NICHOLAS: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. My name is Nicholas Parsons and as the Minut NICHOLAS PARSONS: Welcome to Just A Minute!
THEME MUSIC
NICHOLAS: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. My name is Nicholas Parsons and as the Minute Waltz fades away it's my huge pleasure to welcome our many listeners not only in Great Britain but also around the world. But also to welcome to this show four talented, interesting personalities who are going to display their gift with language and words as they try to speak on the subject that I give them for one minute, and they try to do that without hesitation, repetition or deviation. Seated on my right, two of our regular, feisty players of the game Buffy Summers, known, I’m sure, to you all as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Manny Rayner, doyen of inscrutable online book reviews and Professor of Quite Advanced Thinking at a secret institution in Switzerland. And seated on my left, two newcomers to the game, Hermione Granger, our youngest ever competitor, who I’m sure needs no further introduction from me, and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, current President of the Russian Federation. Please welcome all four of them.
(Applause)
And the subject chosen to start off tonight’s show is How I Will Win Just A Minute. An interesting subject. Manny, will you start please. You have 60 seconds, commencing now.
MANNY : Well, it may be self-defeating if I explain precisely how I will win tonight’s Just A Minute because my fellow competitors will then instantly steal my plan.
BUZZ
NICHOLAS : Hermione has challenged.
HERMIONE: If he won’t tell us how he will win this game then he could just shut up and let someone else talk. It’s deviation. He’s deviating from the task on the card.
[image]
NICHOLAS : An excellent challenge. Hermione, you have a point and 52 seconds left for How I Will Win Just a Minute.
HERMIONE : I am an extremely logical person and I can spot the weaknesses in my fellow competitors a mile away, plus I’m a lot more popular than any of these people, I mean, for example, you won’t be seeing Buffy on the cover of Vogue any time soon –
BUZZ
NICHOLAS: And Buffy Summers has challenged.
BUFFY : Hermione, your mouth is open, and sound is coming from it. This is never good. (LAUGHTER)
[image]
NICHOLAS : But what is your challenge?
BUFFY : She’s a stuck-up dweeb who no one wants to listen to.
AUDIENCE : Ooooh
NICHOLAS : But that’s actually within the rules.
BUFFY : It is? Okay okay. I don't want any trouble. I just want to be alone and quiet in a room with a chair and a fireplace and a tea cozy. I don't even know what a tea cozy is, but I want one.
MANNY : You may have come to the wrong place then. (LAUGHTER)
NICHOLAS : Hermione, you have a point for an incorrect challenge and the subject is back with you. 39 seconds left starting now.
HERMIONE : I… stuck-up dweeb?
BUZZ
NICHOLAS : President Putin has challenged.
PUTIN : Hesitation.
[image]
NICHOLAS : Yes, there was. (You sort of dried up you know.) So, Mr Putin, you have a point for a correct challenge and the subject is yours and there are 37 seconds left for How I Will Win Just A Minute.
PUTIN: I will win this game because I never hesitate, that is why I myself am President of the Russian Federation and not anyone else. Also, I never deviate from my chosen goal, ask any Crimean. And I never repeat myself. I don’t have to. I say something once and it happens. My people are very aware of this. So I think I am very good contestant for your show Just a Minute. I fully expect to be successful. I cannot be beaten by two young girls and a professor of middling years. These are not contestants who could for example wrestle with Siberian bears or ski down steep mountainsides. They are feeble. They –
WHISTLE
NICHOLAS : And President Putin gains the extra point for speaking when the whistle went at the end of the 60 seconds. And at the end of Round One Hermione and Mr Putin are in the lead with two points, and the others have yet to score. We begin Round Two with a strange subject – The Undead. Buffy, it’s your turn to begin. Could you talk on that subject for one minute starting… now.
BUFFY : I met my first undead person when I was around 11 or twelve maybe and it was immediately obvious, he had the emotional range of a spare tyre and a very poor complexion. But I know you’re going like isn’t that all 15 year old boys? Well yes it is that cannot be denied, but to be Undead is to be my mortal enemy and I get to kick your face off, which is not the case with most young persons of the male gender –
BUZZ
NICHOLAS : And Hermione has challenged.
HERMIONE : Deviation. This is so boring most of the audience are now channelling their inner undeadness. Deviation. She’s a deviant so she must be deviating.
NICHOLAS : Well, there’s nothing in the rules which says you must be interesting.
BUFFY: She’s got her wand in a knot again.
HERMIONE : (to audience) I’m this close to a straight Wingardium Leviosa. (LAUGHTER)
NICHOLAS : So you have a point and you continue with the subject The Undead and you have 35 seconds left.
BUFFY : People are quite scared of the undead but they’re just people with bad attitudes in need of a good dentist. Also they seldom have good conversation. Maybe it’s because I kick their faces off so they can’t talk –
BUZZ
MANNY : Two faces. Two people.
NICHOLAS : Oh well listened, you did say face and people twice. So Manny, you take over the subject with 36 seconds to go starting now.
MANNY : An undead is a being in mythology, legend or fiction that is deceased but behaves as if alive. A common example is a corpse re-animated by supernatural forces by the application of the deceased's own life force. Undead may be incorporeal like ghosts, or corporeal like vampires and zombies. The undead are featured in the belief systems of most cultures, and appear in many works of fantasy and horror fiction. Bram Stoker considered using the title The Un-Dead for his novel Dracula (1897), and use of the term in the novel is mostly responsible for the modern sense of the word –
BUZZ
NICHOLAS : And Hermione has challenged
HERMIONE : This is just the Wikipedia entry on the Undead which he is simply parroting.
NICHOLAS : Is that right, Manny?
MANNY : Well, possibly. I may have committed most of Wikipedia to memory, it’s just possible. It can come in useful on a show like this.
HERMIONE : So it’s plagiarism.
MANNY : There were quote marks.
HERMIONE : Quote marks?
MANNY : You couldn’t hear them. This is radio. (LAUGHTER)
HERMIONE : This is preposterous.
MANNY : Yes, it’s preposterous radio.
PUTIN : There should be an end to this banter. Please return to the task in hand.
BUFFY : He’s the chairman, not you.
PUTIN : At the moment, this is so. In future, maybe not so.
NICHOLAS : It’s an incorrect challenge. Manny, please continue with the subject, you have 9 seconds left.
[image]
MANNY : In 1932 Robert E. Cornish became interested in the idea that he could restore life to the dead. He attempted to revive human victims of heart attack, drowning, and electrocution but had no success. However, on test animals he managed to revive clinically dead dogs by injecting a mixture of epinephrine (adrenaline) and anticoagulants. –
BUZZ
BUFFY : Repetition of dead.
NICHOLAS : Yes, quite right.
MANNY : But it’s part of the subject The Undead. And you can repeat the subject.
BUFFY : Dead and Undead are two different things. I can tell you that from experience.
NICHOLAS : She’s right you know. Buffy, you have got in with only one second left on the subject, starting now.
BUFFY : All my friends are dead.
WHISTLE
NICHOLAS : So the Vampire Slayer was talking as the whistle went and gains a point. After round two the score is now Buffy Summers has taken a dramatic lead with three points and the others are neck and neck on two. So to Round Three and the subject is What I Did on my Holidays… Hermione, it’s your turn to start.
Some time in the 1950s a bunch of Times journalists in London had a competition to see who could get the most boring story into the paper. The winner Some time in the 1950s a bunch of Times journalists in London had a competition to see who could get the most boring story into the paper. The winner was
SMALL EARTHQUAKE IN CENTRAL AMERICA NOT MANY HURT
As everyone knows, journalists are the scum of the earth. What was that quote?
Journalists? I'll tell you what I think of journalists. The hand of God, reaching down into the mire, couldn't elevate one of them to the depths of degradation.
Not only that but they write in this bizarre language called journalese – this is the strange amalgam of antique cliches and usages which are only to be found in newspapers. No human being would ever say this kind of stuff. When Michael Jackson dangerously held his son Prince Michael II over a balcony to show him off to fans the Sun in Britain had a great headline
JACKO IN TOT DANGLE HORROR
I remember that we adopted the phrase with glee – for months afterwards whenever anyone did anything slightly dangerous it was “tot dangle horror!”
An infant in the British press is always a tot, a word British people themselves haven’t used in ordinary conversation since around 1935; but tot is 3 letters, infant is 6 and this matters for the headline writing sub-editors. Likewise romps, boffins, lovenest, vice girl, crooner and woo. How about that for a wonderful provincial firm of lawyers :
Romp, Boffin, Tot, Crooner and Woo.
So I will now present for your entertainment a handy cut-out-and-keep instant guide to How to Write Shoddy Journalism.
HOW TO WRITE SHODDY JOURNALISM
What does snow do?
Blankets.
What’s another word for “quite surprising”?
Bombshell.
What do bombshells cause?
Shockwaves.
What are always chequered?
People’s pasts.
What is a consensus?
Cosy.
What talks do politicians have?
Crisis.
What do you call a slight problem?
A crisis.
What word sounds really funny if you repeat it five times?
Crisis.
What is always the eleventh?
The hour that crisis talks are held at.
What is the only other kind of talks politicians are able to have?
Scene 1 : Scriptorium of the monastery of St Giles the Bleeding.
Year : 874 AD
Winter sunlight streams through the recently installed stained glass. O Scene 1 : Scriptorium of the monastery of St Giles the Bleeding.
Year : 874 AD
Winter sunlight streams through the recently installed stained glass. Outside, several peasant children are dying from scrofula.
Aethelfried : Hey, Cuthelbearthth, I think we have a problem.
Cuthelbearthth : Yeah? Whit’s oop?
Aethelfried : Well I'm trying to translate the beautiful words of Our Lord into plain English and I’m finding that three letters in the alphabet, h, c and g are being used to spell seven different sounds, but two letter pairs, cg and sc, are being used for just the one sound and each vowel has a long sound and a short sound such as – hop and hope, see that? But we only have the one letter for these sounds.
Cuthelbearthth : Shoot, that’s jist what ah was thinking masel. And wha aboot them dipthongs, eh? Gies me a fookin headach jist thinkin aboot them diphthongs. Ah wake oop sweatin aboot them so I do.
A mouse runs across the stone-flagged floor, through the brilliant blue and scarlet of the stained glass sunlight.
Cuthelbearthth : Where’s ma piic – I’m gonna shove a hol threw yon muus.
Aethelfried (sighing deeply) : And that’s the problem.
Scene 2 : Scriptorium of the monastery of St Giles the Bleeding
Year 1106
Gaiallard Euvrouin d' Expensivewine : Thees language eez bollocks, mon vieux. We will 'ave to make it better.
Fr Hildebrondus (resentful of Norman influence) : Your mother was an elderberry.
Gaiallard : Some of thees preenciples I agree weeth. For eenstance, doubling the consonant to eendicate a short vowel except if the vowel is already being spelled with two letters, and also not doubling the consonant after a short vowel eef there are already two consonants representing two sounds. Thees ees good. Eet ees true, we do not want words like mothth or fishshing. And we can't possibly 'ave double vees because we now 'ave double yous so lovving weel look like lowing so we weel 'ave to bequeeeeth to the future such confusibles as dove and dove and live and live, eet ees too bad.
Fr Hildebrondus (resentful of Norman influence) : Your father was an 'addock.
***
I bought this book in a spirit of joyful geekery but was quickly downcast by the annoying nature of the subject. The spelling of English is intrinsically aggravating. I will give one example. Sometimes the spelling of a word is influenced by other words when it really shouldn't be. So, English got the word delight from French, and this word was originally spelled delit and delyte, and there were several other words around following that form, such as syte, byte and kyte. But the great majority of "ite"-sounding words were spelled "ight" – might, fight, tight, etc. So delyte changed to delight. The gh came from the back-of-the-throat hacking sound still made by many Scottish people (it's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht) – English people stopped using this sound unless they were actually clearing their actual throats - so fight was originally pronounced fi(clearing throat noise)t. This noise was represented by the letter yogh which was rejected by the monks as being too weird, so they substituted gh which made SO MUCH MORE sense – to them, but not to us. There used to be many more gh spellings in English – willough, and yaughan (yawn). Daddy wouldn't buy me a bowgh wawgh. I don't know why some were respelled more sensibly and others weren't.
Likewise, analogy from pre-existing words is why we have a load of silly silent b's in such words as plumb and numb. In Old English they did sound the b in such words as dumb, climb and comb. This pronounciation disappeared. But when new words like plom and nom came into the language, the scribes decided (once again) they should follow this earlier pattern & so fixed on plumb and numb even though no one had ever pronounced the final b. This insane analogy rubbish also explains a lot of words beginning with wh. Whole and whore for instance. That's what this whole book is like. That's what English is like. I love it, but it's a very naughty language. ...more
I thought- hello, let's use the 100 words to review this wee book, sort of like the well-known sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” I thought- hello, let's use the 100 words to review this wee book, sort of like the well-known sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” which uses all the letters in the alphabet. It seemed mega doable, it could be so cute, but it very quickly it became a royal pain in the arse. I dilly-dallied, I couldn’t get going. I stared out my window for inspiration. There were no UFOs - again. I read the blurb on a shiny new paperback and thumbed through the ever-boring Sherwood Gazette. For the purposes of this review it would be handy if there was a bone-house on my street but you don’t get those in residential areas. Or an ink-horn on my desk! But no, I threw away my last ink-horn in 1921. And there are very few skunks in Nottingham, y’all, except for the kind you smoke. So I got fed up with the whole idea and started a Sudoku riddle. I got the munchies even though it was past brunch and hours until lunch. I thought I’d phone for a take away. That would be dinkum, better than a trek to Tescos. “Now, what could I have, hmm… loin of pork with caramelised potato? Egg fu yung? Escalope of brock? Medallion of muggle?“ But I remembered I had no money on me so I just had a vanilla yogurt and a cup of tea. I needed to chillax - ugh, what a word, no I didn’t, this whole stupid review idea was a lot of fopdoodle - how, for instance, was I going to shoehorn a merry bridegroom with an undeaf bodgery in his pocket in without descending into bloody ridiculous contrivance? I was trying to keep it real and not have the thing sound like a page out of a Murakami novel. I lost interest in the whole thing – which may I say did not make me disinterested - the terminal confusion between UNinterest and DISinterest gets my shibboleth, and all that jazz. OK, that just makes me another fool trying to prevent the necessary change which English goes through all the time. Grammar morphs, Americanisms and dialect insinuate, and the speech-craft of the crazy kids in those webzine doobries whose neologisms edit polite speech on a daily basis show that evolution of language ain’t stopping for me nor anyone else, even though some things set my teeth on edge like those nasty PC linguistic contortions they try to foist upon us. We owe a debt to the entire gaggle of past rule-disregarders – Willie Shakespeare being a major dude in this regard.
I switched the tv on idly, channel-hopping. The music channel was some veejay schmoozing a garage band called The Strine Mipelas - they were terrible. The SF Movie channel was offering The Matrix , Species, and I Robot. I’d seen them all. Over on the news channel a dame in a taffeta skirt (what do I know?) gave me the information that another banker had been given a billion dollar bonus instead of a jail sentence. I note the top three – top three! executives at Barclays resigned in the past five days – can bankers' reps sink any lower? When you listen to these creeps you just get a riddle wrapped in the doublespeak of a wicked dragsman. They thought Nixon and his little Watergate pals were the nadir of Western corruption at the time but this latest crew – if the law ever does catch up with them they’ll all claim they have early onset Alzheimer’s and they'll skate. Do you think some people are born with unslakeable greed in their DNA? Seems to me that life used to be a lot pleasanter – back in those olden days a swain would ride a roe over a lea to see his valentine, quaff some mead and never have to worry about being unfriended in the Twittersphere. Their chattels were few, their hearts correspondingly lighter. They didn't know a killer app from a loaf of bread and to them cherry-picking meant picking cherries – lol! And try explaining the concept of having to bagonise to a swain… oh you haven't heard of that either? It's a made up word which won a competition on a radio show organised by David Crystal – it refers to those anxious moments when you're waiting for your luggage at the airport carousel. Quite cute, but no one will actually say "I had to bagonise for 45 minutes then finally saw my holdall and thought "Gotcha!" A bit silly really.
Enough of this blathering – I love this geeky book and I think you will too – there are a lakhsworth of fascinating factlets on every page. David Crystal's elevator certainly goes to the top of his high-rise, if you get my drift. I was thinking that they'd have to invent another ology just for this sort of book, but they already did – etymology. Anyway, it was grand. ...more
Bill Bryson is like the Abba of books. Everyone, your granny and your kid's teacher and your babysitter, and your mum's friends, everybody has a couplBill Bryson is like the Abba of books. Everyone, your granny and your kid's teacher and your babysitter, and your mum's friends, everybody has a couple they really like and they probably have Bill Bryson's Greatest Hits on the cd shelf too. Safest present to give to someone you know very little about : a Bill Bryson book. Oh, everyone loves him Didn't he do Dancing Queen? We danced to Notes from a Small Island at our wedding. Oh did you - A Short History of Nearly Everything was "our book". I'm in the middle of reading Knowing Me Knowing You (A Ha!) - they're so funny. And those two Bills they've got singing, well, I really fancy the blonde one. So if you get my hand in a vice and start turning the handle then I'll admit between gritted teeth that Bill can write some tuneful melodies and Abba are occasionally amusing. There. Now can I have my hand back.
Loading...
