...
Από το σημερινό ηλεδελτίο του Μάικλ Κουίνιον:
Life imitating fiction
A rather splendid word has entered the UK political lexicon in recent weeks. It was uttered in the House of Commons during Prime Minister’s Questions on 18 April by the Labour leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband. He described the coalition government as an omnishambles because of several recent allegedly serious policy and public-relations blunders, including the press excitement over a trivial dispute about whether the Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, had ever eaten a Cornish pasty and where (this inevitably became known as pastygate). The Daily Mail commented that omnishambles “described the combination of tragedy and farce that characterises modern politics” and the word has been gleefully taken up by many commentators, some in the Conservative press. It began life in The Thick of It, a satirical BBC TV series about Westminster politics created by Armando Iannucci; it was said in an episode in October 2009 by the foul-mouthed government head of communications Malcolm Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi, though he meant by it one particular person’s incompetence in everything she did (“you are a f****** omnishambles, that’s what you are!”). The word appeared a few times after the broadcast but Ed Miliband’s use set it trending, as they say over on Twitter. Its popularity is indicated by compounds that are already being coined, including omnishambolism and omnishambolic.
Το δεύτερο μέρος του επεισοδίου, με την επίμαχη λέξη στο 11:32:
Το πρώτο μέρος εδώ, από τον συσωληνοχρήστη omnishambles.
And You, Sir, Are an Omnishambles (The New Yorker, April 22, 2012)
During a particularly bitchy session of Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, David Cameron and the Labour leader Ed Miliband volleyed slurs on each other’s character and record in front of a packed, jeering chamber. Miliband, Cameron said, was “incompetent.” Cameron, Miliband replied, was “desperate.” It was fairly feeble stuff—“Yo Momma” for posh wonks—until Miliband, even before he said it, betrayed that he had the best line coming with a smirk of anticipatory relish. “So, Mr. Speaker,” he said, “we’re all keen to hear the Prime Minister’s view as to why he thinks, four weeks on from the budget, even people within Downing Street are calling it an ‘omnishambles’ budget.” (At about 11:00 below.) [Δείτε το εκεί]
It was, as The New Statesman noted, the first recorded use in the House of Commons of “omnishambles.” The insult of the week, it derives from the British political sitcom “The Thick of It,” a creation of Armando Iannucci, the subject of a recent Profile by Ian Parker. (Iannucci has a new show, “Veep,” set in Washington, D.C., beginning tonight on HBO.) On the show, a brilliantly slanderous Scotsman named Malcolm Tucker tells a claustrophobic co-worker who balks at using an elevator, “Jesus Christ, you’re like a fucking Omnishambles, you are. You’re like that coffee machine, you know? From bean to cup, you fuck up.”
As Giles Harvey pointed out last month, the art of verbal abuse, from Dr. Johnson to Monty Python, is “a mainstay of English life, to say nothing of English T.V., English film, and English literature.” (Tucker also says, of a colleague, “He’s as useless as a marzipan dildo.”) For a preening example of the British political slag-off, see the European Parliament member Nigel Farage’s attack on Herman van Rompuy, the President of the European Council: “You have the charisma of damp rag, and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.” Miliband’s “omnishambles” was a start, but I still like Churchill on De Gaulle: “He looks like a female llama who has been surprised in the bath.”
An omnipresent omnishambles (Macmillan Dictionary blog, April 25, 2012)
Every Wednesday here in the UK, we are treated to a piece of political theatre known as ‘Prime Minister’s questions’ or PMQs. For half an hour, the Prime Minster is obliged to answer questions from other MPs, and the traditional highlight of this event is a verbal skirmish between the PM and the Leader of the Opposition – currently Labour leader Ed Miliband. Last Wednesday, Miliband used PMQs to focus on changes to the tax system announced by the government in its recent annual Budget speech. Some of these changes had unintended consequences. Though barely noticed when they were first announced, their implications gradually became clear, so that they’re now seen as politically foolish because they brought maximum unpopularity for minimum financial gain – a classic example of an ‘own goal’. Miliband took the opportunity to put the boot in. He reeled off a list of the offending changes, and concluded with the latest example of linguistic inflation:
...
And suddenly, omnishambles is omnipresent (and it already has an entry in our Open Dictionary). It is not a new word, though: it was invented in 2009 by Malcolm Tucker, the fictional spin doctor and foul-mouthed star of the BBC comedy series The Thick of It. Tucker used it just once, and (like countless other inventive coinages) it seemed to disappear without trace – until now.
Omnishambles combines the prefix omni- with the old English word shambles, which started life as a singular noun (shamble), meaning a table or stall for the sale of meat. From the 15th century, it was used mainly in the plural, to denote a meat market – a collection of individual stalls – and visitors to the city of York can walk through a medieval street called The Shambles, which used to be full of butcher’s shops. From here, it also came to mean a slaughterhouse or abattoir, and from around 1600 it acquired a figurative sense, denoting – as the OED puts it – ‘a place of carnage or wholesale slaughter’.
Its current use, meaning a situation of great disorder, suggesting incompetent management, is relatively recent. Like most words of this type, it tends to be modified (or ‘amplified’) by words like total, utter, absolute, and – most frequently – complete … even when the subject is a trivial upset, as in this ridiculous example from our corpus:
...
Shambles is one of those unusual words (like moneybags or butterfingers) which looks plural but acts singular: a situation is ‘a shambles’.
[...]
Λοιπόν, τι λέτε; ;)
Από το σημερινό ηλεδελτίο του Μάικλ Κουίνιον:
Life imitating fiction
A rather splendid word has entered the UK political lexicon in recent weeks. It was uttered in the House of Commons during Prime Minister’s Questions on 18 April by the Labour leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband. He described the coalition government as an omnishambles because of several recent allegedly serious policy and public-relations blunders, including the press excitement over a trivial dispute about whether the Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, had ever eaten a Cornish pasty and where (this inevitably became known as pastygate). The Daily Mail commented that omnishambles “described the combination of tragedy and farce that characterises modern politics” and the word has been gleefully taken up by many commentators, some in the Conservative press. It began life in The Thick of It, a satirical BBC TV series about Westminster politics created by Armando Iannucci; it was said in an episode in October 2009 by the foul-mouthed government head of communications Malcolm Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi, though he meant by it one particular person’s incompetence in everything she did (“you are a f****** omnishambles, that’s what you are!”). The word appeared a few times after the broadcast but Ed Miliband’s use set it trending, as they say over on Twitter. Its popularity is indicated by compounds that are already being coined, including omnishambolism and omnishambolic.
Το δεύτερο μέρος του επεισοδίου, με την επίμαχη λέξη στο 11:32:
And You, Sir, Are an Omnishambles (The New Yorker, April 22, 2012)
During a particularly bitchy session of Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, David Cameron and the Labour leader Ed Miliband volleyed slurs on each other’s character and record in front of a packed, jeering chamber. Miliband, Cameron said, was “incompetent.” Cameron, Miliband replied, was “desperate.” It was fairly feeble stuff—“Yo Momma” for posh wonks—until Miliband, even before he said it, betrayed that he had the best line coming with a smirk of anticipatory relish. “So, Mr. Speaker,” he said, “we’re all keen to hear the Prime Minister’s view as to why he thinks, four weeks on from the budget, even people within Downing Street are calling it an ‘omnishambles’ budget.” (At about 11:00 below.) [Δείτε το εκεί]
It was, as The New Statesman noted, the first recorded use in the House of Commons of “omnishambles.” The insult of the week, it derives from the British political sitcom “The Thick of It,” a creation of Armando Iannucci, the subject of a recent Profile by Ian Parker. (Iannucci has a new show, “Veep,” set in Washington, D.C., beginning tonight on HBO.) On the show, a brilliantly slanderous Scotsman named Malcolm Tucker tells a claustrophobic co-worker who balks at using an elevator, “Jesus Christ, you’re like a fucking Omnishambles, you are. You’re like that coffee machine, you know? From bean to cup, you fuck up.”
As Giles Harvey pointed out last month, the art of verbal abuse, from Dr. Johnson to Monty Python, is “a mainstay of English life, to say nothing of English T.V., English film, and English literature.” (Tucker also says, of a colleague, “He’s as useless as a marzipan dildo.”) For a preening example of the British political slag-off, see the European Parliament member Nigel Farage’s attack on Herman van Rompuy, the President of the European Council: “You have the charisma of damp rag, and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.” Miliband’s “omnishambles” was a start, but I still like Churchill on De Gaulle: “He looks like a female llama who has been surprised in the bath.”
An omnipresent omnishambles (Macmillan Dictionary blog, April 25, 2012)
Every Wednesday here in the UK, we are treated to a piece of political theatre known as ‘Prime Minister’s questions’ or PMQs. For half an hour, the Prime Minster is obliged to answer questions from other MPs, and the traditional highlight of this event is a verbal skirmish between the PM and the Leader of the Opposition – currently Labour leader Ed Miliband. Last Wednesday, Miliband used PMQs to focus on changes to the tax system announced by the government in its recent annual Budget speech. Some of these changes had unintended consequences. Though barely noticed when they were first announced, their implications gradually became clear, so that they’re now seen as politically foolish because they brought maximum unpopularity for minimum financial gain – a classic example of an ‘own goal’. Miliband took the opportunity to put the boot in. He reeled off a list of the offending changes, and concluded with the latest example of linguistic inflation:
...
We are all keen to hear the Prime Minister’s view on why he thinks, four weeks on from the Budget, even people within Downing Street are calling it an omnishambles Budget.
...And suddenly, omnishambles is omnipresent (and it already has an entry in our Open Dictionary). It is not a new word, though: it was invented in 2009 by Malcolm Tucker, the fictional spin doctor and foul-mouthed star of the BBC comedy series The Thick of It. Tucker used it just once, and (like countless other inventive coinages) it seemed to disappear without trace – until now.
Omnishambles combines the prefix omni- with the old English word shambles, which started life as a singular noun (shamble), meaning a table or stall for the sale of meat. From the 15th century, it was used mainly in the plural, to denote a meat market – a collection of individual stalls – and visitors to the city of York can walk through a medieval street called The Shambles, which used to be full of butcher’s shops. From here, it also came to mean a slaughterhouse or abattoir, and from around 1600 it acquired a figurative sense, denoting – as the OED puts it – ‘a place of carnage or wholesale slaughter’.
Its current use, meaning a situation of great disorder, suggesting incompetent management, is relatively recent. Like most words of this type, it tends to be modified (or ‘amplified’) by words like total, utter, absolute, and – most frequently – complete … even when the subject is a trivial upset, as in this ridiculous example from our corpus:
...
The tea was a major embarrassment. Instead of tea we got a few cakes out of packets, no sandwiches at all!!! Staggering. Complete shambles. This should have been the best tea of the year!
...
Shambles is one of those unusual words (like moneybags or butterfingers) which looks plural but acts singular: a situation is ‘a shambles’.
[...]
Λοιπόν, τι λέτε; ;)
:lol: