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Hi, and here's a quick guide to some of the odder Britishisms and
national characteristics in the songs. I'm doing this mostly out of
gratitude to Tom Lehrer, Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter et al who unwittingly
provided me with insights, not discoverable elsewhere, into the American
psyche and vocabulary. It's only through them that I can identify
respectively: BBD's; a Babbit and a Bromide; and an Arrow collar.
Time to return the service, so…
THE BIRMINGHAM SONG
You'll gather that this is about regional rivalry - specifically,
our own north/south divide. Brummies see London and the south-east
as rich and effete. We ourselves, and the rest of England, are poor
but largely honest. However, if you look at a map, you'll see that
London and Birmingham are only a hundred or so miles apart. Say, an
hour and a half. Practically next door. (Geographically, Brits always
talk in terms of distance, Americans of time - our first minor disparity).
Whichever - this phenomenon needs some explanation…
Firstly, by U.S. standards, ours is a tiny and crowded country. Here's
a thing: were you to do us the honour of making England your fifty-first
State, we'd rank just twenty-eighth in size, right after li'l old
Alabama. But we'd have by far the most people. California currently
has your highest population, at twenty-six million. England has forty-seven
million, huddled together at five times California's population density.
From here, the U.S. looks effectually empty.
Within England - and remember, we've not even mentioned Ireland, Scotland
and Wales, which are even smaller yet much more vociferous about their
identities - anyway, in England, each minuscule region has its pride,
of course, but also its negative stereotype. Thus, Cockneys are vainglorious,
Westcountrymen are simpletons, East Anglians are incestuous, Brummies
are boring, Yorkshiremen are miserly, Scousers (from Liverpool) are
feckless kleptomaniacs, and Geordies (from Newcastle) are all of the
above but so poor that one can only laugh at them.
On a single summer's day, you could drive sedately in daylight through
all England's regions. Yet so distinct are they that, by accent alone,
any Englishman can place any other to within about forty miles.
As a matter of course, that Englishman would then tar his new acquaintance
with the appropriate regional brush. George Bernard (pronounced 'Buh-nud')
Shaw said, "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without
making some other Englishman hate or despise him." If you want proof
of that, listen to the very end of The Birmingham Song; the audience's
little cheer of solidarity reflects the fact that a vowel shift occurring
about an hour south of my home town is instantly recognisable in central
Scotland, up at the other end of Britain.
So, now we know why the people are laughing, let's continue today's
symposium with some of the song's vocabulary:
* Home Counties: a vile phrase, suggesting that only those counties
surrounding London - namely, Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire,
Hertfordshire and Essex - are truly English. Pah!
* Tory: a Conservative voter. Like a Republican, only a lot more so.
* The Daily Telegraph: our most right-wing daily broadsheet newspaper.
We don't have regional morning papers.
* (BBC) Radio 4: cosy, intellectual, speech-based, national radio
station. A typical programme title might be A Book at Bedtime, and
I didn't make that up. Radio 4 is widely regarded as the mouthpiece
of Little England, i.e. roughly, the Home Counties, q.v.
* Green Wellies: Wellington boots - gumboots, do you call them? -
should be black. Anything else is metropolitan affectation.
* Allotment: tiny piece of land, rented cheaply from the local council,
on which poor urban Northerners grow their own vegetables. Hence,
over-elaborate greenery decorating a…
* Pimm's (in full, "Pimm's Number 1 Cup"): pretentious summer cocktail,
drunk at toffs' outdoor gatherings such as Royal Ascot (racing), Glyndebourne
(opera), Henley (rowing) and Wimbledon (lawn tennis, but you knew
that).
FIRST KISS
E-mail me if any of these are already familiar, and I'll remove them.
* Calorgas: luxury camp cooking system
* Primus: old-fashioned paraffin (your 'kerosene') cooker.
* Standard Vanguard: a make of staid, old British saloon (sedan) car
(automobile). Sorry, this is getting rather silly.
* Van: small, closed truck.
* Knicks: h'mm, bit of a minefield here. Knicks is short and jokey
for knickers, which is what my mum ('mom') would have called those
items which American women now call 'panties', a word which we in
turn would consider inappropriately sexual for the kids' underwear
here described. 'Underpants' or, more likely, just 'pants' would be
our formal term, but of course, 'pants' are what you call 'trousers'
and moreover pants is now, among British youth, an adjective meaning
'dreadful; the pits'. And the word shorts in English English exclusively
means what you used to call 'kneepants', or indeed, 'knickers', so
that the line later in this song, "I looked up the leg of her shorts"
might not mean quite as much as you'd think, whereas "He'd seen down
Rebecca's knicks" may mean somewhat more. And I'm still not sure where
BBD's fit into all this. * Pussy willow: has absolutely no carnal
connotations over here. None. Do I make myself clear?
FAT JOHN
* Vegemite: a vegetarian version of Marmite, a kind of savoury spread
which one either adores or loathes. I love it. Actually, Marmite is
vegetarian as well but is always confused with Bovril which is very
similar, only made of cows.
THE WINE SONG
* Brut: cheap aftershave lotion.
* Lino: universal (except in Scotland) abbreviation for cheap linoleum
floor-covering.
BEARDED LADY
* Ian Bruce: big, beardy Scottish folk-singer, fine figure of a man
and an old chum of mine. The line is slightly ironic: try and imagine
a gay Billy Connolly. Actually, I've always wondered a little about
Billy, and after Pamela's book…
* Ian Botham: a cricketing hero. Big and occasionally bearded, 'Beefy'
Botham is the best all-rounder, i.e. batsman as well as bowler (most
players specialise), in English cricketing history. A he-man to the
last hyperactive facial follicle.
* Copydex: latex-based carpet adhesive.
MYSTERY STORY
Please lay off my sort-of-American accent. I've heard all the jokes,
and I take comfort from the fact that I can't possibly sound as bad
as Dick Van Dyke's Mockney in Mary Poppins. Thank you, let's get on…
* Hastings, Harold, Will: I'm never quite sure how much English history
Americans are taught, or of course even should be taught, but the
Battle of Hastings, 1066, is the only date that every British student
knows. King Harold of England was defeated on that day by William
the Conqueror of Normandy. And that, children, is the last time England
was invaded.
* "You didn't clock it": I know this idiom doesn't exist in American
English, and it annoys me now that I had to use it in an American
accent, no matter how phoney. But just you try and think of another
rhyme for 'pocket' in this context. And at least I said 'pants pocket'
and not 'trouser pocket'. Sorry anyway.
THE CAT SONG
All pretty straightforward, I think.
NEW MAN
* Plonker: a dork.
* Casablanca / …crank-a-bout it: you will have guessed, correctly,
that the apocopated rhyme here suggests another and cruder word. That
word is wanker and I wouldn't dream of telling you what it means.
If you know already, then this note is redundant and by definition
completely inoffensive.
* Cricket, googerlies: big topic, this. Cricket, needless to say,
is almost never played by women: they make the refreshments ('do the
teas'). Googerlies is a jocular corruption of googlies and if you
don't like sport ('sports'), you can skip the next section…
[Short digression on cricket…
Still here? Right. In cricket, a googly is a leg-spin bowler's disguised
off-break… You're still here..? O.K., here's exactly what that means.
Pay attention, this will take a little time…
You can think of cricket as being vaguely similar to baseball except
that: · it's played without catching gloves, although a catch is 'out',
same as in baseball
· the ball is rather bigger, heavier and harder, and aimed at three
sticks called 'stumps' or 'the wicket'. Hit these, and, again, the
batsman is out
· the batsmen run to and fro instead of round and round
· each batsman stays in batting and scoring runs for as long as he
is 'not out'. One man's good innings (not 'inning') can last, and
frequently does (not 'do' - it's singular), for several days. Believe
it.
That's enough differences for now - you get the general idea. The
reason that a bowler in cricket is called a bowler and not, say, a
'thrower' or, God forbid, a 'pitcher' is this: the bowler's arm
must remain straight throughout his delivery. He bowls 'off a
run-up' and 'overarm', the straight arm windmilling past his ear.
Think about that for a moment. Stand up and practice the action if
you like. Weird, isn't it? Now imagine aiming the ball at a target
twenty-two yards away, two feet high and ten inches wide. There's
a man standing in front of it with a bat four inches wide, held vertically.
You have to beat him with either the naked aggression or low cunning
of your delivery. The bowler who uses trickery rather than pace is
called a 'spinner' - and this seems the moment to introduce what I
think is actually the biggest difference between cricket and baseball.
In cricket, the ball bounces once before it reaches the batsman.
Thus, the bowler's control of the height and direction of the bounce
become critical. Now, as in baseball, the batsman stands sideways
on to the delivery, and the area of play to his left and behind him
is called, logically enough, 'the leg side' and to his right, 'the
off'. The reverse applies for left-handers. The 'leg-spin bowler',
using his wrist and/or fingers at the moment of release, makes the
ball veer to an unpredictable degree from leg to off after the bounce.
In Test and County (roughly, 'international' and 'Major League') matches
('games'), a spinner will bowl at about 50 m.p.h. A good pace bowler
might double that.
And so we come to it. The 'googly' is that delivery which, with
a conjuror's guile, the leg spinner makes turn the other way, i.e.
from off to leg.
Ideally, he does this without the batsman noticing before the bounce,
by which time it is too late for him to change his stroke. This, the
'unspottable googly', is the Holy Grail of slow bowling. To bowl someone
a bit of a googly has the same proverbial meaning as an American's
'throwing them a curve ball'. I could add that the left-handed leg-spinner's
googly (to a right-handed batsman, of course - bowled to the left-hander,
it's clearly no more than a left-handed googly) is called a Chinaman,
but that might be confusing.
End of cricketing digression.]
Back with us? Good.
* Michael Palin: ex-Monty Python star widely regarded as England's
Nicest Man.
* Bitter: archetypal, strong, brown English beer ('heavy' in Scotland),
served at room temperature. Yum, yum.
THE TRANSPLANT PATIENTS' ANTHEM
* Carling Black Label: mass-produced lager beer, similar to Budweiser.
A famous T.V. advertising campaign jokily attributed abnormal powers
to its drinkers, always with the tag line "I bet he drinks Carling
Black Label..."
* Highway Code: a booklet published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office
and detailing the rules of the road in this country. In a rather British
way, it is advisory and has no absolute legal force.
HOME BY ANOTHER WAY
An American song of course, but since I sing it in my own voice I've
very slightly changed the lyric in two places. English English only
ever treats 'sure' as an adjective, never an adverb, so 'they sure
enjoyed their stay' becomes 'they did enjoy their stay'. And we don't
say 'I figure that…' or 'I guess that..', but only ever 'I think that…'
I could have gone on because, for example, 'it's a lead pipe cinch',
'figure' as a transitive verb (we'd say 'figure out') and 'cut a deal'
don't yet exist as mainstream idioms over here. But enough, already.
Which, as it happens, is another phrase we don't use. |
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