This week we will start with Boris Johnson, and finish with a linguistic analysis of 1980s sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo.
I keep telling myself I will not let the English language mistakes I see every day get under my skin. But then I come across something so monumentally, staggeringly, ridiculously stupid that I feel I must complain.
The English language is full of idioms, aphorisms, proverbs, adages, catchphrases, epigrams, and other memorable sayings that we all scatter through our speech.
I love them, I truly do. They give the language colour and interest. Many are very clever, apt and amusing.
The only bad thing about them is that they are sometimes ridiculously misquoted. The latest blockheaded blunder that irked, ired, and inflamed was in a complaint about that young Boris Johnson chap.
The statement was that the prime minister and his chums in government couldn’t appreciate the problems of the working man because: “they are all old Estonians”.
Estonia. That famous public school.
How could anyone with even the loosest grasp of current events, the English language, or their own sanity, make an error of such abject thickwiterry?
I shouldn’t laugh, but sometimes I can’t help it when I hear: the model of the story, not the moral of the story, or see the route of all evil instead of the root of all evil. Nip it in the butt instead of nip it in the bud.
You don’t have to look far to find further examples. A stirling job instead of a sterling job. Pass mustard instead of pass muster. Deep-seeded when deep-seated is intended. Tender hooks instead of tenterhooks. The last chance salon instead of saloon.
Case and point instead of case in point. For all intensive purposes when intents and purposes is meant. Made a scrapegoat instead of scapegoat – I have also seen “made an escape goat”.
It’s like English, but a strange version used by people who can’t actually speak the language.
I’m reminded of the English airman posing as a French policeman in ‘Allo ‘Allo, whose recurring comedy raison d’etre was he thought he could speak French, but amusingly mispronounced words and mixed up phrases.
We are surrounded by people just like that. They think they can speak English but routinely get basic words and phrases hilariously wrong.
The ‘Allo ‘Allo character was played by Arthur Bostrom, who published a book titled Good Moaning France: Officer Crabtree’s Fronch Phrose Berk, in which he attempted to teach people to speak the “Fronch longwodge”.
I’d suggest he brings out an English version.
Word of the week
Pinguid (adjective)
Full of fat, or resembling fat or grease. EG: “The pinguid brain of one who thinks Estonia is a public school for boys.”
Read the latest Oh my word! every Saturday in The Courier. Contact me at sfinan@dctmedia.co.uk
