Tag Archives: cockwombles

What people really want to know about Britain, part 21ish

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It’s time to empty the search engine questions onto the kitchen table and see what Lord Google’s sent us. The questions appear here in all their oddity. And in case you worry that I’m making fun of the people who left them, I’m 99.9% sure that not a one of them stuck around to read my answers. They came, they saw, they thought, What the hell is this?, and they left.

British History and Culture

does anyone know why the british all wore those silly-looking white wigs ?

Oh, I am so glad you asked. I hadn’t gotten a decent search engine question in weeks and I’d been starting to think Lord Google had stopped caring about me. The answer is, first, yes. I know that and, oh, so much more. Most of which I won’t tell you because, having left your question, you’re gone, aren’t you? Besides, it would scare you shitless if you knew what I do. It sure as hell worries me.

But there’s a second part of the answer, which is that they liked their wigs. They took them seriously, in no small part because the wigs allowed them to look down on the wigless–the schmucks who were so poor they had to run around–publicly yet–in their own hair. Wigs were strictly for the upper classes. Think about it. Wigs weren’t just expensive, they were in style. It’s amazing what people will wear if it’s expensive and in style.

People who could afford to had more than one. Think of the wig as the Gucci bag its day. Or if you have a Gucci bag and take it seriously and I’ve insulted  you–sorry–fill in the imaginary blank with any expensive style you do think is ridiculous.

Now, O person who’s no longer here, think about something you own and love that’s the height of fashion. Then think about yourself in forty years, looking at a picture of yourself and (or in) it. Think how silly it (and quite possibly you) are going to look. 

That’s if we’re all still around in forty years, which is looking less likely every week.

Irrelevant photo: flowers from a village produce stall. Chrysanthemums, I’m reasonably sure.

cockwomble definition scottish

Is the Scottish definition of cockwomble different than (or from) the English definition of cockwomble? Or the Welsh, Irish, or Cornish one? I’m outside my area of expertise here  –if I have an area of expertise–but that doesn’t normally stop me from sounding authoritative. So I’m going to say no, the cockwomble grew out of a kids TV show, The Wombles, which was British, not English/Scottish/etc.ish. The show grew out of a kids’ book. A band by the same name grew out of some hallucinogens. 

No, I don’t know that. I’m asserting it in complete ignorance, but I do remember a moment or two of the seventies, which is what leads me to think–

And when someone comes along and tells me I’m wrong about any of that, I’ll be happy to shove over and give them the expert’s seat.

Lord Google is besieged by people asking about a link between cockwombles and Scotland. I know this because I asked him about it myself. I can’t find any reason to think the link exists, but if enough people ask eventually a link of sorts will be cobbled together.

cockwomble oxford english dictionary

I’m sure there’s a cockwomble working at the Oxford English Dictionary. There’s one anyplace with a staff of more than six. There might even be a definition of cockwomble in there somewhere. Dictionaries have gone refreshingly lowbrow these days. But what’s the question doing here instead of at the OED?

self esteem bell ringers

Y’know, I hate the phrase self-esteem. Or maybe it’s not the phrase but the idea. It strikes me as a short answer to a long and complicated question. I don’t trust it. But when you add it to something as noisy as church bells, it gets really annoying. Can we limit the bell ringing to people who don’t feel so damn good about themselves, please?

But since I slammed the question into the British Culture section–and I take these categories seriously, I’ll have you know–I’d better explain that bell ringing is a thing here. There used to be competitions. Maybe there still are.

And with that I’ve exhausted most of what I know on the subject. I’ll just sneak out quietly before anybody notices. 

anglo-saxon england notes

It was your class, sweetie. You’re the one who was supposed to be taking notes.

what were debtors called in great britain

Debtors. Also things like Alfred, Harry, James– Occasionally you might get a Sarah or something along those lines, but with the power to contract debts solidly in the hands of men, that seems to have been less common.

why do we eat brussel sprouts for christmas

Because Santa’s moved on from that coal-in-the-stocking routine. Times change, dear.

berwick on tweed at war with germany

No, no, no. It’s Russia that Berwick on Tweed isn’t at war with even though a lot of people think it is. Germany? Berwick also isn’t at war with Germany, but nobody except one late-night person messing around on the internet thinks it might be.

Although I suppose Berwick can not be at war with one country as easily as with another. Or with all of them at once. With the state the world’s in, it’s good to hear of someplace that isn’t at war. Even if it’s not a country and doesn’t have an army.

perwick island still at war

Look! We’ve got another variation on the theme of Berwick not being at war with Russia.

Lord Google couldn’t lead me to any Perwick Islands, but he doesn’t insist on precise spelling and told me instead about three Berwick Islands. One is in (or off) Australia, one is ditto in relation to Louisiana, and the third to South Carolina. After that we get to Lerwick, on the Shetland Islands.

None of them are at war with anyone. Isn’t that marvelous?

I’m learning so much about how rumors start.

how to pronounce tunnel

This is a perfectly sensible question, given how badly English-language pronunciation aligns with English-language spelling. Unfortunately, this is not a sensible place. Try a dictionary, friend. 

British Politics

supine stem of confiteor

This is a phrase our prime minister dropped into a speech to a bunch of blank-faced school kids, apparently in an effort to convince them that education was exciting and that they’d look back on these days as–well, who knows? The best days of their lives? A time when they’ll learn useless phrases they can later throw into a speech when they have no idea what point they’re supposed to be making? 

In a career that’s long on incoherence, this wasn’t Johnson’s most coherent speech. But it did follow his pattern of being able to say stupid things in Latin. Or partially in Latin. Most of it was in English, but nobody understood that part either.

when did the uk go metric

Some time ago, in a moment of Euro-madness. Or make that several moments of Euro-madness, and I’d give you an actual date but the country crept up on metricosity in stages, giving us one date for petrol (which if you’re American is gas) and diesel, another date for certain types of alcohol, no date at all for beer, at least in pubs, because it’s still sold in imperial measures, and–well, you get the drift. 

Now that we’re leaving the European Union, will we go back to our state of pre-metric innocence? Innocence is hard to recapture and I suspect the shift would be too much trouble for even the most hard-nosed Brexiteers, but I may be underestimating them. Or overestimating them. Or I may be, as a karate teacher I once studied with liked to say, overexaggerating. 

Americans in Britain

baking powder biscuit in england

Outside of my house, you won’t find a single baking powder biscuit in England. You’ll find scones, which are made with baking powder, but they’re a different thing. You’ll also find biscuits, which we Americans–being the perverse creatures that we are–call cookies, and they’re generally with baking powder too, but they’re not baking powder biscuits, they’re just biscuits. Made with baking powder

Are you confused yet? Then you’re getting into the spirit of the thing.

Baking powder biscuits look like scones but they’re not as sweet. 

Yeah, but what about cheese scones. They’re not sweet. 

We’re leaving them out of the conversation because they’ll only leave crumbs on the floor. They’re also different from baking powder biscuits, but (other than the cheese) I can’t explain why. It’s something you just have to take on faith.

You eat baking powder biscuits like bread: with a meal, without a meal, to mop up the gravy, with butter, with jam. The only thing you can’t do with them is toast them because you’ll never get them out of the toaster in one piece. 

Baking powder biscuits are a southern thing. They’re a Black thing. They’re a wonderful thing, and mostly we just call them biscuits. What they’re not is an English thing. Or (since this is probably what the question meant) a British thing. Americans are still trying to work out the difference between England and Britain. What do you expect from us? We still haven’t figured out the difference between the United States and America in general.

Questions that Defy Categorization

Britishfonot

I thought I’d include it so you’d understand how strange it gets around here. Even without my intervention. I have no idea what it means.

how to politely reject the award

You mean on those special occasions when saying, “Fuck you, this is meaningless,” just won’t do? 

It’s not that hard. You start by saying thank you. Then you explain that you don’t do awards. If your reason is that they’re meaningless, you’ll want to keep it to yourself because you’re being polite, remember? If your reason is something inoffensive, you explain it. Then you get out of there while everyone’s still smiling. 

You’re welcome. I’m going to start an advice blog any day now, with a side of good manners and another one of cole slaw.

amazon

Somebody asked to find Amazon and Lord Google sent them to me. That must mean I rank higher than Amazon.

Would you like a side of cole slaw with that?

Exploring British profanity

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Not long ago, someone in an online conversation said that as she gets older she has less “inclination to tolerate the presence of cockwombles.”

The presence of what?

The cockwomble in question was our local Member of Parliament, Scott Mann (the only people I name in this blog are public figures, but if you run for office, sorry, you’re fair game), so I went ahead hit Like. Then I headed for the internet to figure out what I’d agreed with.

According to the Register, “The origin of this very rude term is unclear, although it’s thought to have first surfaced on an online football forum. For those of you unfamiliar with the word, it has been summarised as someone ‘possessing properties of striking idiocy.’ “

The summary the Register’s quoting is on the b3ta dictionary. In case you need to know that.

Irrelevant photo: Tintagel Castle. Photo by Ida Swearingen.

Irrelevant photo: Tintagel Castle. Photo by Ida Swearingen.

But with something this absurd, no single definition is enough. And I wanted to know more about the word’s origin, so I followed a link that promised me the origins of nine “Great British” insults.

Just for the sake of unclarity, I should say that the site could have been promising great insults but could also have meant that they were mediocre insults from Great Britain. Its headline style capitalized most words—never mind which ones; it’s never quite as simple as it seems and you don’t really care, do you?—which meant that Great would get capitalized whichever meaning it had.

As it turned out, the site was a disappointment. Three of the insults were American as well as British (clodhopper; nincompoop; lummox), and cockwomble wasn’t one of the nine.

I love Google. It adds such a layer of pointlessness, to my life.

Anyway, I moved on and found a cycling forum (no, I have no idea; the tides of the internet sweep my intellectual raft to some very strange places) that had hosted (and not taken down) a discussion about the meaning of cockwomble. I came away convinced that no one can define it but that everyone will use it anyway.

Which leads me to ask: If no one can define an insult, is it possible to use it inaccurately? It’s too deep a question to go into here, but I raise it in case you want to give it some thought yourself. As an editor, I saw such gloriously misused words that I started a collection, and soon friends were adding to it. My favorite came from a college philosophy paper: “When we contemplate the obesity of the universe, we know there must be a god.”

After reading that, I understood our cats better. They weren’t lying around doing nothing; they were contemplating the obesity of the universe. I could never tell whether ornot they believed in god.

But back to the cycling forum. Highlights of the discussion include—.

Sorry, but I have to interrupt myself again. The contributors were coyly reluctant to swear but were convinced that if they substituted an asterisk for a U no one would know they were swearing.

Is U a bad letter or is something else going on here?

At the exact same time, they believed that everyone would understand what they meant, and these two beliefs cancel each other out so thoroughly that holding them both at the same time should make the believer’s head explode, but that must be a delayed effect, because once that happens you can’t post anymore. And these people were posting.

Anyway, the most vivid definitions were: “a less sweary f*ckMuppet,” “somebody in charge of a department of a local authority” (translation for those who need it: authority here means government), and “anyone who disagrees with you on an internet forum.”

So much for the wisdom of bikers. Or cyclists, as I think people say here.

Collins English Dictionary defines a cockwomble it as a Scottish football administrator. (“Approval status: pending investigation.” Um, yeah, I’d say.)

My search (I only do this, folks, so you don’t have to) then led me to Buzzfeed. How did I get there? By following a come-on that said, “Know your bawbag from your wazzock.” Well, I didn’t know my bawbag from my wazzock, so I clicked through and learned that, being of the female persuasion, I don’t have a bawbag. I understand that many of the people who possess them can’t imagine life without them, but any number of us manage quite well without them.

Do I resent bawbag owners who can’t imagine that every random stranger they meet on the internet might not have one on hand? You bet your ass I do, but not enough to spend much time on it. Especially since bawbag might be used the way cunt is in Britain. In other words, it may be one of those miraculous and logic-defying insults that’s applies to any gender you can think of, even though it’s about as gender specific as you can get. In which case, I can use one as easily as the next guy, so maybe I do need to know it from my wazzock.

But this is all kind of academic since it’s Scottish and I’m not likely to hear it much down here in Cornwall. And if that makes me sound defensive, it’s because I don’t want to dent my reputation for the sparkling use of profanity. I’ve sworn ever since I understood the words. Or before I understood the words, if you want the truth. What I understood was their power. Now that I’m 603, though, I apparently look like someone who wouldn’t swear, which goes to show you how deceptive looks can be and adds an element of (a) hilarity or (b) shock to the exercise.Either one’s fine by me.

But I should stop bragging and tell you what a wazzock is. It’s a northern word for an idiot, so it’s not exactly swearing. We do have idiots in Cornwall, in roughly the same proportion as you’ll find them in the rest of the world, but we don’t seem to have wazzocks. Which is kind of a pity. It’s a great word.

So I learned something, but it wasn’t about cockwombles. They weren’t mentioned.

In a final burst of intellectual curiosity, I looked up womble, because I still wanted to understand the word’s origin. A womble, it turns out, is a furry, pointy-nosed creature that lives in a burrow and helps the environment by collecting rubbish and recycling it. In case it’s not already clear, wombles are fictional. They were created by Elisabeth Beresford and apparently escaped her books and took refuge on TV.

Maybe you need to have spent a few years watching the wombles to understand the insult.

Periodically, someone me asks why, after ten years in Britain, I still sound so American. My answer is usually that I don’t pick up accents in English, and that’s true as far as it goes. But it’s also true that if I did pick up accents, at my age the best I’d manage would be a kind of mid-Atlantic accent and vocabulary.

That means that if there’s a way to misuse cockwomble, I’d misuse it. And if there isn’t, I’d misuse some other word I’d just gotten hold of and wanted to show off. I’d contemplate the obesity of the universe. I’d mistake my nonexistent bawbag for my all-too-existent inner wazzock. Because swear words are rooted deeply in the culture. You can’t listen for ten minutes and get them right.

A belated note here for anyone who dislikes swearing. If you’ve gotten this far. I respect your feelings, but I don’t share them. For me, swearing’s an integral part of any language, and what’s considered to be swearing depends on each culture’s taboos. The whole subject is fascinating.

I can swear a bit in Spanish, and a bit less in French and Greek. (My Greek vocabulary consists of something like ten words, so you should be impressed that I know anything this useful, thanks.) But if I get the words wrong in a foreign language, or use them in an odd way, my accent will explain my absurdity and somebody will have a good laugh—and I’ll join in if I figure out what the joke is, which I probably won’t. But in English, my profanity has its roots in the U.S. of no-cockwombles A. I understand American swearing.

British swearing, though? Not really And you can’t use an insult unless you have a feel for its meaning, its context, its impact.

I’m not assimilated enough for that. So it is with great sadness that I report the following: I will not be calling our MP a cockwomble.