The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
A reesmoggish prorogue
It’s always been a fascination to me about how new words and phrases enter our eclectic, not to say mongrel, language. Many of us old pedants, myself included, frequently complain about what Professor Henry Higgins, in My Fair Lady, described as: “The cold-blooded murder of the English tongue” but, in reality, change and development are the lifeblood of any language, even if there are bits of it that make you cringe or shout at the telly.
Imports from other places and cultures are not fashionable at the moment but somehow they creep in and establish themselves in everyday use. Or almost, depending on the kind of conversations you have over the breakfast table.
Who, before 1979, in the general run of life in these airts, had ever heard of an ayatollah? And where would our contemporary cultural commentators be without “zeitgeist?”
Portmanteau words, ranging from “brunch“to “Brangelina” are now much to the fore as is (shudder) “verbing”. Which apparently applies to the habit of using nouns as verbs, particularly, it would appear, in sporting events. I give you “medalling” and “podiuming”. Or how about “To impact” or “To deplane?”
Then there are already-established words that have gone on to take new meanings. “Spam” to a certain generation meant a form of reconstituted luncheon meat into whose origins it was much wiser not to delve too deeply. To a newer bunch, it’s an even bigger load of rubbish. I always thought “woke” was the past tense of the verb “To wake” but current usage is “awareness of social justice issues” and is regularly applied to every action of
the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Politics, of course, is rich in this kind of source material, much of it deriving from the names of those who initially perpetrated actions which eventually spoke louder as words. Churchillian, Thatcherite, Hitlerian. Quisling and Gerrymandering. Filibustering actually comes from old piratical terminology but if it’s not a version of some politician’s monicker, it should be.
And our current crop? Johnson already has its own colloquial meaning, into which it is not right for a family newspaper to delve, even if the cap, if one might put it like that, does fit the present potential wearer only too well. And there is the odd new usage that hits the nail on the head. As in: “He’s made a right Grayling of that.” Or: “What a Farage!” Not to mention: “Gove over!”
Any road up, there we were, the Significant Other and I, doing our well-known and finely-honed impersonations of rock ’n’ roll rebels of a Sunday evening – ie sitting outside eating home-made lemon curd tarts and listening to Classic FM.
The theme to the original televised version of Evelyn Waugh literary classic Brideshead Revisited was announced. I made the fatal mistake of saying: “I love that. What a great series it was, too.”
The Other Half, who, despite being a former broadcast journalist, had little familiarity with the general oeuvre of Mr Waugh, even the aptly named Scoop! and whose connection to popular culture during the 1980s might best be described as tenuous, muttered: “What was it all about, then? Like Poldark, was it?” You can tell he’s a Peaky Blinders man.
I explained, as best I could, that it was set in a stately home and the University of Oxford, and was all about a family of wealthy English Catholics, soggy with nostalgia for the golden age of aristocratic superiority. And that a major character was a teddy bear called Aloysius.
I obviously wasn’t selling it to him. “Hmmm. Sounds a bit Rees-Moggish to me,” he said, darkly. And I couldn’t, when I thought about it, have put it better myself.
All we have to do when describing the events of 2016-2019 for future generations is say, with a certain edge to our tone: “Well, it all turned out a bit reesmoggish, really.”
A nostalgic fantasy of privilege and position based on perceived glories of the past, peopled with characters that never did and never could exist in any kind of reality familiar to the general run of common humanity? Got it in one, I’d say.
Well, what else did you expect?
So Boris & Co (I hesitate to call them the government) have decided to suspend Parliament so that MPs can’t do anything to prevent no-deal Brexit. In one of the languages of the continent they all seem to despise so much, quelle surprise. What can you expect, as my granny used to say, from a pig but a grunt? Given that even the most rampant supporters of leaving the EU seem to admit that any kind of Brexit is going to mean a worse deal than what we already have, the outlook seems to be not just: “How bad can it be?” but: “How bad can we get away with and still cling to power and money for ourselves?”
And why anyone should be the slightest bit taken aback by the notion of suspension, I cannot for the life of me imagine. Let’s face it, they’ve been hanging the rest of us out to dry for the past three years.
What can you expect, as my granny used to say, from a pig but a grunt?