BUFFOONER BUFFOONER

BEING A LINGUIST, PEOPLE OFTEN ASK ME, “David, what does ‘Bafana Bafana’ mean, and why is the South African team given such a name?” The short answer to this question, of course, used to be “I have no idea”, although I do now, after some research. However, on discovering that the meaning of the double use of the word ‘bafana’ makes it plural, i.e. ‘bafana’ means ‘boy” and ‘bafana bafana’ means ‘boys’, I am now intrigued by the possibilities opened up by this curious formation of plural nouns in whatever of the nineteen official languages of South Africa this expression happens to be.

CURIOUS ASPECTS OF LANGUAGES always interest me more than the languages themselves, which in themselves tend to interest me more than the people who speak them, unless the strangeness of the language indicates some quirk of the people that might be worth looking into. Indeed, fringe languages often show fringe mentalities.

SOMEHOW I HAVE IMAGINED THAT common words like Llanfairpwyllgwyngyll or Blaenauffestiniog give us an insight into the deranged minds of the Welsh people, as well as their confusing of the sounds ‘p’ and ‘q’, enabling them to turn the Latin quinque into pimp, while writing it as ‘pump’. It may equally be true that the last remaining use of the inflected infinitive and future subjunctive in Portuguese shows that they need to be doubly sure that they know who they are talking to, possibly because those to whom they are talking may not be listening.

I OFTEN WISH THAT CERTAIN ASPECTS of these strange tongues could be assimilated into our own, straightforward language. If this were possible, I would gladly use the repeated noun instead of the plural simply for effect. Political writings could be vastly improved by this technique, particularly in these days of the coalition government, which, in its attempts to “cut costs”, yet be “inclusive”, has managed to make record claims for ministerial expenses, possibly because we have two ministers where we used to have one. All of this shows that David Cameron’s idea of a “small government” is a load of ball ball.

WHAT PART OF FOREVER DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?

RICH, LANDED CONSERVATIVES AND VAMPIRES have many things in common, as we discovered when one of the recent spate of unsuccessful Tory Party leaders in opposition was our noble yet instantly forgettable Romanian Dracula Michael Howard (pictured above), but it would be begging belief to imagine that the “swing” towards conservatism in the United Kingdom might have anything to do with a parallel in a bloodthirsty interest in vampires and all things to do with sucking the life blood out of otherwise healthy unemployed gadabouts and busty tavern girls.

YET THIS APPEARS TO BE THE TARGET for the Conservative government and their vegetable-leaf hangers-on the LibDems: the life blood of the weak and unprotected. All of this coincides with the growing success of the tasteless and ill-filmed Twilight movies, based on the abnormally poor writing of the novels, coming together to produce a sort of flailing Kung-Fu of the Twenty-Tens.

IN ENTERTAINMENT TERMS, NO ONE in their right mind would wide-berth a bit of necking of an attractive youngster by someone who knows what they are doing, which is why the Twilight movies and novels are as successful as any Dracula and/or rape and pillage soft-core fantasy adventure work may be, whether in medieval garb or in the horrendous Ugg boots, big hair rollers and floppy summer dresses that today’s female vampire victims appear to wear while they are waiting to join the ranks of those who will become lesbians and suck blood forever. And the remarkably Glee-ful Cee Lo Green track for Eclipse will no doubt lead the underhand erotic film franchise even further into success.

BUT THE PART OF FOREVER THAT the Conservative Party does not understand is clear: as they announce an increase in the retirement age, scaled from 66 to 70 years old “over the near future”, with reductions in benefits for all and sundry, they do not realize that not everyone has a stately home somewhere, and that making factory and farm workers stay in work forever is worse than biting them in the neck.

BOY GEORGE UNCOVERED

THE EMERGENCY BUDGET PRESENTED yesterday by George “Boy Gideon” Osborne (see Sunday Morning, October 2009) must be one of the clearest misnomers of recent times, suggesting that there is truth in the allegation that George hasn’t a clue about what he is doing. The word “emergency” (it says here in my dictionary) means “pressing necessity” and “requiring immediate action”. Thus, a budget that leaves its most important measure to come into effect only in January 2011 should really not be granted this name. And after all the alarmist hoo-hah, one wonders what the fuss was all about. If there is not howling, wailing and a-gnashing of teeth at the moment then the Chancellor cannot be doing what he threatened to do, although, as a good Conservative, he has hammered both single and married women, state school children, the disabled, working class families and the lumpen. The fact that they will not really feel the pain until next year means that Boy George really does want to hurt them, but taunt them first.

YET THERE ARE THOSE WHO are miffed in the short term about the immediate response to the budget announcements made by normally dull and soft-spoken Harriet Harman, deputy leader of what is left of the Labour Party. It is not common for a politician to describe a fellow MP as a “fig leaf”, so when Harman singled out the most conspicuous fig leaves among the LibDems some members of the house who have not had training in classical painting and sculpture were slightly confused. Describing Nick Clegg as Davy Cameron’s fig leaf as well as Vince Cable and Danny Alexander, the two most prominent LibDems in ministerial positions, as Tory fig leaves was not perhaps the best attack on the idiotic coalition of two parties who could not have been more antagonistic in the election campaign, but it was enough.

IN THE SAME DICTIONARY AS ABOVE, it says that a fig leaf “covers up something disgusting or embarrassing”. I am not sure who wrote this dictionary entry, but I am reliably informed by an imaginary friend I sometimes talk to that a fig leaf usually covers up “a penis and testicles”.

RAINBOW WORRIERS

THE LATEST FOOTBALL WORLD CUP competition has started off as lively as one could have imagined, played as it is in a nation in which there are more killings per day than in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Israel put together. In my opinion some of the newspapers and journalists have exaggerated the importance of the robberies and assaults on members of their profession while in their hotels or when out covering the football matches; one reporter today was at pains to point out that “there are petty thefts at hotels all over the world”, which is indeed true, although I doubt that many of these in Britain are carried out by a band of six masked men carrying Uzis, as was the case recently in South Africa.

HOWEVER, THE WORLD CUP is all about football, of which there has been precious little up to now. The perennial favourites, Italy, Germany, Argentina and Brazil, have all played by now, and none have impressed overmuch, yet all seem to have that boring steel that will see one of them lift the trophy. It would be unfair to compare them, given that they have played somewhat different opponents in these first games, but if I were a betting man, which I am, I might be tempted to have a flutter on Uruguay, two time champions who have not won the trophy since the days of black and white television. So conspicuous is this fact that the BBC’s Gary Lineker recently called them the “champions of the black and white days”. A sure pointer for them to win in South Africa.

AND ONCE AGAIN WE ARE ALL SURPRISED by the Koreas. Whether it is the one that makes most of our cars and appliances or the one we will soon reduce to rubble, ruins and ashes along with Iran when we collectively test out our latest version of what used to be called the “Atom Bomb”, both of these countries are going toe-to-toe with the big boys in the footballing world. One wishes the North Korean spirit of joyous triumph could be shared by many so-called “free” countries, forever moaning about financial “crashes” and “belt tightening”.

ALTHOUGH JUNG-MOO HUH, manager of North Korea, refuses to talk to the press unless they refer to his country as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (which no one does), Jong-Hun Kim, of South Korea, also known as Korea Republic, and his players attribute their stamina to the consumption of ginseng. There is no doubt that ginseng is a great help when one needs that extra little bit of energy, and I am never without a decent supply of the “man root” in my bathroom closet, but I find it somewhat difficult to believe that it would enable me to perform at a high level for 90 minutes.

COME ON YOU LIB-DEMS

A HEALTHY LAPSUS LINGUAE may often turn out to have some profound hidden meaning which reveals that the speaker was really thinking about something else at the time of allowing the slip to out. Or on occasion it may set a generous mind into action to try to discover what might be the true meaning of the mistake when applied ‘deliberately’ as if it were not a lapse but a true statement. Thus I was intrigued when I was watching Anna Jones on Sky News recently talking about our good Prime Minister’s plans to apply a hefty increase to students’ tuition fees as from next year.

THE INTERESTING ASPECT ABOUT this entirely predictable announcement by the Conservative Party is the question of how this will be received by the Liberal Democrat members of the coalition government, given that in the election campaign Nick “Deputy Headmaster” Clegg had promised that his party would abolish university tuition fees entirely.

AWARE OF THIS PROBLEMATIC SITUATION, but living in a TV world in which one cannot spend ten minutes without news about England football team and its role in the World Cup, Anna Jones commented “Well I wonder how this Conservative policy will go down with Liberal Democrat fans…” She immediately corrected herself, and perhaps did not even notice the mistake, but at this time of both football and political craziness I began to imagine that the word “fans” might indeed be the appropriate term for those who follow our political parties in earnest.

A GOOD ENGLAND FOOTBALL FAN only really gets involved in activities proper about every four years, as is the case at the moment, in South Africa. Generally the fan is hopeful-ish about victory, but does not really harbour any illusions. The best one hopes for is the third and fourth place play-off. But it is a good opportunity to do a bit of shouting, spend a bit of money and, as is sometimes said, “put oneself about a bit”. One can wear the team colours, preach about the virtues of the “side”, clap and cheer and then go back home again, perhaps after a little drink or two, or perhaps more, and wait for the next tournament in four years time. Now what has that got to do with Liberal Democrat fans?

LORD PRESCOTT

SIMILARLY TO AN ISSUE I DEALT with four years ago in relation to John Prescott then being the “Deputy Prime Minister”, I am concerned about whether I agree with the fact that a decent working-class ex-waiter should accept a position in the House of Lords simply because “her at home wants t’be a lady”. Mr John Prescott was an excellent MP and a decent deputy PM, despite being criticised for having an affair with a woman (nowadays it would be acceptable if he had been fooling about with another man).

ON AFFAIRS, HOWEVER, MY TAKE IS why on earth any decent gentleman should be remotely concerned about how many affairs with a secretary another gentleman has or does not have. But perhaps there is the rub: gentlemen may be forgiven for having the occasional glass of Port after work in the company of a secretary, and if one has one too many and if this leads to what is vulgarly called “sex” then this is all well and good as long as the gentleman does not tell anyone about it and the secretary does not ask for money.

INDEED, IN A SENSIBLE WORLD THIS SORT OF ACTIVITY would be compulsory. After all, everyone benefits in the end: the gentleman gets more value for money from his employee – and everyone knows that secretarial wages are a scandal nowadays – and the secretary benefits from close contact with refined, upper-class manners and visits to decent restaurants in Juan-les-Pins or Avignon perhaps, before she goes on to get married to, say, an insurance representative and settles down in Wolverhampton.

HOWEVER, THINGS CANNOT BE SEEN THROUGH the same prism when we are dealing with a member of what is laughingly called the working class. One cannot but cringe at the thought of the smell of tripe, black pudding and brown ale during a kiss, or candlelit dinners in wine bars in Putney, or the flat, twangy northern declarations of affection, using words like “lass”, or, perish the thought, copulation in the dark, which, I am reliably informed, often takes place among people who buy their underwear in supermarkets.

EVEN SO, PRESCOTT DESERVES his nobility simply for the fact that one of the highlights of an incredibly dull period of politics over the last ten years or so was the sight of the Right Hon. Member “duffing over”, as he would no doubt put it, one of those irritating hooligans who find amusement in insulting their superiors during political campaigns on a visit to some unpronounceable settlement in North Wales. I have watched with extreme horror while protesters have hurled eggs, flour and tomatoes at decent chaps who, nonetheless, have remained passive, yet all the time wished to move in with a stout hickory crop and give these unwashed curs a good thrashing. But, fortunately we have an obedient police force in England and Wales, so no doubt a thrashing is administered behind closed cell doors by blue-clad johnnies wearing what is termed “body armour” today.

SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

It is public scandal that constitutes offence,

and to sin in secret is not to sin at all.
Le Tartuffe

ONE WONDERS WHAT MOLIÈRE MIGHT BE WRITING nowadays if he had been paying attention to the behaviour of our Liberal Democrat leaders over the last twenty or thirty years. Indeed, almost every snide attack M. Poquelin made on the French nobility, court, middle class, liberals and soi-disant politicians in the early XVIII century may happily be applied to our splendid coalition partners today.

THE ‘OUTING’ OF DAVID LAWS AS A HYPOCRITE might be drawn straight out of The Misanthrope, and new boy Danny Alexander seems to be going the same way, suggesting that these chaps have simply not understood that golden rule about glass houses and throwing stones. After one speech in the House of Commons by David Laws, on Thursday 27th of May, warning MPs that they cannot expect to have their “frills paid for them”, the Daily Telegraph of Friday 28th of May outed him as having claimed for his “frills” for eight years. On Saturday 29th he resigned.

CONTINUING IN MOLIÈRE’S RICH VEIN, the Liberal Party, whether Democrat or not, has never been a school for husbands, and much less one for wives. We may go back to Jeremy Thorpe, Simon Hughes or Mark Oaten or to see an embodiment of their ideals: many of them want the libertarian freedom to indulge in smutty behaviour behind closed curtains in suburbia without telling their wives, husbands, boyfriends, children or, more importantly, voters.

DAVID CAMERON WAS SURELY WARNED by the barons who run his party that when one gets into bed with a Liberal one gets into bed with all his friends, and all their friends, and that somewhere along this daisy chain of bourgeois gentlemen there will be someone with dirty fingers. The millionaire David Laws, so secretive that his party didn’t even know his address and that he himself did not know he had been living with a male partner for eight years, was obviously a live one for Cameron. No wonder the Lib-Dems want CCTV banned.