not have voiced criticism of the policies of our coalition government, of course, and few with any sense would disagree with what he said. But it is hard to see why so many objected to him saying it: he is entitled to say anything he likes, even when has no special knowledge of the subject, for no-one would take him seriously; the man is totally lacking in charisma.

The silly hat is not his fault, for that goes with the job, but he clearly cares nothing for his appearance, not even having the decency to trim his preposterous eyebrows. Lamentable!

But recent Primates of All England have been a pretty uninspiring bunch. His immediate predecessors—Coggan, Runcie and Carey—were respectively dull, hypocritical and slimy, so I suppose Williams, mad eyebrows and all, is an improvement on them. But for a bit of style you have to go back to Ramsey, a genial old person who once very nearly gave me the immense privilege of sharing a drink and a chat. If you bother to follow that link, you will find not only a report on this memorable encounter, but also a note about John Whitgift, whose stylishness has never been surpassed since he died in 1604, though his contemporary detractors said he was just a show-off and deplored his ecclesiastical bling. 

The Firm

With this lovely bit of Photoshopping on the cover and under the title President Windsor, Dominic Sandbrook in New Statesman last month lauded the political nous of the Queen, who has spent 60 years giving the impression that the monarchy is somehow detached from everyday political life. She is most certainly a political animal, having worked with 12 British prime ministers and 14 New Zealand prime ministers, 12 Australians and 11 Canadians. Without any training for the job, she has never, almost without exception, made a false move; we often underestimate just how much self-discipline and skill ;this must have taken.

The big problem with republicanism is that it is hard for us to imagine anyone else who could possibly make such a perfect Head of State. Sadly, although her sense of duty might induce her, in the interest of the country, to give up two or three of her residences, tell her awful family to pipe down, allow her head to be removed from our stamps and drop some of the pomp (and some of the duties) surrounding her present role, the fact that if she were to stand as a candidate in our first ever presidential election she would unquestionably get the kind of majority only previously enjoyed by leaders of totalitarian countries is irrelevant: she is too old.  

It used not to be like that, usen't it not to be?

There has been much huffing and puffing about the inclusion of such words as thang, blingy and tik (methamphetamine) in the latest Collins "official" list of Scrabble words, but of course this is a matter of total indifference except to those daft enough to play Scrabble with people who take the game so seriously that they will pay £16.99 for the book.

Real dictionaries have detailed criteria for the acceptance of new words rather than depending on mere editorial whim. The realest of them all, the OED, accepted for inclusion this year (for example) LOL, couch surfer, fnarr fnarr and OMG (about time too; this one's nearly a hundred years old).

But not yet innit. This, though, is only a question of time, for it is unquestionably in sufficiently wide and probably permanent currency to warrant inclusion, and certainly fills a lacuna in our language: we have no invariant tag other than the crude eh? or huh? enabling us to ask for the agreement of the listener, and have to use a huge number (pity the poor foreign student of English!) of clumsy phrases like don't you? or shouldn't we?. But innit, which is a rather neat contraction of Is it not so?, can be used in any context, being the equivalent of n'est ce pas?, ¿verdad? or nicht wahr?

So we should all start using it now, without waiting for the OED to catch up, innit?

More NS competitions

Writing a post the other day about the famous New Statesman competitions, I recalled some of the prizewinning entries in (much) earlier years. Not the long ones; I imagine there have been anthologies of winning entries, though I haven't been able to find one, in which I could have looked up such things as the winning entry for An Imaginary Discussion between Oswald Mosley and Ian Paisley Written in the Style of Hemingway. (I often wondered why anyone would expend the huge effort needed to write things like this in the hope of winning a small book token.)

No, it was the one-liners that stuck in my memory, such as:

Great Boasts:
At the wedding: "Yes, charming couple, I've slept with both of them."

or
Irregular Verbs, along the lines of I am firm/ you are obstinate/ he is a pig-headed fool:
"I am Oxford/ you are Cambridge/ he is London School of Economics."
"I like boys/ you are a scoutmaster/ he is in prison."

or
Announcements which make the experienced party-goer/ diner-out wish he had stayed at home:
"This is something rather special: we trod the grapes ourselves."
"And now, who's for some mead?"
"Oh goodie, Deirdrie's brought her zither!"

I wish I had made a note of some of the others; I could have made fifty posts out of them.

True prophets

My friend Grumio and I were not among the countless billions who prepared to be whisked up to Paradise last week, or alternatively to be left down here to suffer a bit and then die miserably. You see, we knew that there was no hurry, because the smart money said that these happenings were still some way off.

During a trip to the States some years ago, we had had the privilege of meeting Septimus and George, two brothers who have made much more authoritative prophesies. You can tell from a glance at their lavishly illustrated website (and check out their profiles) that they are not misguided amateurs like that Camping fellow, but the real McCoy, top-level seers whose word is to be trusted.

We are advising all our friends to take their time to prepare properly, not forgetting provision for their pets, and then cash in all their investments and have a real good time in the coming months.


Selah!

The one about three intelligent men

A friend asked me the other day if I knew the riddle about three men who had to compete in working out whether a black or a white patch had been stuck on their forehead. I remembered it, vaguely, and told him I would look it up and tell him how it went.

But I then found that it was not so easy to google something that contained no distinctive words. I tried various combinations, patch+ three+ black+ intelligent and so on, and eventually found a number of variations of this old puzzle, but none of them explained it well.

Finally I remembered that I had first seen it in a marvellous book my late sister gave me for my eleventh birthday: "The Complete Home Entertainer". It has a particularly fine section called Fun with Matches, Coins and String and this kept me happily occupied for a very long time, but I finally found  the puzzle I wanted under Brain Twisters. I could have scanned it and posted it as a picture but it was on more than one page so that would have been tedious. Instead I typed out a précis of the question and answer, and here it is:

The three most intelligent applicants for a job are given a test.

The interviewer tells them to shut their eyes and he will then stick either a black or a white patch on the forehead of each of them. He says "When I ask you to open your eyes, anyone who can see a black patch must raise his hand. If he can deduce whether his own patch is black or white he must lower his hand".

He then stuck a black patch on each forehead and told them to open their eyes. Three hands shot up and almost immediately one came down.

"Yes? What colour is your patch?"

"Black, sir"

"Correct! The job is yours!"

How had he worked it out?

Call the candidates X, Y and Z. X says to himself:

"Suppose my patch is white. Then Y has his hand up because he can see Z's black patch."

But also he sees Z with his hand up and, being intelligent, he asks himself: "Why is Z's hand raised? Answer: because he can also can see a black patch which must (Y will argue) be mine. IF MY PATCH WERE WHITE, the intelligent Y (and the intellgent Z) would work this out in no time. But neither has done so, since both still have their hands up. Therefore the problem is not as simple as that. Therefore my patch is black".

So X got the job.

Competitions and a raincoat

It is many years since I subscribed to New Statesman—in fact, I don't think I ever did, I used to read it in the library—but for some reason they often send me a free copy. This is nice, for although I would no longer want to buy it every fortnight, I enjoy seeing an occasional copy for nostalgia's sake.
  
I am happy to know that their competition is still going strong: it has reached No 4174, which called for poems on the subject of any well-known proverb and attracted many entries. There were several clever and elegant ones, but my favourite among the prizewinners was short and simple:
Don't keep a dog...
I kept a dog and barked myself
And now my throat is sore.
The burglars only laughed at me
And busted in my door.
They stole my money and my jewels.
They stole my private log.
I only wish they'd thought to steal
That stupid, silent dog.

In 1949 the competition was for parodies of Graham Greene's writing style; famously, the author himself submitted an entry under the pen name "N. Wilkinson" and won second prize. In 1965 Greene again entered a similar New Statesman competition under a pseudonym, and won an honourable mention.

I too entered a few times but never got even an honourable mention. However, as with all literary competitions the prizes were miserably small book tokens (they are still only £25 and some Tesco vouchers) so I soon gave up trying and later my pride was salvaged when I did win £50, a lot of money in those days, in a newspaper competition.

This was in the Observer and was for a parody of one of their regular feature writers; I chose Pierre d'Harcourt who wrote on travel (merely a slim column—lavishly illustrated colour supplements were way in the future), aimed squarely at discriminating travellers, not the holiday-making masses. Fifty years later I recycled my entry as one of the first posts in Other Men's Flowers.
   
I spent my winnings on a Gannex raincoat; Harold Wilson quickly followed my example and wore one on a world tour in 1956. They became fashion icons, and were worn by Lyndon Johnson, Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev, as well as the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the royal corgis. In addition they were worn by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, Himalayan climbers, the armed services, and police forces in Britain and Canada, and the success of the new fabric made Joseph Kagan a multi-millionaire, while Wilson made him a life peer.

He was later charged with tax evasion, though the formal charges were styled as "theft" and "false accounting", to comply with extradition treaties which did not cover tax offences. After a stay in Israel, he was arrested in Paris. On December 12, 1980, he was convicted of four counts of theft, fined £375,000 and served a ten-month sentence. He lost his knighthood, but his peerage could not be forfeited and on release from custody he returned to the House of Lords and spoke on prison reform.
[Wikipedia]

Why the Sunday Times is rubbish, Part 163

Last Sunday's edition was typical. The front page was dominated by a photograph and an article on Kate McCann, and the "News" Review devoted pages 1 to 3 to an extract from her forthcoming book and six more photos.
Everyone sympathises with Mrs McCann, and no-one would blame her for keeping alive the tragic story of the disappearance of her daughter Madeleine, but it was disingenuous of the ST to push these non-revelations with the subhead: "Here she tells what really happened that terrible night". After four years it would certainly be good to know what really happened, but of course the extract, and presumably the book, contains nothing new of any importance.

A weekly shot of sense

I have a PVR which enables me to record TV programmes for watching at convenient times (for example, when I am not dozing, or eating, or training for the pole-vault in 2012). Most of the time there are a couple of dozen items waiting to be watched and inevitably when starting to work through them I find that in many cases I had been unjustifiably optimistic in thinking they might be interesting. So I have watched only the first five minutes of many programmes which looked promising but turned out to be rotten; this often happens with old films which I remembered with affection but which, when viewed with a more mature (or blasé) eye, are unutterably tedious.

I said rotten, not rubbish: one of the pleasures of advanced age is being able to watch rubbish without feeling guilty; I do a lot of that. I will not, therefore, list the items of which I am currently watching a series, but there are some which I can recommend without incurring contempt.

One is Dateline London, a round table discussion between media correspondents based in London, some British but mostly foreign (12.30 on Saturdays, BBC News 24). They talk about any issues of the day in a relaxed and non-adversarial way, often disagreeing but often reaching a consensus. None of them ever expresses any opinion which makes me want to punch him, or her, in the mouth. Hard-ass journalists they may be, but they argue as if they actually like and respect each other, a refreshing thing; Gavin Essler chairs admirably

And, of course, most of them know something of which they speak, having studied and reported on it. After I watch this programme I am often still confused about the matters which have been discussed, but confused in a much better-informed way, if you see what I mean.

Their discussion on April 30th was typically rewarding. They talked with appropriate gravitas about the situation in Syria, the West's attitude to dictators, and the alternative voting system, but before that with an equally appropriate lightheartedness about the previous day's royal wedding.  

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of the Independent had spent the day in a deserted Epping Forest and then at a (very small) republican party, Brian O'Connell of the Irish RTE said that they had given it three hours on TV, up to the balcony kisses, Dr Vincent Magombe of Africa Inform International said that he doubted whether anybody in Uganda had watched it because the situation there is so dire, and the splendidly named Stryker McGuire of Newsweek said that most of his compatriots had thoroughly enjoyed the magnificent spectacle, knowing that they didn't have to pay for it.

Big Nuptials

"Nuptial" can mean relating to marriage or weddings, but in zoology it refers to the characteristic breeding behaviour, coloration, or structures of some animals, e.g. nuptial plumage. There was a great deal of that on the women in the Abbey this morning and some little fellows like Rowan Atkinson and Elton John had to stand on tippy toes to find their way through the throng.

The big news of the day was, of course, Nepalese choir go missing after landing at Heathrow; immigration officials were investigating whether the group had absconded or simply decided to give the Cornwall International Male Voice Choral Festival a miss.

But I am joking. That event was momentous enough, but, except in Cornwall, of little importance compared with the royal wedding—sorry, Royal Wedding—which was going to be watched on TV, so they told us this morning, by two billion people, only half a billion less than the number who watched the funeral of a dodgy Egyptian playboy's mistress in 1997.

There were many moments and sights to treasure: the man opening the offside door of the grandparent's car when it arrived at the Abbey and holding it open while standing smartly at the salute as they both got out of the other side was a splendid bit of knockabout humour, and there was much quiet enjoyment to be had from noting the soppiness of most of the hats and some of the get-ups; those of Prince Andrew's daughters, for example, were hugely comic. It must be said, though, that the top echelon of male participants looked terrific in their military finery with gold decorative bits dangling all over them, and the Dean's golden robe was a dream, making the Primate of All England look positively dowdy.

Nuptials, 1902 state Landau, jingling escorts, kiss-kiss, surging crowds, flypast, don't we do these things well? Those Americans who have heard of Great Britain are consumed with envy. Anyway, it's all over: Nicholas Witchell, Huw Edwards and the rest of the commentators and royal correspondents—sorry, Royal Correspondents—can now get up off their knees.

The noisome Earl Spencer said afterwards that it was a jolly good show but a pity that Diana wasn't there.

Playing Mummies and Daddies

Feature article on page 12 of the Sunday Times, April 10th 2011:
"...research found that 88% of parents feared that children were under pressure to grow up too quickly, with concern about adult behaviour where children do not realise what they are doing... fears about children acting older than their age have been heightened ..."

Article in the same edition of the same rubbish newspaper, page 3:
This is three-quarters of a page under the headline "Playground princes get their big day", with two photos of small children. One shows a pair in wedding dress walking down the aisle of a church, the other has a little boy in military uniform and a little girl with veil and a froth of pink and white. The article drools on about the news that "Primary schools across the country [100 of them, apparently] are ringing wedding bells, with pupils playing the roles of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The boys and girls will be blessed by local vicars, sometimes dressed as the Archbishop of Canterbury, at pretend services in parish churches...".

At a school in Staffordshire the deputy head reported that "Each of the children designed 10 top honeymoon destinations for William and Kate...", but amid all this drivel there is a refreshing note of sanity: each of the children has "... sent a letter to Kate warning her to think carefully about marrying into the royal family".

There has been no mention of pretend honeymoons to follow the pretend weddings, but the Sunday Times article thoughtfully tells us that "the ceremonies are naturally on a smaller scale than the real thing on April 29th" and presumably this will apply to the honeymoons too; behind the bike sheds would be traditional, but not many schools have these nowadays.

And I suppose they don't do pretend divorces until the sixth form. 

Weasel words

"I'm sorry if what I'm setting out to do hasn't communicated itself...Listening to the vote this morning, if I've not got that message across then I apologise."

Andrew Lansley's words, reported last week as "an abject apology", were nothing of the kind, for three reasons:

First, I'm sorry is rarely an apology; usually it is an expression of regret for something for which the speaker bears no trace of responsibility: I'm sorry to hear your grandmother's got piles. Second, use of the conditional if, twice, suggests that it is by no means certain that there is anything to apologise for. Finally, switching to the passive hasn't communicated itself lets the speaker out: if you didn't get it, that was your fault or the message's, not mine.

He could have made an apology which really meant something: I now realise that my proposals for the NHS were ill-considered and likely to harm the NHS irrevocably, and that I failed to explain them clearly and honestly. For these things, and my general incompetence, I apologise.

Fat chance.

Reverse crusade

Interesting to see that Gbagbo and his forces of the Ivory Coast Christian south have been finally beaten by the forces of the Muslim north and the French. Apparently his only allies in the world were the American Christian evangelists, who admired him greatly and believed he had really won the election.

Nice to know, too, that the graffiti artist Banksy Moon gave his support to the right side.

Allegro ma non troppo

If I have any kind of individual writing style then it is a careless blend of the highfalutin' and the demotic or even racy; in other words, people may need a dictionary for one sentence and are offended by the coarseness of the next. This means that am often taken to task for faults in my writing, being condemned either for pretentiousness or crudity.

The atmosphere during many a convivial evening at Reginald's has become ill-natured or even violent when I have been forced to defend myself against attacks by Grumio or other soi-disant linguistic experts expressing their contempt for some trivial syntactical or stylistic error in something I have published.

Nearly always these strictures are totally unjustified; a typical example is the criticism of my excessive use of "selah", on the grounds that I do not actually know what the word means. This is unfair: if we all restricted our vocabulary to words of which we fully comprehend the meaning then discourse would be stifled and politicians, for example, would have to remain permanently mumchance (a pleasing prospect).

Anyway, in the case of "selah", there is every excuse for not knowing the meaning, for no-one really does. The Oxford Dictionary has:    

selah, exclamation
(in the Bible) occurring frequently at the end of a verse in Psalms and Habakkuk, probably as a musical direction.

This is not much help and is probably wrong: musical directions are not exclamations. So never mind what Habbakuk meant, I use it to mean any one of a number of things, for example: amen; what d'you think of that?; so there!; you know I'm right; QED; here endeth the lesson, or whatever.

Selah!

[The title of this post really is a musical direction and has an interesting story behind it.] 

Cops and Rozzers

We like naming things, so much so that a multilingual glossary of some groups of names would be a hefty volume.

Take insects, for example; in hundreds of years entomologists have already named millions of the little chaps, but there may still be many whole species which remain anonymous. Then there are our naughty bits: there are thousands of terms for these—technical, demotic or vulgar—although those in the last group are never uttered in polite society; any English translation of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel will contain several hundred names for the items relevant to both genders.

A similar restriction applies to deities, many of whom are said to wax exceeding wrathful if their name, or one of their many names, is actually spoken. An extreme case of such divine paranoia is described by Arthur C Clarke in The Nine Billion Names of God, but I will not reveal the appalling punishment meted out if anyone lists these, for that would spoil the enjoyment of those who have never read this classic 1953 short story.

Police officers are another group bearing many names; a few are affectionate, most are insulting; Wikipedia lists two hundred of them. Inexplicably, a disproportionate number seem to originate in Turkey, such as this one:
Aynasız
The most common slang word to address a police officer in Turkish. The word literally means "mirrorless", and its attribution to a police officer suggests that a cop is perceived as someone who constantly accuses others of vice, whereas he himself has no mirror to see his own vice. It is the semi-official equivalent of the English word "pig" (only when used to refer to the police), and commonly used when translating English-spoken movies into Turkish. Pronunciation is roughly I-nuh-suzz. (Plural: Aynasızlar)

Few of the terms Wikipedia lists are as sophisticated as that. Most are rather dull:
Hot Dogs
a Chinese term referring to stationary traffic cops and guards who are standing in the sun all day.
or:
Bängen
Swedish slang term for the police. Originally an old Swedish word for devil, from Romani Beng with the same meaning.

The Blue Comes Through

A few years ago I wrote a post about my first employers and their products (or, rather, one of them; I omitted to mention another of our best sellers, an ointment for piles: blind, bleeding, itching, ulcerated or protruding).

And we sold all round the world other equally effective remedies for a variety of distressing maladies. Our advertising, though perfectly honest, was colourful and convincing; inevitably, it evoked a great number of enquiries and it was one of my duties as Export Manager to respond to them.

Many were from West Africa. In those days none of them were of the kind which asked for my bank details so as to facilitate the transfer to me of huge sums of money; some were heartwarming expressions of gratitude for having relieved the writer's discomfort or worry and others asked for advice or a free sample. Most included lurid details of the writer's symptoms, and some of these had to be kept out of the sight of the junior office staff, for these were prudish times; nowadays, of course, they would be pinned up so that everyone could have a giggle.

In reply I used a number of different standard letters, all of them ethically impeccable, giving sound advice where this could do no harm and always recommending consulting a doctor. Sometimes I would add a non-committal sentence of comfort or re-assurance.

I still have a file of the most entertaining letters that I received. It was all rather a waste of time, really. It would have been easier, and perhaps kinder, to have had a few hundred standard replies ready-printed for use in most cases, simply saying:

Dear Sir
You have the pox.
Yours faithfully....