is the English! I love the way of the English with their language. I will, from time to time, watch Prime Ministers time and admire the way the PM goes back and forth with the members of the House of Commons. Things get heated but, unless you are paying attention, never seem to get terribly ugly. A combative politician in the UK once said of a mild-mannered opponent that being attacked by him “as like being savaged by a dead sheep”. Imagine if that same language was “Americanized” and, further, imagine that someone in America said it. The firestorm would be incredible.
There is an article in The Economist this week that discusses the likely reaction of Britons to the looming financial crisis as compared to earlier financial panics. In the rocky times following WWII, the government was handing out, as a food ration, a type of fish called snoek. Rather than saying “This fish tastes like hell!”, one columnist remarked that snoek “tastes like mackerel, only more so”.
Another of my favorites, usually credited to Winston Churchill, shows how much fun the Brits can have with their language. For example: in response to a memo issued by a civil servant, objecting to the ending of a sentence with a preposition and the use of a dangling participle in official documents, Churchill red pencilled in the margin: “This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put.”
Overall, I am partial to the American version of English but it is interesting to see what goes on over the pond….