That's the Way It Crumbles by Matthew Engel

Author:Matthew Engel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile

Footnotes

1 This is not hindsight. It struck me by the Brandenburg Gate in 1990 as the East Germans voted in their first free election and I listened to a busker warbling ‘Naads in wide sadin, neh-va reachy vee-enn’.

2 Even in Britain, during the reign of the non-anglophone George I.

3 Indeed, the linguistic rituals involved in simply buying a morning croissant in provincial France are only slightly more informal than a cotillion in Jane Austen’s Bath.

4 France and Germany both decided that Brexit would be regarded as masculine. This was perhaps the only aspect of the issue which was not a problem for Britain.

5 At the UN the official version of English, in theory at least, is actually British English: documents are supposed to have British spellings.

6 The most fluent of all ironists, being the nation who turned bastard into a term of endearment.

7 Which was probably around in the US since the Pilgrim Fathers rushed off the Mayflower and headed to the souvenir shops to buy wampum.

8 This was used in the US scientific community as early as 1946.

9 The second half of that paragraph was randomly generated by the helpful webpage http://atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html.

10 But by 2010 an advert in the Jewish Chronicle demanded ‘an organised and self-motivated team leader’ to serve as a rabbi.

11 This has American roots deep in the nineteenth century. In Britain Michael Ellis was selected as Conservative candidate for Northampton North by something described as a primary in 2006.

12 A term used in the US from 1832 but startlingly borrowed as early as 1886 by the Liberal MP W.S. Caine, who referred to ‘the blandishments or terrorism of the party machine’ in an interview with the Pall Mall Gazette.

13 See pp. 63–4.

14 First used in the US to describe rigged horse races in the 1920s. The word then transferred to American politics. It was rare in Britain until the 1990s, when the media began parroting it so ignorantly that it was (and is) often misspelled shoe-in.

15 A bellwether was a castrated ram, which had a bell round its neck to help farmers track the flock. In America the term has long been used to denote a closely contested and therefore indicative constituency. In Britain it is used only by journalistic sheep, and is normally misspelled. Castration would be an appropriate punishment.

16 An election was described as a race in Kentucky in 1824. It is not clear when this transferred to Britain: presumably when MPs began to run rather than stand.

17 Traceable to 1932 in the US. A complete nonsense in Britain since British English does not use call in this sense. Or it didn’t.

18 Dates back to 1816 in the US. Naturalised in Britain by 1879, though infrequently used at first.

19 Adapted from military use in the US by 1809; in Britain by the 1850s.

20 First recorded in the US 1912; increasingly used in Britain from 1968.

21 In The New York Times 1984, either from baseball slang or maybe from a play-doctor, who works on flawed scripts.

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