It’s only words
In an occasional tribute to the brothers Glibb, here are some of my favourite terms/words of the moment.
Harry lifter
Britain’s favourite comic toff, Michael McIntyre, argues that if you have a posh accent, you can use any word to describe the state of being drunk. So “I was totally pyjama’d last night” works in an Oxbridge accent, but not a Scouse one. Reading John Fuller’s bizarre stories about an Oxford don, The Adventures Of Speedfall, I came across an even better one when a dignitary is deemed incapable of giving a speech because he had “had too many harry lifters”.
While the rest of us make do with such common-or-garden euphemisms as bladdered, blotto, hammered, legless or wasted, 1940s jump-blues king Louis Jordan – in the classic track ‘Open The Door, Richard’ – describes someone as “abnoxicated”.
According to the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1883481.stm), there are 141 ways to describe being drunk. Actually, there are 142 because their list doesn’t include “harry lifters” although it does include the “saying hello to Mr Armitage”, presumably a reference to those titans of the toilet Armitage Shanks .
Czar
The term, derived from Caesar, once described the ruling of Bulgaria, Russia and Serbia. Only one living person can truly call himself a czar or tsar (the latter is the more authentic Slavonic spelling) – an elderly Bulgarian gent with the Scrabbletastic name of Simeon Saxe-Coburg Gotha, who was Tsar Simeon II until the Communists took over Bulgaria in 1946. Simeon later returned to Bulgaria, becoming president.
Alan Sugar is now Britain’s enterprise czar. Lord Sugar of Amstrad is merely the latest in a long line of ersatz potentates. So instead of 24-carat, autocratic, blue-blooded czars, we have enterprise czars (Sugar), a communications czar (Stephen Carter, who has just resigned to cries of “Who?” and “So what?”), a drugs czar (Gil Kerlikowske in the US), a pay czar (Kenneth Feinberg, appointed by Obama although officially we are not supposed to call him a pay czar), a privacy czar (in Ontario) and a heart disease czar (the NHS). Reuters estimated that Obama has now appointed 21 czars, prompting Senator John McCain to quip: “He’s got more czars than the Romanovs.”
Talking of whom, the first civilian czar, if you will, was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was dubbed the “baseball czar” when he cleaned up the sport after the 1919 World Series had been fixed. The nickname was in poor taste – only a year before, the last Russian czar, Nicholas II, had been shot in a cellar in Ekaterinburg.
Al Desco
In these turbulent times, often referred to as ITCC (In The Current Climate – a phrase which neatly embraces economic and environmental anxieties), Al Desco sadly describes where many of us are eating our lunch: at our desks. At a time when we are constantly being asked for voldis (volume discount) and vulture capitalists buy assets on the cheap, the moment Al Desco lunches are replaced by Al Fresco ones may be the surest sign of recovery we can have.
Lingerie
Disappointed to discover that this alluring word has its roots in the French phrase laver lelinge – literally “was the clothes”. But delighted to hear that it changed Marlon Brando’s career. The ultimate Method actor had a job as the elevator operator in a department store but quit after four days because having to shout out “Lingerie” embarrassed him so much.