Some of us read Chap before it sold out and started printing in color.
I'll give you what for, you impudent twat.
Speaking of "what" in its (obsolete?) Chap-ish sentence-ending exclamatory sense, I've never definitively sussed out what connotation, if any, this usage carries. Contextually it rarely seems as though corroboration is being sought. Rather, I generally read it as a preemptive "just so" in agreement with oneself. Is this interpretation on the mark?
7: You mean like certain bloggers use "no?", no?
Elective affinities
Say what?
What.
Hrmmm:
Fastest Tache in BritainI first read that as 'Fascist Tache in Britain'.
max
['It's the Mustache of Goosestepping!']
Elective affinities
I really like that book, in spite of myself. The part where the married couple has sex with each other while each thinking about their actual beloveds, and in so doing conceive a kid who looks like those two people? That's pretty silly.
7: You mean like certain bloggers use "no?", no?
Pues este uso es bastante comun en espanol, no?
Aloof, impartial, incorruptible arbiter of the political fate of a large part of the earth's surface (Quote in the Wikipedia article on "pukka sahib.")
I think "what?" as a sentence ending operates -- in chapese -- more or less like the latin interrogative adverbs num and nonne, which appear at the start of questions expecting the answers no and yes respectively. (You can tell which it expects by the context.) (That is, if you can't tell which is expected, you must not be a chap...)
I have never encountered a non-joking real-life delivery* of this formula, which I would think was at its apogee in the 20s and 30s and died out in the 50s or early 60s.
*Possible exception: the Queen's consort Prince Philip, but even he would be using it as a kind of jokey presentation of self. And I have anyway never encountered him. Though he occasionally posts on Crooked Timber.
13: (Quote in the Wikipedia article on "pukka sahib.")
Bowling the Taleban a Googly'If we could just teach these lads to play cricket, they'd be on the road to civilization. Look at what it's done for the Hindus!'
Ex-Army officer uses the noble sport of cricket to try and tackle the hot-headed warlords of Helmand
max
['Right, then!']
@7: to clarify, it expects the answer yes or no, as per the latin, but it does not at all necessarily expect this answer to be vocalised, because -- as spoken interrogatively to a fellow chap -- why on earth would they be disagreeing?
The characters in fiction I most associate it with are the hghly anachronistic King Pellinore and Sir Grummore Grummorsum in T. H. White's "The Once and Future King", both Knights of the Round Table. I think even in its heyday it involved an element of self-parody.
The "googly" sentence is a bit undermined by the fact that the Pakistani Test Team are somewhat notorious for their skill at this kind of super-deceptive spin bowling (local pitch and weather conditions greatly favour it); its very slyness puts it right at the edge of the British notion of fair play being nvoked there -- there are routinely arguments about whether the cricket ball has been tampered with to produce the spin or swerve or whatever... so its "nobility", in this example, has to be a little in question!
A googly being a leg-break that spins from off to leg, of course. You knew that, though.
Isn't the sentence ending "what" a Germanism? I vaguely remember a lot of sentences there ending in "was.". Or, more like "wa'". Don't know if that's regional or my completely inaccurate memory.
19: A googly being a leg-break that spins from off to leg, of course. You knew that, though.
No, I did not, old sod, although I knew the term was cricketish, and I know the move itself.
max
['I was just struck by the 'Look, lads! The Empire is back. Well, it's not our Empire, but any empire in a pinch I say!' sensibility.']
My initution is that Chapese-as-per-that-mag was at its height in the 20s and 30s, so -- while not actually post-Empire -- it's a manifestation more of its coming to self-awareness of its mortality than it is the unselfconscious inter-imperialist lingo of empire at its zenith (which would be c.1880-1910), which was a much more inventive, stranger, casually impenetrable mix of Public School slang, Latin, Greek and borrowed words from various far-flung stations in the colonies (such as pukka and sahib...)
In English children's stories pre and post the first world war there's a distinct shift in tone and cultural confidence about this whole terrain (school being its primary vector): before you went to school to begin your adventures in the world; afterwards, school was what you escaped for your adventures in the world -- and the argot you were escaping had become a kind of mannerist echo of itself, appealing to dullards more than vanguardists...
OED: "As an interrogative expletive (sometimes with eh usually at the end of a sentence, esp. in recent trivial or affected colloq. use." Its first citation feeling sufficiently Chappy is from 1891, and it is fully Wodehousian in a 1914 citation.
Close parenthesis s/b in the appropriate place above.
Prince Phillip posts at Crooked Timber??
20: Perhaps you are remembering Nigel Hawthorne's performance as George III in The Madness of King George (Nicholas Hytner, 1994). Actual Germans punctuate their sentences by yelling "Ja, sehr gut!" and then drinking some beer out of a large commemorative stein.
It's not exactly a social history -- it was a semi-pointed, semi-affectionate satire made in 1943 -- but Powell and Pressburger's "Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" traces the arc of a particular generational fashion, with Roger Livesey's Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy as a character moving from before ww1, when he's the smart young thing, a highly educated, fairly intelligent, decent army fellow, through to the 40s, when he's a dated old buffer being shunted aside and laughed at by the influx of an entirely new breed (and to some extent class) of officer, urgently battling a far nastier foe: Livesey "whats" his way through the whole film, and you get a sense of a extant subculture that he's drawn to in his youth, that's gone when his time is done.
(A substory of the film is that Wynne-Candy speaks excellent German, which ever so slightly speaks to Di's suggestion...)
While it's true that fans did mimic Wodehouse a little, his hyper-stylised discourse largely existed only in his own head: Wooster isn't really a Chap, I wouldn't say; nor's Lord Peter Wimsey, who also falls into the lingo now and then. In the latter case, it's a kind of protective colouring.
oo I'd totally forgotten George III: as far as I recall, Alan Bennett says he based the speaking style on actuality... I'll have to go look that up. I think it was an anomaly in its day rather than the style, though.
Bennett: "This verbal habit of the King's [he uses the full "what-what"] was presumably the attempt of a nervous and self-conscious man to prevent the conversation from flagging, always a danger in chats with the monarch as the subject is never certain whether he or she is expected to reply or when." Apparently it died off when he went mad; and its return was greeted with relief, as a sign of his improvement.
I think it's time to bring what-ho into this, what-ho?
More seriously, wouldn't the trailing "what" play the same role as "eh" or the finalreuse in tone found in uptalk, to wit a request for confirmation from the interlocutor?
Is "what-ho" a sentence-ending interrogative?
finalreuse in tone found in uptalk
"finalreuse" when the uptalker is a valley girl, "finalreur" when a male surfer.
"What-ho" is usually more like a refined version of "hey you" -- it's a way of attracting attention, as in "What-ho! Jeeves"
the finalreuse in tone found in uptalk
Fantastic. I now know what that's called. Thanks unfogged Sifu!
16 & 18: That's pretty much as I had thought; it's not as though the speaker allows for the possibility of contradiction so there's really no "interrogatory" aspect to the usage except as to form (as in the OED description at 23). This is consistent with the non-inflected delivery I can ever recall having heard (Blimp bring a fine example--far from my favorite P&P film, but extraordinary in its achievement of fleshing out a baggage-laden caricature to create a portrait too fully and sympathetically conceived to be reduced to mere satire, yet certainly no apologia).
the finalreuse in tone found in uptal
And yet it's knife sharpening that supposedly marks the blog as unrepresentative of ordinary America.
So "finalreuse" was a typo or something, right? What the hell was Sifu on about?
Also, 36 accords more with my 30-incompatible sense than does 35.
41.1: It sounded good. I didn't look it up. I just liked the term "uptalk" given how obviously descriptive it is.
"Uptalk" is the standard term. I don't know what "finalreuse" was supposed to be.
Someone I know taught the word "lad" to a group of eight-year-old students, who then started saying "What up, my lads?"
Pukka sahib seeks finalreuse for googly and doosra. No Pakis need apply.
46: I used slol's original formulation as the headline in a craigslist personal once, only to find that it was deleted, probably because of the NINA clause. Buncha humorless gits over there. Next up: "where all the highminded snoots at?".
"finalreuse" was supposed to be "final rise in pitch used", I believe. iPhones value brevity over comprehensibility, it turns out.
I thought maybe it was a phase in the Programmer's Rapture.
"where all the highminded snoots at?"
This would be fantastic for culling for those with either a very particular sense of humor, or complete jackasses. You should try it.
Is the NINA clause an important factor here? For I know not what it is.
48: iPhones value brevity over comprehensibility, it turns out.
How very Googly.
max
['Lads, there's an iPhone user on the internet, so some of you may not be coming back.']
Is the NINA clause an important factor here? For I know not what it is.
"No Irish Need Apply."
Followed by the PINTA* clause "Polynesian Islanders Need To Apply".
*Referred to as the "Tiki clause" by fucking racists.
Huh, is interesting:
The issue of job discrimination against Irish immigrants to the United States is a hotly debated issue among historians, with some insisting that the "No Irish need apply" signs so familiar to the Irish in memory were myths, and others arguing that not only did the signs exist, but that the phrase was also seen in print ads and that the Irish continued to be discriminated against in various professions into the 20th century
I'm mildly shocked to hear that this is the subject of debate; I thought it was very widely accepted.
I do like the puckish sense of humor that led some Wikipedian to illustrate this passage with a Help Wanted ad from an 1854 issue of the New York Times.
Les Baxter Presents: A Red Line's Just A Hula Hoop For Sharing
I do like the puckish sense of humor that led some Wikipedian to illustrate this passage with a Help Wanted ad from an 1854 issue of the New York Times.
Yeah, it makes the whole thing seem pretty cut and dried.
55 should have been "The Wikipedia article is interesting."
The revisionist article linked from Wikipedia is better footnoted than most of its type, but I'm still going to go with my initial assumption that it's the bad kind of revisionist, 'cause I'm humorless like that.
In related news, I found out that one of the attendees at last night's Halloween party had considered coming as a terrorist, but did not because "[Witt] would be offended." Torn between feeling grateful that at least something stopped him, and angry that it had to be an external finger-wagger rather than his own conscience.
(I rather suspect his wife was happy to palm it off on me, which is understandable from the standpoint of domestic harmony, but still annoying.) How about not being a terrorist because it's a stupid racist uncreative costume?
I went as a terrorist one halloween. Don't worry, though. I was a disco terrorist.
Halloween is next weekend!
I will be wearing a crown of thorns.
FACT: whilst assembling the crown out of rose branches, I pricked my thumb such that a little drop of blood was capable of being welled out. Nevertheless, I think it would be unwise for me to create any woundes rede.
Stupid public health concerns combined with the knowledge that that would be overcommitting to the bit if anything would be!
Yeah, you shouldn't give yourself stigmata. Instead you get them from laser-beam-shooting doves, as depicted in medieval art.
Nosflow, you say overcommitting, I say commendable effort to enter into the spirit of things.
(Or rather, be entered into by the spirit as it were.)
Nothing could be more of a stigma than my cursed handsomeness anyway.
Oh wait, usually not doves. Laser-beam-shooting-wingèd-miniature-Jesuses.
Torn between feeling grateful that at least something stopped him, and angry that it had to be an external finger-wagger rather than his own conscience.
Huh. My sense of humor stops there; I'm afraid I wouldn't be grateful, just disgusted. It would be tough if the person were a friend/acquaintance.
Although. Thinking again: some of my extended family are homophobes, and have adjusted some of their behavior because I think they've begun to figure out that my brother is gay. So. Grateful. Small, small inroads.
Not that there's any parallel between terrorism and homosexuality.
Not that there's any parallel between terrorism and homosexuality.
Well now, wait. Let's unpack this.
Abortions for some! Miniature Jesuses with lasers for others!
Let's unpack this.
Feel free. I'm mostly just embarrassed now because I entered humorless mode at the same time that neb was explaining that he's going to wear a crown of thorns for halloween. Say what?
The revisionist article linked from Wikipedia is better footnoted than most of its type
It did get published in a well-respected peer-reviewed journal and is by someone who appears to be retired now, but had a long academic career. Of course it's going to be well-footnoted. I haven't read it, don't know the author's work, and have no opinion on the matter. Also, I'm writing something due tomorrow so I'm not going to look further.
So what's to say? On Halloween I am going to wear a crown of thorns.
71: Cool. I'm going to make some popcorn.
No one's going to try to tie the thread together with the phrase "Ecce Homo"?
I would like to point out that the French sometimes end their statements in "quoi" (I picked it up in the most embarrassingly valley-girl way) and the Germans I knew did the functional equivalent with "oder" (again, despite my pathetic German, I picked this one up too). I don't think either interjection carried a chappie connotation.*
*In French I know it didn't because I picked it up originally from the dub-over to "Clueless." They translated "what-ever!" as "Tu reves, quoi!"
and the Germans I knew did the functional equivalent with "oder"
I tend to say a lot of things that sort of trail off and end in "or...", usually to express uncertainty about what I just said or as a way of acknowledging a skeptical look someone is giving me. (Sometimes I get a very literal "Or what?" in response, and am left saying "Or... something?") I'm not completely sure if I picked it up when spending too much with Germans.
But with these Germans it really wasn't a trailing off, just a verbal tic expressing a certain polite diffidence.
"It's long," said the Knight, "but it's very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it - either it brings tears to their eyes, or else-"
They translated "what-ever!" as "Tu reves, quoi!"
I thought that was "n'importe quoi" (which, in my limited experience hearing French in France was used in situations where "whatever" would have been an appropriate translation.) Do you mean "as if"?
But with these Germans it really wasn't a trailing off, just a verbal tic expressing a certain polite diffidence.
"Verwendet", remarks my dictionary, "am Ende e-s Satzes, wenn der Sprecher Zustimmung erwartet od. sich erhofft": making it quite like "nonne" (except for placement) or perhaps "innit".
I wonder why the dictionary's Abkürzungtreib, the same which led to "e-s" and "od." for "eines" and "oder", did not extend to "s." for "sich", which must also occur quite frequently.
n'importe quoi in its slangy usage is a sort of derisive term, in certain situations loosely corresponding to 'crap' or 'bullshit' e.g. 'c'est du n'importe quoi' 'mais tu dis n'importe quoi'
I recently heard a native English speaker end a sentence with a very German "or so". It was weird.
Or more directly like "right?", amirite?
The Germans have all those little interjectory words they thrown in all over the place. In the case of 'whatever' I think the closest corresponding term in meaning is 'oder so'
English doch doesn't have those kinds of word alors.
English doch doesn't have those kinds of word alors.
I don't even know why you might think that.
With nice chappy hat, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pqC563bX_w
Do you mean "as if"?
No, I remember it really vividly. Alicia Silverstone would be all making the W with her fingers and the smoky French overdub would go "Tu reves, quoi." Either that or "je reve, quoi." Fuck.
Guess I didn't hear enough French slang, then. I heard "n'importe quoi" in the context of a child not wanting to do a chore said child's parent wanted done.
74
I don't think either interjection carried a chappie connotation.
Isn't a "chappie connotation" unique to the culture of upper-class, early-to-mid-20th century Britain (or deliberate throwbacks to that era, etc.)? If so, then no, even word-for-word translations of chappie speech into other languages wouldn't have its connotations, and certainly not a closing interjection alone, which comes in many varieties. Dub a 1930s British man's speech into a modern person and it would sound more like a chav than a chap.
I don't talk in rambling, meandering speech very often, just because I'm not the talkative type, but when it happens I think I end my sentences with "you know" and similar phrases. As uncommonly as I do that in English, it's far more rare in French, of course, but in those situations I think I'd use "quoi" like you.
90: "Tu reves, quoi" seems much more likely than "je reve, quoi".
91: Sure, I could believe a child saying "whatever" to an unwelcome chore, and that's the meaning of "n'importe quoi" I learned.
Not upper-class so much as mid to upper middleclass I think: anyway that's what I was getting at when excluding Wooster and Wimsey from echt chappism, above. The upper classes are comfy enough dealing with it but not of it. (By upper I guess I mean the aristocracy or the born-to-comfort: chappism definitely entails an overlap with the professional classes -- actually having to do stuff. "So-and-so: very able, what?" Not a description that the upper classes need to seek for themselves: they can carry on whether or not they do anything... )
A googly being a leg-break that spins from off to leg, of course.
Or the successful completion of an amazing or difficult Google search: "You found a recipe for Cambodian mouse testicle soup on a Geocities page? Good show! That was a wicked googly, what?"
Armstrong and Miller get a lot of comedy mileage out of the combination of 'chap' accents and modern dialogue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtW-BMpxEZ0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCPGcNKBKwo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DR3vGUOVUA&feature=related
These videos are not available in my country due to a copyright restriction!
The revisionist article linked from Wikipedia is better footnoted than most of its type, but I'm still going to go with my initial assumption that it's the bad kind of revisionist, 'cause I'm humorless like that.
The argument seems to be of the form that many Irish immigrants found employment, therefore discrimination against them must not have been significant. I guess none of the journal reviewers were Iranians Mexicans Latino immigrants.
I'll have to watch some of the RAF sketches instead. Or possibly not instead.
Those were links to their RAF sketches.