Counties of England

I have just been reading Brewer's "Britain and Ireland" which gives the etymology of thousands of place-names in the UK. I was particularly taken with one of the maps which showed the traditional counties of England. It brought a tear to my sentimental eye (the left one). Names long vanished: Cumberland (only the sausage remains), Westmorland, the Ridings of Yorkshire. Weren't they lovely? They made writing the address on a letter quite, well, English. Now I live in a place called North Tyneside that is the bastard love child of old Northumberland and the rightly despised Tyne & Wear. I really do wish we could go back to those earlier county names. I was born in Middlesbrough ("middle fortified town") and that used to be in the North Riding ("third thing") of Yorkshire. There was never a South Riding (Cnut decreed that) but we now have little counties and unitary authorities all over the place. Even Darlington. Even South Yorks. God above! Given absolute power, I would restore the boundaries of the old Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Kent, Essex, Sussex, East Anglia, Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria. Ah yes. They were the days. Am I reaching too far back? Perhaps.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

In Defence of Football Hooligans

Newcastle Utd. and Sunderland met at St. James' Park yesterday. There were 52084 in the ground*, all of whom spilled out onto the cold streets of Newcastle after the game. The police made 20 arrests and the news this morning was full of the usual hand-wringing and hyperbole.

The reports neglected to say that 52064 people were NOT arrested (99.96%). So, out of every thousand at the match, 999 remained out of police custody. I am not so naive as to think that "stayed out of police custody" is the same as "stayed out of trouble" but, nevertheless, it is quite clear that a VERY small percentage created the bother.

Newcastle and Sunderland is somewhere between Bolton v Blackburn and Israel v Gaza in terms of violence. Not quite Celtic v Rangers but getting close. There isn't the religious intensity in the North-East derbies, just tribal, localised passion. Let's not lose that.

I'm the last person who wants to see "hooliganism" back, but come on.

Stop creating a problem that isn't there!

*Thanks to GC for the accurate figures.

Potential Swearwords

There are 26x26x26x26 (456976) potential swearwords. To be honest, there is no necessity to employ these words in an expletive manner and, in spite of their obvious utility, we use relatively few. Of the massive number available, barely seven thousand appear in the OED. A great shame. The people of our blessed lands struggle to spell efficiently and leaving all these simple, short and potentially descriptive words unused is quite wasteful of a readily available resource.
There are those within the whole set which are, frankly, useless. Where all the letters are identical or the final combination is a complete tongue-twister we would be forced to consign it to the scrapheap. In truth, around 30% might never be successful orally/aurally.
But there remains a massive number of combinations where there is no current meaning and the difficulty involved in spelling vanishes. A few moments staring at the QWERTY keyboard conjures up thousands. Not one of the variations I created (mentally) in the previous ten minutes is in common use.
So, if you are edging towards inventing a concatenated Greco-Roman-derived lexical behemoth to describe a newly discovered -phobia or the latest -ism go for the short, pithy option instead.
You would be praised at Dimly Lit Corner.

Allergy advice: No words matching the title description are included in the piece above.

Apostrophe's

Birmingham, it was announced today, is going to get rid of apostrophes on road signs. King's Walk will become (exempli gratia) Kings Walk. Given my often ridiculously over-the-top defence of my mother tongue, you might expect me to be dead against this. Well, surprisingly, I'm not.
For starters we shouldn't confuse road signs with poetry or prose. Different things don'cha know. Apostrophes do tend to complicate things on your SatNav too. I know using your mobile phone is naughty whilst driving but it is safety personified against reprogramming your Tom Tom at 60mph through town. Apostrophe's? Get rid of the little bugger's. Who need's them?
We must also remember the location of this act of grammatical vandalism. Birmingham. There is a theory that the Brummie accent is only allowed to exist because everyone else then sounds intelligent. Even Smoggies. It is apt that they are de-apostrophising in Brum. Having massacred the spoken word it is right and fitting that they now butcher the written word.
Our gain, Birminghams loss.

Drunken Teenagers (or not)

Apparently, 6% of boys and girls have been drunk before their 16th birthday*.
Shock! Horror! Probe!
Hang on. I think this means that 94% have NOT been drunk. What in God's name are we worried about? I think that figure is absolutely amazing. This would be an excellent country if a few other things were at (or around) the same level. What about: truthful MPs? honest Peers? Up-to-date judges? Things worth watching on TV? The incidence of simple good manners? Useful government initiatives? Cancer survival rates? People in work? People who enjoyed going to work? Trains that run on time? and so on.
The shameless way the New Puritans target our teenagers whenever/wherever possible is one of the most depressing features of 21st Century Britain. If Cromwell's lackeys are to be believed [please don't] our 13-18's are drunken, obese yobs in hoodies with no respect for anything, with dreadful GCSE results and zero future. They really aren't. Really.

But they will be if we keep treating them like that.

*Government figures today. Something miraculous happens on your 16th birthday. It is OK to be ratted most of the time from then.

The Unelected

Regular readers will have noticed that I am rather anti our PM, Gordon Brown. There is nothing personal in this. Indeed, I would love him to pop round for a chat one night. We could get in a parmo* and a couple of beers if he liked. Play on the Wii; that sort of thing.

My problem with Mr Brown is that he is unelected. I know the apparatchiks of New Labour want him in power but, in a democracy, that is really not the point. The people of this country should want him in power and we do that through a General Election. He will never have any real power or credibility unless/until he is actually elected PM.

The same goes for Mandelson. Just wheeling this old crony in from the Lords to get us out of this recession doesn't wash. We are a democracy, damn it! The Lords are there to keep an eye on the Commons and take dodgy payments to make laws. They are NOT there to be in executive positions. I had the same reservations about Lord Carrington in Thatcher's time.

Perhaps I have it all wrong. Perhaps we are not living in a democracy.

*A Middlesbrough delicacy. Think Pizza, but replace the doughy base with hammered out chicken. Excellent.

The Resistable Rise of Bugsy Malone

The Puritan Kakistocracy are at it again! This time we are being ordered not to allow anyone under 15 ANY alcohol. Yet again, parental responsibility is crushed under the heel of autocratic diktat. Do these people never learn?

Just after World War 1, the USA introduced Prohibition by way of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. It was an unmitigated disaster, giving rise to a crime wave unsurpassed at that time. One of the big supporters of Prohibition was the Ku Klux Klan. That should have been a big clue (no pun intended) to the law-makers. Some of the great names of American history emerged in the Prohibition: Al Capone, Bugs Moran.... The 18th was repealed - the only amendment that has ever been repealed. Well, Gordon Cromwell and his miserable minions are heading the same way only down a generation. If we tell our teenagers not to do something, they will see it as something to do. Bugsy Malone with WKD instead of custard.

The French will be laughing at us.

And I hate that.