Technophobia 14

Save your document every five minutes. Put all the files on your desktop into a folder, and move it to your hard disk. Now you can back up in the Cloud. Bookmark all your tabs and close your tabs. Curate your Facebook feed. Those are not "straight quotes", they are inch and foot marks. Set Word to use curly quotes. Now automate your job out of existence... There'll be a youtube video – or ask @Grok!

PROBLEM BETWEEN CHAIR AND DESK

Someone on Twitter complained about red lines in Word tell him that "color" is wrong. I told him he can select a UK dictionary.

Gen X survived “Microsoft Word has encountered an error and needs to close” as we watched our term papers vanish into thin air at 1 am. (Save every 5 minus.)

Bloody power went out just as I was saving. Lost the whole story. (@Gnerphk. Save every 5 mins. Save in the Cloud.)

In my first sales position, my manager was the Chief Revenue Officer. He didn’t know how to use Powerpoint, barely understood Gmail, and spent most of his day materializing behind other people to ask them what they were doing. (@cartoonshateher. She’s good on jobs where you have a highfalutin’ title but no actual function.)

I don’t think there should be an ‘algorithm.’ People should follow what they want and see what they get. (@FischerKing6. And could we have a chronological timeline?)

@WilshireTony is told about the Following tab: All the time I’ve been using this & I hadn’t cotton on to that…

It’s 2025 and Matt Walsh has just discovered the Mute button in Twitter!
It’s January 2025 and I’ve just told someone how to block words on Twitter.
It’s February 2025 and I’ve just told someone to switch to “Following” if they want to pick what they see and see only that.

Just found the unsubscribe button on emails – changed my life. (@Rylan)
(Many replies saying “Wow! Where is it?”) 

My phone pings all the time so I don’t bother to look at it.
(Turn notifications off. I have turned them off and now people moan that I’m unavailable.)   

Them: But I don’t see the POINT of Twitter. Can you explain it?
Us: [We explain Twitter at great length.]
Them: But I don’t see the POINT of Twitter.

Them: But you can do all that with the mouse!
Me: But it's quicker to use keyboard shortcuts – if you can touchtype.

The wife of a cranky poet who lives in the Midwest contacted me to ask if I would write a letter to her husband since he disdains email. Obviously the wife takes care of everything that is required to live in 2025 while the husband saunters along cheerfully in a bygone era knowing that his spouse will protect him. (@JoyceCarolOates. Another complained that their inlaws never got any kind of computer and now can’t do anything. Somebody has to order their food for them and make their medical appointments.)

Rubio orders State Dept to remove Colibri and revert to Times New Roman. Latter being far more legible and economical, it’s the wisest policy so far by Trump admin. (@leemakiyama)

My recollection at DoD is that the default Word font changed to Calibri around 2021, so everyone just started using that. It wasn’t a conscious choice. (@Brett_327)

[A long thread follows claiming that Times is harder to read than Calibri for dyslexics and the visually impaired. The Republicans just want to be cruel – it’s their entire policy! The font is Calibri, the cigarette lighter Colibri.]

I was sent on a shorthand course in 1993 so guys could dictate their emails for me to type. (@Enilorac999)

Had [a job where I did nothing] for about 3 years and it was heaven until someone on high finally decided to crunch numbers...they just moved me over a department and now I have to maintain a few dashboards and lead a quarterly meeting. Still not a real job but I'll take their money. (@coluim_mael)

Someone on Twitter: I’m not seeing anything from people I follow!
Me: Switch to “Following”.
Him: Thanks, I’ll try that.


Someone asked how he could access my blog. The link was after my signature on every email.

If you feel like you're bad at your job and it's making you depressed, just consider that, as the investigation of the recent heist revealed, the password to access the Louvre's videosurveillance system was "Louvre". (@phl43)

The entire Louvre security camera system was protected by the password “Louvre”. The museum was also running software from 2003 that hadn’t received security updates for years. (@visegrad24)

I had a job that was basically filling out seven massive spreadsheets with data that was 85% common between all the spreadsheets. I created a linked spreadsheet and input the data once and cut the job time down to pretty much nothing. I didn't tell anyone and eventually left due to boredom. The person who took the job over went back to the "old way" because they couldn't figure out how to maintain my linked spreadsheet. (@Abe_Froman2)

Yup. I got hired as a 'secretary' by a non profit. The main task was managing the database and sending out membership renewal packages. The lady before me edited the letter, membership card, and sticker for the envelope individually. The first day there I set up a mailing list, set up an export to excel from the database, and had her full-time job down to 1 hour of work a week (stuffing envelopes). AND I saved them money by using envelopes with a window and just formatting the letter so the address field would show. I did that job for 2 years. Pay wasn't great, boss was a jerk, but I was basically doing nothing. Answering the phone was easy, and pretending to work while my boss was in the office. I ended up quitting because the boss had started to blame me for her own screw-ups and it was only a matter of time before she killed a computer and fired me for it. (@Librarycat77)

My friend got hired to work from home for a company that was transitioning from some ancient business software that hadn't been supported in years to a newer system. They had previously been doing this manually, record by record and assumed that she would do the same. They'd send her enough records to keep her busy for a week doing them manually. She did it manually for a couple of weeks, then she automated the process and a week's worth of records was completed in less than 30 seconds on Monday morning with the results uploaded Friday afternoon. She did NOT inform her employer who was super happy with her accurate and timely work. She worked ~2 minutes/week for a full-time salary because she automated her job. (@DLS3141)

I’ve sent three emails in my life, and my wife, Barbara, has typed two of them. (Ringo Starr)

In the past, some managers had all their emails printed, organized and put into binders to read and review. (@fvntsplssvn)

When a publication I worked for acquired Macs instead of terminals, some staff thought they were terminals and didn’t know you could save stuff locally and use them as your own personal computer. And when we got email they “replied all” instead of just “replying” for about a week, creating a terrible tangle of furious miscommunication. 

An innovation joins our lives. Most people pick it up and use it and find it more and more useful. About 10 years in, a group of middle class parents get all guilty about it, and try to reduce their and their children’s screen time, and write jeremiads in the paper and online about how evil it is. Even whole books! And of course it “rewires our children’s brains”.

“TV is evil and destroys your children’s eyesight” has morphed seamlessly into “Peppa Pig gives your children dopamine hits and they get addicted and it’s just passive entertainment”. Like books? I used to get told off for reading all the time.

And if you find spam emails waste time, mark them as spam. Unsubscribe from any firm you've bought anything from – and which now bombards you with marketing emails. If you don't know how to do any of this, you could hire somebody to filter your emails and select the ones you need to see. You could call them a "secretary".

TECHNOLOGY – DONCHA LOVE IT? 
This also comes under "overdigitisation".

Struggled with this wireless mouse for months before it occurred to me to change the tracking speed...

It's nearly 2026 and printers are still requiring the colour cartridges to be available to print in black only. What the hell? (@jaseeey)

I once went to a Chipotle who told me at the register that they could only accept orders via the app, I guess because the register was broken? They could not accept any cash or payment from me in person, I needed to step aside, download the app, then order with it. I just left. (@JasonKPargin)

They had those checkerboard code menus. I’m a 76-year-old man. I’m trying to eat a cheeseburger while I have time left on this earth, not deal with that nonsense.

I once broke a bank receptionist's brain because i showed up for an appointment and couldn't check in for it with the qr code because my phone's camera was shattered. he didn't know what to do. i asked him to just go let the lady know i was there. he said that wasn't possible. (@veanimator)

I consider myself a pretty reasonable person but whoever invented the feature that opens Outlook when you click on an email address in your web browser needs to be sent to mow lawns on the Sun. (@VeryBadLlama)

Afternoon spent as predicted on the phone to Companies House: I finally got through to learn that no, they don't really know how their new software works, they can't get into it, the Post Office probably cocked up our identity verification but they're not sure, and we need to do it again, at a cost of £35 each via a law firm. I phoned a firm in Bristol and they confirmed that they are, in fact, making a small fortune dealing with people who have failed to get through the government's software. (LW)

I have just got a new copy of Word and if I change the view or the type size in ONE document it makes the same change in ALL OF THEM. Every time I open a doc I have to adjust the size and view. Searched for an override, no such luck. (2025. And I can’t “tile” pages, it shows them in a line.)

There was a tipping point where everything was now maximised for phones, not laptops or heaven forbid desktops. Now the thing doesn't work on the laptop – or you have to break off and take a picture of yourself on your phone and transmit it to the app you're not using and... Looking at you, lexulous.com.

Why does my phone's ring tone start quietly? Takes several rings for me to hear it. Then I have to unzip the pocket in my handbag and take the phone out without hanging up by mistake. And then the other party hangs up. Apparently you can deselect Ascending or Crescendo but I can’t see how.

My clock radio does the same. If I set it so I wake up with the news I just hear whisper whisper burble burble Donald Trump mumble...

And another thing about clock radios. Every one I've had. The numbers gradually fade - to black. And I have to turn on the radio to see the time. Grok says that the numbers just age. So you have to throw out a perfectly good working clock just to get one whose numbers you can see.

Q How do you take a screenshot on the new iPhones without home buttons short answer?
A Press the Side button and the Volume Up button at the same time. 

“These are our default settings. You may change them at any time if you spend 400 hours looking through our Baroque menu system.” (@Klassical_Kat)

I have just wandered round St Alban’s in the dark looking for the station. Thank you for the map, Google Maps, but WHERE AM I? It thinks I am a car which is infuriating. (You twiddle a setting NOT IN THE ACTUAL APP but in “Apps”.) 

At the moment, aircon can’t be installed in new buildings because “not everybody can afford it”. (Though they use more pompous language.)

Why is everyone using WhatsApp when Android phones have a perfectly good texting service? Perhaps because in WA they can have group chats.

When Google and other search engines arose, we were promised "Ask it anything in natural language".
To get any meaningful results you had to use Boolean logic. My idea of fun, but not most people's. Now we have Grok - what Google was billed to be 20 or 30 years ago. (And some are convinced Grok is part of a conspiracy to spread fake news.)

The outrage and foot-dragging when people got home answering machines was... typically British. Mine used to say "Please leave your number SLOWLY" and people would enunciate their number and then sneer "Was that slow enough?" Usually: Call me at gabble mumble mumble gabble, drops voice.

More here and links to the rest. 

Inspirational Mantras about Bullying 109

Don't forget, bullies are cowards, just ignore them, they tease you because they like you and violence never solved anything.

It takes a long time to believe something like that’s actually happening to you. You think things’ll change, get better.’... Being with C sort of sapped my will... With my first wife it didn’t matter – she loved me, she gave me confidence, and we had lots of friends, we were fine. I just didn’t know how to cope with someone like C. She isolated us as a couple . . . one by one, stopped me seeing all my friends, everyone I’d known before I met her. It got horribly claustrophobic... She spent her time criticising and getting at me. (A Reconstructed Corpse, Simon Brett)

The insidious nature of domestic abuse also plays its part. “It can build up gradually. It takes a while to acknowledge that you are being abused … because it’s become so normal.” “It’s impossible to work with [child on parent violence] by adjusting your behaviour, filling out a worksheet or trying to lay down boundaries. That sort of thing is not going to work if someone has lived under siege for a couple of years.” (Guardian 2018) 

Many families shrug off unacceptable behaviour with the approach, “Oh, that’s just the way Ethel is,” and the object of the ire is just expected to take it. (Dear Prudie, slate.com)
 
Things changed once I became the successful one. The more I achieved, the worse his behaviour became. (Sydney Morning Herald on domestic abuse)

Emotional abuse leaves life-long scars. (@SilkeMeyer_DFV Some of us bear for ever the imprint of someone's thumb. Nancy Banks-Smith)

What’s at stake isn’t their internal emotional state but how they’re treating your fiancée. (Dear Prudie, slate.com)

Bullies get worse as time goes on. (@TheRoyalButler)

I would say that the college training was very lousy, and I don’t think that people learn by being invalidated...  Acting teachers... seem to think that beating up their students and invalidating them will make them better, which I think is completely wrong. And at that age, you don’t realize that this sick person is really projecting all their neurosis onto you, you think that you’re the one who’s damaged...  AK would not validate and would not allow. I think she had favourites, and you could never figure out why you weren’t a favourite, and it never made any sense. The thing you have to remember is that if a person is making you feel bad about yourself, that person is going to be in his or her own world. They are lost in their own universe. (Karen Black on acting school)

“Bullying is a complex symbiotic relationship” is a posh way of saying it's the victim's fault again.

People make the mistake of assuming that resistance to bad things is produced by being subjected to the badness one is supposed to resist. (WUR)

Marie Antoinette apparently had one shoulder slightly higher than the other – with an emphasis on the apparently, since nobody seems to have noticed it except for her mother, the Habsburg Empress Maria-Theresa, who demanded her daughter be strapped into a corrective corset that she probably did not need, and peppered her letters with bullying commentary on the alleged shoulder incline. (Times) 

Former Boy Scout Mails 500 Pieces Of Garbage To Boy Scout Bullies Among other things, the packages contained old tea leaves, underwear, and dirt. (Atlas Obscura. Revenge only hurts the avenger blah blah.)

You sided with a bully... and that is something I will never forget. So, no, you and I won’t be “coming together” to move forward or whatever. (FB)

The education secretary’s adviser on behaviour has revealed that he was bullied at secondary school. Tom Bennett... said that he had suffered “discreet” bullying for years... “It lasted for years and the teachers never knew a thing. The odd thing was, neither did I. It was perfectly usual to sit in a lesson and be passed notes telling me what a wanker I was... Never was I actually punched in the head or anything. I think that’s why I never spotted the clues. It lasted until late in my school career, when I started to push back.” His experience taught him that adults could be unaware of bullying and that he had been right to react.

A study of twins concludes that bullying has genuine causal effects on mental health. (Who’da thought it, eh?)

Bullying isn’t simply an affective state of a victim. (‏@isacsohn, 2016 You can’t have a victim without a perpetrator.)

"I'm being bullied" is now an early, loud complaint of all bullies. (@WillWiles, 2016)

The view from Oz PM Malcolm Turnbull was that Donald Trump is a bully and to confront a bully, you need to bully back. (What happened to “just ignore them and they’ll go away” or “respond to Trump with calm”?)

Bette Davis took out all of her insecurities, as is often the cliché, on everyone within firing distance. (goodreads.com Oh yes, bullies are just insecure, and “take it out” on others. So that’s OK, then.)

Ridicule is dominance marking behavior. (@RuffyanMe, 2017 Sticks and stones; they tease you because they like you.)

Following years of bullying from my peers for being clumsy, I still struggle to trust people. (Refinery29.uk)

"Grow thick skin" is what abusive men say to get away with their abuse. (@Nouronal)

As I grew taller and older, she ceased bullying me – even attempted some sort of rapprochement. (Falling, Elizabeth Jane Howard) 

As my brothers got bigger, my bullying father then focused on me. (slate.com)

No-one told T that the kid who repeatedly bullied him and tore his clothes 'secretly liked' him (T eventually stuffed his head down a grating, which didn't mean T secretly liked him either). (LW) 

Rather than firing or talking directly with members of staff he didn’t like but had somehow acquired, he froze them out – a slow torture for the victim. (London Review of Books, 2016 on David Astor)

Mom mocks my crying by putting on a demented baby voice. (Dear Prudie, slate.com)
 
My husband was an early bloomer, and hit six feet tall long before other kids his age hit their growth spurts. Some short bully with a Napoleon complex made a project of tormenting him... until one day, in front of class, M just turned around, picked him up, and DROPPED him. Guess who never bugged him again? (@Iron_Spike)

I've often read how horribly director John Ford treated people. I've also often thought that someone should've given him a punch on the nose! (KMB)

More here, and links to the rest.

Inspirational Mantras 108

Comedian Robin Ince, on po-faced academic study of low culture: There is something far more joyous in scrutinising low-brow culture than in examining the high-brow. The incongruous mix of writing about post-Freudian analysis within the context of oedipal mother worship when it concerns Jess Franco’s Bare-Breasted Countess is so much more entertaining than reading another academic analysing TS Eliot’s The Waste Land...  Necronomicon magazine included Deep Throat: Pornography as Primitive Pleasure and Marco Ferreri: Sadean Cinema of Excess. I’d just watch the films if I was you, or read a book about string theory. (From The Bad Book Club.)

Frankly, there are things in Narnia which are nothing to do with religion. They are to do with being out of date. As with Tolkien, there are ideas there which haven't yet faded sufficiently into the past to become valuable antiques. (Guy Kewney)

I never ever ever ever ever want to live in a boarding house -- and by logical extension in one of those stupid hippie commune houses where everyone pools their money from their jobs at the incense store and grows vegetables using refortified, sustainable, organic faeces and then gets into a fist fight about who gets to eat the last Pop Tart because there's no individual property (and because modern 'hippies' are really, really dumb). (Goodreads review)

Hippies in suits are the worst kind of hippies. (@grodaeu)

It is a sort of acknowledgment of God, just in case there happens to be one. (Stanley Green, the "protein man" of Oxford Street, of his nightly prayer.)

There should be nothing easy about scepticism. It’s not about pointing and laughing at people who believe crystals are magic. It’s about challenging ideas that may be deeply embedded in our society and causing real harm to real lives. (@lecanardnoir)

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States... nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge". (Isaac Asimov)

Telling me you’ve done a course doesn’t cut it in the grown-up world. (Simon Myerson KC)

Most family memories do eventually end up for sale in secondhand stores, or moldering in garages, or eventually thrown away. (Danny Lavery, slate.com)

We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself. (@ProfBrianCox)

In America, amateur costuming is a rite of passage. (William Lee Adams)

A moral injunction can't simultaneously be compulsory and optional. (Philosopher Ben Colburn paraphrasing Tolkein.)

Somehow, strange old shoe-repairers and run-down hardware shops that seem to have almost no customers survive when others go down. I think it likely they are run by visitors from another dimension... (Fin Fahey about the shop on Newington Green)

More here, and links to the rest.

Nice Reviews

Those nice people at the Clothes in Books blog (highly recommended) like my first book, Witch Way Now? (Followed by Witch Way To...?, We Three and The Fourth Door, all available at Amazon.)

Here's what they said:

JanW: Lucy Fisher's Witch Way Now? For me, one of the best books on late 60s teenage girl life.  

Clothes in Books (Moira Redmond): totally agree about Lucy's book, it is marvellous... We met online because I read her review of a book and loved it so much that I contacted her to do a guest blog. (I think it was on Elfrida Vipont's The Lark on the Wing.)

Here's Moira's original review (I did mention clothes a lot). 

Received Ideas in Quotes 40

The Emperor is naked, there is no Santa Claus, I don’t believe in fairies and I loathe Big Brother.

There are no guidelines. It is perfectly ethical to ringfence parts of the discourse. There is no “evidence based” set of current ideas. There’s an official set. You can say anything apart from “human beings can’t change sex”. 

All minorities have a voice, everybody has a voice – apart from them, them and them. This is not contradictory. 

Optimism is official. You can’t say “Well, it never worked for me”, it’s so rude. Whatever group you belong to, you must shut up.

Optimism must not be contradicted because we need to give everybody hope. Ideas are tested on the probable outcomes of believing them. 

And Mark Twain invented the expandable bra strap. (It looks like he did, too.)


Medieval people regularly cleaned their mattresses, they actively combated fleas and were terrified of bad smells so did everything to  avoid them.

They had pillows. Blankets were washed more than once a year.
Livestock didn't live in the same room as the people, they lived behind partitions.
If you survived childhood you had a good chance of living into your 60s, 22 wasn't really middle-aged. Thatched roofs keep rain out very well.
They had curtains, especially around beds.
They had toilets, outhouses, seats over cesspits, not just buckets.
And no, they didn't toss it into the street.
There were strict laws against it and people had noses, they didn't want that filth in their streets.
There's no evidence for 'gardlyloo' till long after the middle ages.
Its not French for watch out below.
Streets weren't really open sewers.
They had gutters that were for liquid waste like grey water only. 
Public latrines were very common.
@fakehistoryhunt


New ideas are in fact a change in the brain. (@tathtrod)

Monet’s Poplars series almost didn’t happen because the trees were about to be cut down. So he purchased them until he finished painting, then sold them back. (@artistmonet. He had the train schedules changed so that he could paint them, too.)

Perhaps only great men have destinies. (Said a philosophy professor to me once.)

I keep saying the Bible not only has books missing but King James rewrote it in several versions for financial gain. The Vatican is responsible for so much of this evil. They just changed things to fit their narrative of dominance over humanity. (@PeggyDodson)

My English teacher in secondary school was Jewish. She told my class that when her dad came to England he didn't speak English very well, all he could day was I am a free man, so they recorded his last name as Freeman. (@Trixie696775)

The Three Wise Men of Gotham were feigning madness to avoid taxes. (Weren't there some long-sought Mafiosi who feigned Alzheimer's to avoid recognition?)

Reminds me of the apocryphal story of Bazalgette building London's sewers. He did all the maths to work out flow rates and required pipe sizes based on population size, then thought "hang on, we only get one chance to dig all this up". So he doubled every single diameter. (@GazTheJourno)

Archaeologists have found a real treasure: a medieval toy production site! Quite touching and another reminder that the old idea of medieval children being treated as adults and not having a childhood is nonsense. (@fakehistoryhunt. That was middle-class, mid 20th century children.)

Many people falsely believe that we all begin life as females, before hormones transform some of us into males. But the past few decades of genetics and embryology have debunked this. (@zaelefty)
 
William Holden, the lad just signed for the coveted lead in 'Golden Boy' (1939), used to be Bill Beadle. And here is how he obtained his new movie tag. On the Columbia lot is an assistant director and scout named Harold Winston. Not long ago he was divorced from the actress, Gloria Holden, but carried the torch after the marital rift. Winston was one of those who discovered the 'Golden Boy' newcomer and who renamed him—in honor of his former spouse! (George Ross of Billboard magazine, according to IMDb/Wikipedia. When it's common knowledge stars have changed their names, the studio's PR department puts out an origin story.)

Jeanette Helen Morrison said on TCM that Van Johnson was responsible for her stage name. While they were filming The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947), he suggested she shorten her first name to Janet. He also thought that, since the film they were doing was a Civil War drama, Lee would go well as her last name. But then he suggested she spell it Leigh. (Via FB)

I have been told that when standard Lithuanian was formulated in the 19th century they purposely archaized it. (@razibkhan)

Ever immigrant to this country is here at our discretion. They are privileged to be able to live here. They have no right to, and our discretion can be waived whenever we want for whatever reason we want. (@reggiedunlopno4. There is no two-tier citizenship.)

Our local department store used to have ‘men only’ evenings before Christmas & Valentine’s Day when they could go and buy lingerie as gifts for the lady in their lives. One employee told me about 90% of it was returned by said ladies after the day. (@Dearkens.

In Tuvan language, spoken in the Republic of Tuva located northwest of Mongolia, the terms 'songgaar' (going back/future) and 'burungaar' (moving forward/past) suggest a unique perspective: the past is perceived as being ahead of them, while the future is seen as behind. (@FedeItaliano76. This either shows that we are advanced and enlightened now, or that the tribes know a thing or two and we should copy them.)

In schools, history teachers teach that the Catholic Church is bad because it hid the Bible for a long time. (@profSPedro)

Reality is what we make of it, how we interact with others, and how they react to us. There is no one singular way to exist in the world. (@rejserin)

We were talking about age gaps in marriages in the olden days. @Ingold321 has an answer: Rome-focus (their soldiers had huge age gaps because the military forbade marriage while enlisted), aristocracies, and the desire to present our own time as more enlightened in all ways likely extended the reach of the myth.

@ContraireSous adds that we’re looking at Roman society because “that’s the culture that ushered in monogamy”.

Couples have basically always been within 5 years of age. Some people genuinely believe age gaps were all like 15 years until 1970. (@CartoonsHateHer)

Why do judges break their pen after a death sentence? (@ChrisEjiofor5. Others add: Goes back to the Mughal era, “The pen just signed someone’s fate, it can’t be used again.”) 

My in-laws, for their entire lives, believed that if you get sunburnt you should rinse it with HOT water, in order to open your pores and allow the radiation to escape from your skin. They taught their children this. Imagine my husband’s relief when I told him this was insane. (@Katherine111594)

I grew up in a house like this.  Don't use ice in your drink, you'll get a sore throat. Imagine my surprise at how good ice cold water tastes when my husband debunked that myth. (@kellercre8s. It used to be that ice in your drink in the tropics would give you diarrhoea – possibly because the ice cubes were made with unboiled water.)

Ivy-leaved toadflax growing on an Oxford wall. Its 17th century name was ‘Oxford ivy' or 'Oxford weed’ because it was thought to have arrived from Italy via the packaging of a marble statue destined for an Oxford college garden. (@beatricegroves1)

The phrase ‘to wing it’ as in ‘to improvise’ comes from 19th-century theatrical slang where it meant ‘to study a part in the wings having undertaken it at short notice’. (@qikipedia)

For non-southerners, the Southern accent can be perceived as uneducated or “bad” English. Actually the Southern accent comes directly from British Received Pronunciation and aristocratic society. (Lingoda.com. The only thing the two accents have in common is non-rhotacism – posh Brits don't roll their Rs.)

Type was thrown into the Thames by apprentice compositors from the London School of Printing. Too lazy to distribute, or 'dis' the type back into the typecase, it was put in your pocket and dropped in the Thames from the nearest bridge. (Peter Stephens. Wouldn’t they eventually run out of type? Another theory: it was thrown down the drain. In reality, one of the creators of Doves type refused to share it with his partner, and threw it all into the Thames near Chiswick. Mudlarkers have been retrieving it ever since.)

A whelm is a wooden drain pipe, a hollowed out tree, whelmed down or turned with the concavity downwards to form an arched watercourse. It is where the words ‘underwhelmed’ and ‘overwhelmed’ come from. Lara Maiklem (Dictionary says it means "overturned".) 

I think it is more accurate to say a Votes for Women was won despite civil disobedience. The suffragists managed, during the Great War, to win back a lot of support lost by the suffragettes during their 1900s and 1910s campaign. (@WalkerMarcus)

Part brass rags: This expression is explained in W.P. Drury’s short story the Tadpole of an Archangel (1898): When sailors desire to prove the brotherly love... with which each inspires the other, it is their custom to keep their brasswork cleaning rags in a joint ragbag. But should relations become strained, the bag owner casts forth upon the deck his sometime brother’s rags; and with the parting of the brass rags hostilities begin. (19th century nautical slang)

I love this grafter (Lothrop Stoddard). He's the one who made up the whole "Africans have no word for maintenance in any of their 3,000 languages. (@RonBabylon. Stoddard was an influential racist in the early 20th century.) 

Trivia fact: in the Middle Ages women got married in red. When Anne of Brittany married the King of France she wore a white dress because white is the colour of Brittany. It became a trend because France was already the cultural trendsetter for the world.  (@pegobry_en)

I was always told “You are a Ship of Theseus, all your cells get replaced, you are an information pattern wave through matter”. Today I learned that most of your conscious brain is in fact the same set of neurons you were born with, aging with you for life, ditto heart and eyes. (@liron)

Robert Tombs said that Victorian Britain became the world's first urban nation, clearly forgetting that something preposterous like 80% of Early Dynastic Sumer's population lived in cities. (Basedwagnerite)

Freakonomics (2005) talked about baby naming and links to socioeconomics. They described new names like Oranjello and Lemonjello (pronounced le-MON-juh-lo and or-ON-juh-lo), but had to make a correction in subsequent editions because these turned out to be urban legends. (@paulmidler)

Before the invention of the lightning conductor, bell-ringers, including monks, were often struck by lightning while ringing bells in church towers. This happened because churches were the tallest structures in a village and also because the metal bells themselves attracted lightning. There was a widespread belief that ringing church bells could ward off lightning, making bell-ringing a particularly dangerous practice. (Google)

I’ve just been told that underneath San Francisco there’s an underground roller coaster. Apparently it takes 45 minutes to get through security and sets of multiple doors. (@TylerAlterman)

More here, and links to the rest.
 

Syndromes 6: Games People Play

Get simply furious because a group or a person won’t do XYZ spontaneously without being told. At the same time you don't tell them to do the thing, or explain how to do the thing, or draw up a rota, or have a meeting... But then they’d do the thing and there’d be no need for the incandescent fury, which gives you an excuse to be perfectly vile to the group or person.

Annoying neighbour, on the first day of the Iron Age: "Of course we switched from bronze over a year ago, I made DH throw it all in the midden!" (@IanBlandThatsMe)

You’re early for your train so you force your friend to rush across the station, holding a spilling cup of coffee, while you twinkle at station staff to let you through the barrier and catch the previous train. You both make it, but at what cost? You are thrilled because you have beaten the clock and much else, once again. 

You detain a friend, promising to drive her to the station, tell her she'll have plenty of time for her shopping. You don’t even give her five minutes, and she misses her next appointment. 

If she manages to drag you round the shops while she looks for presents for children, resent the time spent, and suggest rather nasty, kitsch objects she might buy.

Drag your friend round the shops and give her no time to look for what SHE wants. Part of this ploy may be that you want to keep her from visiting the wrong shops, which you’re sure she’ll do if you’re not there to stop her. 

Seek out someone who will believe you when you tell them that everything they do and say is wrong. And everything they post or tweet!

“You don’t need to belittle me, let me do that for you and save you the trouble!” Never works. What to do instead? Don’t be self-deprecating. Don’t make excuses, either, or give justifications. Wait for the belittling to pass with a blank expression but a very slight air of impatience? Pretty soon get up and go home.

In a meeting last week I made a joke about someone being like Columbo. In today's meeting my joke was told back to me like it was theirs. I pretended I didn't get it so they had to explain. Turns out they don't know who Columbo is. (@deathofbuckley)

A instructs B to tell a string of lies to C, for no good reason. It’s just a way for A to establish control over B. A gets B to spy on C and report back.

Make them pay, pay and pay again for some minor infringement. Or for a favour you are going to do them – but you never get round to it.

Lean on me so I can step aside and let you fall.

More unspeakable nastiness here, and links to the rest.

Contradictions 14

Jenrick says 'it's not about the colour of people's skin'. It's just that he didn't see a single white face. That's not even logically coherent. (@David__Osland)

Tragic protagonists are funny because you have Oedipus who does everything in his power to avoid the fate which has unfortunately already been written for him but then you also have Orestes who is joining the war on generational curses on the side of the generational curses. (@corduroycleric)

Never forget: women can't know for sure they're women unless they've had their chromosomes checked, but if a man says he's a woman he's definitely a woman and it is highly offensive to mention his chromosomes, which are entirely irrelevant to whether or not a person is a woman. (@jk_rowling)

TRAs: ‘Trans’ women (men) ARE women and no-one can tell the difference you bigot
Also TRAs: You (a woman) look like a ‘trans’ woman (man). HA HA I am insulting you. HA HA. I am very smart. (@WomensSocIre)

When you're young and getting pregnant usually isn't wise, you're always told how easily done it is and how careful you have to be. When you're actively trying and openly doing so, people will remind you how hard it is and that it usually takes time. Which one is it? (@anon_opin)

Traditional men can’t seem to decide whether women are lazy golddiggers for depending on men for money, or good women for not working and letting men provide. (@ulxma)

There’s this huge disconnect of universities which have ‘trigger warnings’ for Shakespeare and yet allow naked antisemitism to thrive. @nicolelampert

It's extremely funny you'd have the gall to talk about personal liberties in a post declaring that from now on any writer that works for you will parrot exactly the opinion you want... (@MattPolProf. Jeff Bezos, Washington Post)

The person talking about words making people feel unsafe then slags white men off for "fragilities"? How odd. (@rosykaren)

 I do not understand Progressives uncritically supporting the Palestinians who deny equal rights for Women and criminalise homosexuality. (@ThomasDierson)

I love how they claim there are only about 10 gender-critical people in the world and/or everyone is a 'Bot' while simultaneously making massive lists of 'transphobes'. (@OslerMarc)

Why, when people who claim a synthetic sex identity want to pee, there is only a handful of them going about their lives who are no threat, yet when anyone speaks about the harms of the ideology, there are vast swaths of them being murdered and oppressed? (@bjportraits)

Creationist: "I am religious and live by faith. Evolution is a religion that requires faith so it's stupid and wrong". (@grenangle)

I find it endlessly curious that the same people who don’t believe in a higher power have decided gender is some invisible ‘essence’. (@femmehonnete1)

A significant contradiction of male supremacy: women are incompetent yet conniving and manipulative. Women are shamed for having sex yet women owe men sex. (@DrProudman)

It always amazes me how the same people who are absolutely convinced of the power of women's words to hurt trans people are also the ones so skeptical of the danger of men in women's spaces. (@helensaxby11)

More here, and links to the rest.

Contradictions 13

Even when unattributed, all encountered in the wild.

Hey you. Be yourself. But also tone it down a little. Read the room. But also speak your mind. Be responsible with your future. But also take risks, life is short. Kindness is everything. But also you'll get nowhere if you're not fighting. Don't sell out. But also grind/hustle. (@PrinceVogel)

We include everybody except people who aren’t inclusive.

I've had fascinating conversations with media people who say they want viewpoint diversity, but "no social conservatives". (@asymmetricinfo)

It’s academics’ job to be critical about everything – but not gender. 

Childhood: punished for being different, punished for thinking you're different.

If women’s rights are anti-trans then trans rights are anti-women.

Men: Women ought to get married and have babies.
Also men: I'm not ready to settle down.

Feminists used to say that looks don’t matter but you should also wear ugly clothes and no makeup. They also claimed that men would be attracted to you anyway. (They weren't.)

Be spontaneous AND be prepared.

I was overwhelmed with information about how tough it was to be a parent at the same time as I was being told it was the most extraordinary, blissful, transformative rite of passage and that there was no other love like it. That I was, in essence, living half a life by not having children of my own while simultaneously being so incredibly lucky to pursue a responsibility-free ... girl about town, career woman existence. (Article in the Times on infertility)

Saw a post that said doctors being so bad at identifying Autism is hilarious when you consider how good children are at figuring out who's Autistic when they're deciding whom to bully. (Via FB)

Sometimes the world goes through enormous changes and people hardly notice or comment. The rest of the time they write articles (or tweets) claiming the world is going thru huge changes thanks to some trivial aspect. They make far more noise about the second case.

There is a third category – where the world goes through enormous changes and large numbers of people choose to be wilfully ignorant of it, because despite vast amounts of evidence to the contrary, they don't want it to be true. (@GhostOfOrwell84)

How did “medieval man” reconcile a deterministic worldview (Fortune with her wheel) with Christianity, which relied on personal responsibility? (He didn’t. The church thought the concept of “Fortune” was Satanic.)

A post on Facebook isn’t going to incite violence whatever it says. Meanwhile, words are violence when it comes to saying “Human beings can’t change sex”.

Terfs must be silenced because words are violence and there may be distant knock-on evil effects. But these guys can wave placards saying "The only good terf is a dead terf." 

Why do we sneer at the previous decade and its awful décor and hairstyles when we were the ones sporting the mullets and installing avocado bathroom suites?

“Does my bum look big in this?”, but bum-enhancing injections are a dangerous underground business.

Be as much like most people as you can. AND stand out.

Accept what you can’t change is a popular American mantra, also “You are responsible for everything that happens to you” and “the solution is in yourself”. How does this not clash with the American dream of hustle your way to the top and tread down the other frogs in the bucket? Go west, young man!

The English simultaneously do not exist and are responsible for all historical injustices.

More here, and links to the rest.

Outdated Slang 6

Don't fall behind! Learn the new jargon, but be sure to drop the old jargon.


@edwest Do people not say Gordon Bennett any more? He appears in the book I'm reading and it suddenly occurred to me I probably haven't heard the expression since 1992.

@robpalkwriter Just saw someone complain about "litter louts" which was pleasantly nostalgic, like "juvenile delinquents" "dolly birds" or "video nasties" (Others add social services, bovver boys, vandals and hooligans. Also teenage tearaways and earth mothers.)

…ville (Noirville, strictly squaresville) Replaced by X City after the many shopping cities etc.
“Quite” for yes.

"We can't have a National Health Service – everybody will be demanding free wigs, teeth and spectacles!" Cue hilarious false-teeth anecdotes. Strangely, people got over their objections.

[Statement statement], yes? (Or, even more annoyingly, [Statement statement], no?)

A chip off the old block
A fair crack of the whip.
A penny for your thoughts, or “a penny for them”.
A raft of measures

Abort, retry, ignore (Dialogue on early computers.)
Absolutely chocker! From chockablock.
According to my lights.
Acid test (Was it laughed out of court, like “explore every avenue”?)

Addressing people as “flower”
aficionado (and misspelling it)
All my eye and Betty Martin!

amenities (popular in the 60s) That’s not a pointless patch of grass nobody can walk on, it’s an amenity!

Americans think Brits say “Smashing!” all the time. We stopped years ago, but they carry on. (It was “awful modern slang” in the 50s.)

anally retentive, very anal (Of someone who is very tidy, or keeps their CDs in alphabetical order.) 

And in that order‼!
And not necessarily in that order.

Any joy? Are we winning? (These both mean “How’s the work going and when can we go home?”) 

At this moment in time…
Banzai!
basically
Be your age!
beats the band

berk, wally, prat, twonk, eejit, nana/narner, you silly narner (From banana? Prat peaked in 2010, oddly. So did berk. Wally peaked in the 80s, with another peak in 2010.)

big-boned (of a large girl)

bivvi bag for sleeping bag (From bivouac, French for temporary camp. But I saw “bivvi tent” the other day.)

bobbins for nonsense (Recent. Gone, fortunately.)
 
Bog Irish (Rose steadily from the 40s and only declined from 2008.)

bonking, stonking (80s)
bottom feeders
brass neck for gall, chutzpah

broken home (Like “juvenile delinquent”, it became a joke.)
buckshee for “free” (From Arabic baksheesh.)

Buggerlugs, or “your friend” for a man whose name you don’t know, can’t remember or can’t be bothered to repeat (Very disparaging.)

But you don’t want to compete with men, dear! You’ll lose your femininity! (Femininity never defined. They might have had a point. If you did too well, the men wouldn’t want to marry you.)

buttinski, kibitzer
by hook or by crook (Peasants were allowed to gather wood in the lord's forest "by hook or by crook" – they weren't permitted to saw bits off.)

Calling all (anthropologists).
Calling planet (name of person sitting next to you who hasn’t heard what you said).

Can you beat it?
Can you believe it?

chatterbox, swankpot etc. Became something-head, something-face. 
cheek by jowl
Cheekyface!

cheesy grin (as if saying “cheese” for a group photo)
chock full, chockablock, absolutely chockers

clock for look at (Clock that!), or clock up for chalk up (Transwomen are now getting “clocked” or not. They try to avoid being “clocky”.)

clubbable
coalface

Colour me unsurprised!
concur
constructive (opposite is “destructive”)
coupled with (Especially in fronted subordinate clauses, frequently dangling.) 80s.

crass
culprit

Denigrating marriage and motherhood as it would “turn you into a cabbage”. 70s. Guess what – they all got married and had children anyway. Girls would say they didn’t want to have children because “I don’t want to become a vegetable”.

designer (designer stubble, that’s really designer etc. Is “curated” the new “designer”?)

Diddums! (Very damning, like referring to children as “Little Johnny” or older women as “Aunt Edith” or “your neighbour Petulia”.)

die-away for somebody wet, limp and soft-spoken
discombobulated (70s)
dishy for attractive
do their stuff rather than do their thing

Do us all a favour and...
Don’t you just love it when… (that happens. Gas advert?)

Dot and go one, or dot and carry one for someone with a limp. It was a way of doing arithmetic – you put a dot under the column when you’d carried a digit?

drag: Don’t be such a drag, what a drag it is getting old. (60s)
dumb animals, “our dumb friends”
dumb cluck (insult)

effectively, respectively (popular in the 80s)
elbow grease
elf’n’safety
Eric Clapton is God.

facilitator (Non-authoritarian, non-hierarchical. Rose from the early 60s to a peak in 2002.)
Fantastic!
Fons et origo, parturient montes and other Latin phrases.
food chain (Useful – now we have no word for it.)
for some unknown reason (parody of Victorian or later melodrama?)

for your safety and comfort. (Just received a product with instructions “for your satisfaction and safety”.)

forward-thinking
free collective bargaining

fruition (come to fruition. Perhaps we were put off by people telling us “It doesn’t mean what you think it means”.

full of the joys of spring (Ironic, old quote?)
give it up as a bad job (40s.)

Grody to the max! (Grody peaked 1960 and again mid-80s, “grody to the max” peaked mid-80s.)
Grouts for coffee grounds at the bottom of your cup

Half a jiff, be with you in a jiff. (Peaked 30s. Jiffy peaked 20s and 40s.)
Hard lines! Hard cheese!
Having fun? In a sarcastic tone when you’re burning the toast etc. (60s)

He was a frightfully big pot. (Meaning rich and influential.)
He’s a lovely mover. (Usually ironic.)
hip to the scene
Home, James, and don’t spare the horses!

How are things? Oh, just bumping along the bottom. (90s)
I grant you.
I haven’t just fallen off the Christmas tree, I’m not so green as I’m cabbage-looking.
I like your style.

I should cocoa! For “I should say so.”
I speak as I find!
I’ll drink to that.
I’ll give you what for! (Id est, “I’ll give you something to cry about”.)

I’ve come over all unnecessary!
If not, why not?
If the cap fits…
If you’re lucky… (Ironically.)

Internet: First there was the text-only Internet, then it became far more widespread with pages and pictures and it became the Web. Inexplicably, it is now the Internet again.

Is there an (anthropologist) in the house?
It doesn’t arise, it doesn’t apply, it doesn’t signify.
It must have been meant. (People are still saying this, but they never say WHO meant it.)
It smelt to high heaven.

It was a great boon. (40s. From an advert about a pen being “a boon and a blessing to men”?)
It’s later than you think. (From a song called Enjoy Yourself.)

Jesus H Christ, Jesus Christ on a bicycle, Christ on a bike!

Junk jewellery (now “faux”)
kayo, kayo’d
Keep yer ’air on!
Knock three times and ask for Gertie.

Lead me to it!
Liaison (Perhaps went out because nobody could spell it.)
Like greased lightning

Look what the tide brought in. Or was it “Look what the cat dragged in”?
lumpen (from “lumpenproletariat”)

macho (And arguing about how to pronounce it. Mako? And arguing about what it means. Men had got away with the behavior for years because we didn’t have a word for it, so we borrowed one from Spanish and struggled with it. What a relief we settled on “sexist” eventually. Sharp rise from the mid-60s.)

made a dead set at (a man) (It always surprised me when my girlfriends did this. Showed an unsuspected side to their character. They were probably the ones who told me “You’ll find somebody when you’re NOT looking”.)

main squeeze
moosh for mate with a northern vowel
More power to your elbow!
motor car for car

mousy for a girl who is timid, dull, plain, badly dressed, shy. (Helen Gurley Brown says she can succeed through hard work and determination, also by being calculatingly nice to everybody PLUS going blonde, wearing red lipstick and shortening her skirts. And probably sleeping with influential people. She could be right.)

Mustn’t grumble! It’s a great life if you don’t weaken!
My good man… (de haut en bas, or else very patronising)

my SO for Significant Other (They probably say “partner” now.)

narrative thrust (now “arc”)

Ne’er mind eh. (With a downward inflection and no comma before the eh. From Kent? It was an 80s thing.)

neurotic, neurosis (What we accused each other of being, instead of trying to help.)

Nice work if you can get it.
No peace for the wicked! (Bible)
Not a word of a lie!
Not all there
Now he tells me! (Yiddish word order.)

Oh my giddy aunt!
Oh, what? You what? (70s, 80s)

Ooops, butterfingers!
Paging (unlikely famous person).
pansy for gay man 

pawky for anybody “Scots” – what on earth did it mean? Skeptical, salty, tough, suspicious, feisty? (Peaked 30s, 40s, sharp decline since.)

Pish tush!
plethora (80s. Started rising to its present peak in the 40s.)

practising homosexual (Like practising Catholic. Presumably it was OK to be a closet homosexual who never actually did anything, like the hero of the film Victim.)

proliferate
pristine (Pedants quibbled about its origins.)

Pronouncing madam as modom. Calling anybody madam.
Pull your socks up.
Put off the evil day. (Bible?)
Put on your best bib and tucker.

queer as a coot, camp as a row of tents
reading matter for books 
responding to bad news with an ironic “Great!”

Result!, ‘ooky gear (and similar awful Cockney imitations)
right, left and centre

rumpy pumpy (Came from nowhere mid-80s, peaked 93, sharp fall), bonking 80s (Bonk peaked 1860, bonking sharp rise from 1980 to 2000.)

ruthless
Same difference!
Say “cheese!” (when taking a group photo)
Say when!
Scusee! (For “excuse me”. From Italian “scusi”?)

Sez you!
Shades of X!
She looked like the back end of a bus.

Sick squid for six quid (and squidlets for pounds)
sits well with 

skimp (Some people used it for “I just skimmed the chapter”.)
slatternly
slaving over a hot stove
smoothiechops (Implies a man with a very close shave.)

snark
soft furnishings (chairs and sofas)
soppy date or sloppy date
Stand by your beds! (From National Service.)

streetwise
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. (Bible. But often you have to make future plans.)

surly (what people were a lot of the time)
surreptitious
sweetness and light (Goes back to Aesop.)
sylph, sylph-like

Ta muchly!
Tannoy: The announcements came over the Tannoy.
Tell that to the Marines! (Answer: “The Marines knows!”)
Terrible imitations of rustics eg the vly be on the turmut.
Thank you VERY much! (In deeply sarcastic tones. Sometimes attached to the end of a sentence.)

that of (Are writers nervous about where to put the apostrophe? Do they think you can’t end a sentence with a possessive?)

The best of British luck!
the bulk of for most of 
the dog’s bollocks (and arguing about its derivation)

The End of the World as We Know It (TEOTWAWKI)
the hostess with the mostest
the real McCoy (sometimes pronounced McKye)
They didn’t know X from a hole in the road.

They were no respecters of persons. (Paul's Epistles. Implies that they considered everyone equal before the law, or in the sight of God.)

This [thing I don’t like] is a running sore on the body politic. (19th century and earlier)

This I must see! (Yiddish word order.)
This is true for that’s true 

This won’t buy the baby a new bonnet.
thumping lie
titivate (The nuns told us off for “titivating in front of the mirror”.)

To that end, we...
tunny fish for tuna (in case you didn’t know it was fish).
TV reception (now signal)
two-faced

up the wall (for “mad”, or “round the bend”), off the wall for wacky

Upper-class types used to jokily dismiss people, events and subjects with “Well, there you are, my dear”, or “Life’s like that”. They used to put on a silly voice – Lafe’s lake thet. 

used oncers (pound notes)
village maiden, local swain.
wacky (Sharp rise from about 1970.)
Wakey, wakey, rise and shine! 

warpaint for makeup
We’re not getting any forrader.
We’ve all got your number. (Was it a Kenneth Williams catchphrase?)

Weird or what?
Well, I dare say! (Meaning “I don’t believe a word of it”.)
Well, there’s a thing!
wet drip: He's such a wet drip!
What was that supposed to be?
What’s that when it’s at home?

When did explorers become adventurers? 
When did people stop writing “well” after every “may”?
When did rucksacks become backpacks?

When did the royal family stop waving in that peculiar “stirring the air” manner? When did waving become a sideways hand waggle?

Wind your neck in!
wuss
Yerse. (In a dubious voice. Meant “I don’t think!”, like “Ho, yus!” 60s.)

Yes, I dare say. (Implied total disbelief. Also “I dessay”.)
You and me both, cully.
You can’t say I never do anything for you.
You got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning! 
You great steaming nit! (60s.)
You must be out of your tiny mind. (Late 60s.)
You’ve got a dirty mind! (Or “one-track mind”.)

More here, and links to the rest.

The Watersplash by Patricia Wentworth

The Watersplash is one of Patricia Wentworth’s mysteries starring Miss Maud Silver, a former governess, and present-day private detective. How old is she? And what year is this all happening?

I assumed this was an early work, and the “the War” was World War One. Miss Silver’s flat is
“Victorian”, full of curvy occasional tables, with peacock-blue curtains. “Victorian chairs with their spreading laps, their bow legs, their yellow walnut arms, their acanthus-leaf carving. From the walls engravings of some of her favourite pictures gazed down upon the congenial scene – Hope, by G. F. Watts, Sir John Millais’ Black Brunswicker, Landseer’s Stag at Bay.” Here it is explained that she has inherited the furniture. This interior is from the 1880s – how old is Miss Silver?

I checked the date of the novel, and it’s 1951. I had to quickly change the characters’ dresses and hairstyles to the frumpy get-ups of the early 50s. Would Susan wear her fair hair in a “bob”? More likely a flat pudding-basin.

Miss Silver at one point wears an olive cashmere dress (we can imagine a style old-fashioned for the 50s) with a “high, boned collar” and a “lace modesty vest”. High boned collars are from the late 19th century (Anne of Green Gables scandalises her neighbours by wearing a “collarless dress” circa 1900.) And if Miss Silver is wearing such a collar, how does the modesty vest – a piece of lace to fill in your neckline – fit in? Later she’s described as “this dowdy little person in her family album clothes”.

The proprietress of the village shop moans that everything is different now. You can’t get proper furniture polish. “Nothing’s the same as what it used to be, nor won’t be again.” Another older lady complains of “the increasing lack of manners amongst the young”. Plus ça change!

Another middle-aged woman wears clothes 30 years out of date (that makes them from the 1920s – they’d look shapeless and frumpy to the young). She is often found darning her wardrobe tightly in unyielding wool. She also “pokes” her head forward – something we were warned against as children.

A young woman is described: The girl was dressed a little too smartly. Neither the cut nor the material was good enough to produce the effect which had obviously been aimed at... She belonged to the class, so numerous in any large town, who endeavour to satisfy their social ambitions by wearing a cheap copy of the latest mode. She throws herself at one of the few eligible young men – odd, since he has been disinherited.

The mystery involves wills, and the murders take place at the sinister “watersplash”, a ford over a stream that’s unlit at night. Lovers of complex puzzles may be disappointed, but the writing is good, and rises to heights at times. Plus the social observations are pertinent and pungent.

“The coming in of a new fashion of farming or a new breed of cattle, accepted sometimes after long doubt and debate, more often rejected and remembered as somebody’s ‘Folly’.”

“Miss Mildred opined that Susan was headstrong, and they had a very cosy little talk about some other defects in her character.” Another girl is dismissed as “flighty”.

However, I’m not sure you can remove your own fingerprints from a sheet of paper... And Wentworth manages to include the cliché about the “thin veneer of civilisation”: What a superstitious creature man was! Civilized? The veneer was pitifully thin.

A good read, though. I don’t miss afternoon tea, especially when the brew was weak and tepid, and the "butter" margarine.

The Watersplash has been reviewed by Clothes in Books. Fortunately I picked out different costume details.

A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie

A Murder Is Announced gives a snapshot of life among the bourgeoisie in a small country town just after the war. Characters struggle with rationing of fuel and food, and the assistance of the local “lady help” or the temperamental cook from “Mittel Europa”.

The plot centres on the inhabitants of Little Paddocks, home of elderly Letitia Blacklock; her companion Dora Bunner; two young cousins, Patrick and Julia; a lodger, Philippa, who’s working as a gardener; and Mitzi the cook. One morning everyone in the village receives an invite to a “murder”, and the complicated story unfolds.

Despite the perils of living in Mayhem Parva, there is a lot of humour scattered about. The vicar’s wife explains it’s easier to clean a large room: “In a small one your behind keeps getting in the way of the furniture!”. An elderly gardener holds forth on fake jewellery and “Roman pearls” (it’s a clue). Mrs Swettenham complains about the way everybody is breeding Dachshunds now. What happened to good old Manchester Terriers? Other belittled modern fashions include “psychological jargon” and “atom research stations”. Mrs Swettenham, who resembles Mrs Nickleby, complains that they shouldn’t be built near people as “the radioactivity might get loose”. There’s a sympathetic portrayal of a lesbian couple who address each other as “Hinchcliffe” and “Murgatroyd”.

Two Golden Age clichés make an appearance: Nobody reads Tennyson any more, and the shifty gaze is the one that aims straight for your eyes, unblinking.

But really, was Agatha Christie anti-Semitic? I’ve defended her in the past, but in this book there is a character who is “coded” as Jewish, for whom nobody has a good word. She's treated as a figure of fun.

This is Mitzi, the “temperamental foreign help”. Everyone calls her a liar. (Though this could be Christie’s cleverness. Can Mitzi be believed after all?). She wears her hair in “greasy” dark plaits, and sports a bright purple jersey with a jade-green skirt – “not becoming to her pasty complexion”. Despite the plaits, sometimes her hair is “tousled” and “falls over her eyes”. She claims to have an economics degree, though she’s a very good cook.
                
Mitzi is disturbed by the murder announcement and foretells dire consequences. (Literary foreshadowing, of course.)                

‘Yes, I am upset,’ said Mitzi dramatically. ‘I do not wish to die! Already in Europe I escape. My family they all die—they are all killed—my mother, my little brother, my so sweet little niece—all, all they are killed. But me I run away—I hide. I get to England. I work. I do work that never—never would I do in my own country—I—’
                
Later she says that her brother was shot before her eyes. The English characters can’t seem to take all this on board. They must know – Patrick was in the army – that such things happened. But to them it is just Mitzi’s “lies” and exaggerations. Miss Blacklock explains this to Inspector Craddock, though she does add “But in spite of it all, I really am sorry for her.” This is about the only nice thing anybody says about Mitzi in the entire book.
                
During the first murder, orginally thought to be a joke, Mitzi gets shut in the dining room and screams when the lights go out. “A touch of comedy was introduced by the fact that she had been engaged in cleaning silver and was still holding a chamois leather and a large fish slice.” Edmund Swettenham slaps her to stop her screaming. Patrick later remarks that as a joke he’d “sent Mitzi a postcard saying the Gestapo was on her track”. Some joke.

After many more prejudiced remarks about “aliens” from the police and others, Mitzi bravely risks her life to help unmask the murderer, after being buttered up by Miss Marple. But even Miss M can’t resist adding a sideswipe at the poor girl: “I worked on her, my dear. She thinks far too much about herself anyway, and it will be good for her to have done something for others.” At least Julia adds: ‘She did it very well.’

At the end of the book the Little Paddocks ménage is broken up, and Mitzi gets a job in Portsmouth. The characters agree that she will dine out on her bravery and the story will improve in the telling. Mitzi’s reputation for lying and embroidering, “but she may really know something” is also a clue. Who done what and why? Read it yourselves!

More here, and links to the rest.
                

                

When people hear the opposite...

I don't know why this happens.

In our old office, we had individual rooms (small). My desk faced the window, away from the door. People have the odd idea that it's deferential to be very, very quiet. They used to come in, wearing trainers on a thick carpet, and whisper "Hello". I would leap three feet in the air. So I put a notice on my door: "Please approach NOISILY". Guess what they did? In the end I turned my desk round to face the door. (Was it the same people who marked up a proof in tiny, faint writing? And failed to obey the instructions "keep tightly closed"? Or "replace cap after use"?)

In our new office, I kept complaining it was hot and stuffy. Eventually two men with a ladder turned up, waving a chit. "Says here lady is too cold!" Turned out all that previous handymen had done was turn my aircon OFF. I'd said "hot" every time.

When I got an answering machine, slightly ahead of my friends, they'd leave a message and then add: Call me at gabble mumble mumble gabble, drops voice. So I altered my answering machine message to say "Please leave your number SLOWLY". People then enunciated their number and sneered: "Was that slow enough?" 

Hairstylists will give me a boyish haircut, but they leave a long feathery bit at the back to make it “softer”. They’ll give me a geometric bob, but they feather it around the face. Or they give me a boyish haircut, but cut the back straight as if it was the bob they think I ought to have. I go in with a picture of Princess Diana, but come out looking like Mrs Thatcher.

I used to go into hair salons and say: "Could you give me a bob, shorter at the back than at the front?" What did I walk out with? You guessed it.

I used to run a small singing group. I'd say: "If you want to emphasise a syllable, use the vowel, not the consonants". They gave me more more consonants: Snap! Crackle! Pop! I asked for "piú legato" (smoother). They gave me more staccato ("cut short crisply", says the dictionary).

Whenever I told them "breathe" they heard me say "don't breathe". Some of them had sung in large groups where you are always being told not to breathe here, there and everywhere. I always told them to breathe before they ran out of air. Even in the middle of a long note. This overrode earlier instructions – and people tend to stick to the first instruction they're given. However, if you want to sing, you need to breathe IN before each phrase, and then use the air to sing with. Try it.

Agatha Christie's The Rose and the Yew Tree

Hats for platforms

One day I'll write the Key to All Mythologies – or rather, what we can learn about popular ideas about psychology from Golden Age mysteries. "Self-pity" is mentioned in passing. I remember this concept from the 60s. It was something you shouldn't "indulge" or "wallow" in, or "get stuck in a rut" of. It made it difficult to think about your situation. And this is a book about deciding what to do at crisis moments in your life.

This is a straight novel, originally published in 1948 under the name Mary Westmacott. The writer is Christie the philosopher and psychologist, not the puzzler. The writing is, as one contemporary reviewer put it, "crisp and lucid", though there is the occasional touch of melodrama: He whirled on Teresa, whom he seemed to consider the realist of the assembly.

World War Two is coming to an end when the narrator, Hugh Norreys, falls in love with a girl on a train, first seen crying into her soup. They become engaged, convinced they are each other's soulmate – "the sharing of a thousand small minor pleasures". Christie mentions this delusion in Death in the Clouds. But then the accident happens. "All that communion of mind with mind, our thoughts that leapt to complete each other’s, our friendship, our companionship: illusion—nothing but illusion."

Hugh's sister Teresa takes him in and he is a reluctant observer of an election campaign she is running. Everyone is true blue in St Loo. The town consists of "large luxury hotels, thousands of small bungalows, masses of little boarding houses." And a castle. The upper middle classes "ran things, and managed things, and got up things".

Hugh's brother-in-law is a taciturn artist, and Christie unloads her ideas about painting. Why did Naomi Carleton-Smith in The Mysterious Mr Quin paint the sky yellow and the sea red? "It's the way I see'em, Duchess." Likewise, "They are Robert’s idea of trees", Teresa explains.

‘You mean one painter would paint it naturalistically and another symbolically?’, asks Hugh.
‘They’d actually see it differently,' she replies.

Hugh decides that "to shut myself up and make a mystery of myself would be a form of self-advertisement". So he spends most of the novel lying in an invalid chair in a sitting room – like the hero of Monica Dickens' The Happy Prisoner. He dispenses wisdom and tries to understand everybody and improve their lives in the same way, too.

The Conservative candidate is the unlikely John Gabriel, who has a brilliant war record and bushels of charm. But it's a pity his legs are so common, complains Lady St Loo, quoting Christie's mother.

Drifting through the many characters is Isabella, also from the castle. She is beautiful and blonde, but not like other girls. She strongly resembles Margery Allingham's Prunella, in The Beckoning Lady. She is what we would now call "autistic coded". Nobody talked about autism in 1948, though they may have used terms like "schizoid personality". Another autistic-coded girl is Denham in Crewe Train, a book found in the bedroom of the victim in Murder in Mesopotamia.

The essence of femininity is summed up: It is a world of calculation of effects, of persuasion, of a thousand small subtleties. The anti-Isabella. Is this serene girl an avatar of Christie herself? She is very good at maths (like Megan in The Moving Finger), a subject Christie wished she had studied. And she has long blonde hair.

Milly Burt, married to a drunken vet, is a "nice little woman", like the neglected wife in Triangle at Rhodes. Unfortunately her voice is "over-refined" and she blames herself for everything. "Human beings enjoyed exaggerating their responsibility for events", thinks Hugh.

‘I should stop thinking about it,’ I advised.
‘But how can I?’ Her large pathetic brown eyes opened wide.
‘By the exercise of self-control and will power,’ I said.

When did we stop talking about those? Now we have to be mindful and achieve a positive mindset – like Pollyanna, another literary heroine.

The Conservative candidate, John Gabriel, confides in Hugh at length. He wishes he was upper class. It means "being born sure of yourself—knowing what you’re going to do or say—being rude only when you mean to be rude—and not being rude just because you feel hot and uncomfortable and want to show you’re as good as anyone else. Not having to [wonder] all the time what people are thinking of you, but just concerned with what you think of them. Knowing that if you’re queer or shabby or eccentric it doesn’t matter a damn because you are what you are.'
                
Of his Victoria Cross, he explains: Bravery is "all a matter of nerves or glands or something".
                
"Oh yes, I know what my class is. I’m not a gentleman.’
‘Does that word mean anything nowadays?’ I asked sceptically.
‘The word doesn’t. But the thing the word means is still there.’

More of Gabriel's wisdom: Do you think a man is what he wants to be? A man is what he is born... It's always soldiers who buy dud shares, and believe in schemes for getting up Spanish treasure from sunk galleons. (Raymond West falls for one such scheme in an early Miss Marple story.)

And the stuff to give the troops: The... sort of idea that sounds as though it would make everything come right and which is extremely easy to grasp, noble but woolly—and which gives you a nice inner glow.
                

Teresa goes through the motions of campaigning for John Gabriel, even sitting on a platform wearing a formidable hat – probably something like a top hat, in the style of  the late Queen. She too confides in the disabled narrator: To feel that my will and my brain can be entirely swamped and overridden by emotion is insufferable to me. I can control my actions and to a large extent my thoughts—not to be able to control my emotions is galling to my pride—it humiliates me.’... Teresa, I thought to myself, was adult—she had learnt to say ‘I’. (Remember the conversation between Helen and Leonard in E.M. Forster's Howards End?)
               
More of Teresa's philosophy: ‘You will insist on making your own design for life, Hugh, and trying to fit other people into it. But they’ve got their own design. Everyone has got their own design—that’s what makes life so confusing. Because the designs are interlaced—superimposed.'
               
So you are who you're born, and your life has its own design? Where does free will fit in? Hugh later decides that nobody really makes decisions.

At one point Hugh asks himself: What did I know? What could I hope? What was I going to do? – a maxim of Hercule Poirot's. He ponders: Who had said ‘Love ’em and leave ’em alone’? Some psychologist writing advice to mothers? ... I desisted from what has been termed unprofitable speculation and rang the bell and ordered tea.                


Here comes the spoiler. Instead of marrying Rupert St Loo, her first cousin and heir to the castle, Isabella elopes with John Gabriel. And in "Zagrade", Hugh meets them again. John Gabriel is drinking more and has coarsened mentally and physically. But Hugh finds Isabella sitting in squalor embroidering a square of silk:

I took the piece of work into my hand. It was a square of old silk—a delicate dove grey in colour, slightly faded, very soft to handle. On it Isabella was embroidering a design of dark red roses, wallflowers and pale mauve stocks. It was beautiful work, very fine, exquisitely executed. (In her autobiography, Christie relates that when young she liked to embroider flowers on silk, taken from Sèvres porcelain. Does she say she is prouder of her embroidery than of anything she wrote? She gives this skill to Louise Leidner in Murder in Mesopotamia.)
               
It is a rather Catholic story in the end, a Chestertonian paradox. The woman who achieves purity through degradation, or something. The woman with the "triple glaze" (The China Governess, Margery Allingham), who can pass through Hell and not be contaminated. And who may even save others just by being there. The appalling strangeness of the mercy of God (Brighton Rock, Graham Greene).

Gabriel eventually becomes "Father Clement", a saintly figure who stays in the Balkans and tries to improve people's lives. In the framing narrative, Hugh is summoned to his deathbed, remarking that "Father Clement" has come up with ideas that "we all" now live by. These ideas are left a mystery.

More here, and links to the rest.