ENGLISH, AFTER ALL, IS LANGUAGE OF THE BRITS; we only inherited it fair and square at Yorktown in ’81. So it’s not surprising that from time to time my favorite utterances originated in the King’s English (or close neighbors thereof).
On Matters Culinary. Noel Coward is credited with having noted, “England is a country with 500 political parties and one sauce.” HP, says Wikipedia, is “an icon of British culture.”
HP condiment, Image from Amazon.com.
This one has other variations from other people: Francesco Caracciolo said England has “sixty different religions and only one sauce.” I’ve also heard “only one cheese,” specifically cheddar.
The English Breakfast. W. Somerset Maugham commented, “To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.”
Image by Joadi from Wikipedia.
Mystery writer Dorothy Sayers agreed: “What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages! God bless my soul, what’s the world coming to!”
Hurrah for Bangers. Indeed, in “Eating Brit-Style, The 1940s,” SimanaitisSays noted, “Bangers, Brit for sausages, had their origin in an earlier food shortage. During World War I, butchers supplemented their sausages with water and grain, principally oatmeal. The pop and hiss during cooking gave the sausages their name.… Even today, sausages preferred by the British public can run afoul of European Union regulations that limit ‘filler.’ ”
George Bernard Shaw (Actually an Irishman). My most memorable GBS English is in his play Pygmalion and its faithful musical adaptation “My My Fair Lady Parts 1 and 2.” As recounted in the latter, in lieu of study hall I usta hang out in our high-school radio room (where we could listen to records while “studying”…. To this day, a zillion years later, I can lip-sync “Why Can’t The English Learn to Speak?” and the rest of the Original Cast album.
Another GBS fav: “The English,” Shaw wrote, “are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.”
Tomorrow in Part 2, we share two extended commentaries, one from philosopher/logician/mathematician Bertrand Russell and the other from The Queen Mum.
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024