On Passing Lilac Urine is just a bunch of amusing oddments. It references Hardy and Elkie, probably. Can you tell I’m struggling for things to say?
See lyrics to On Passing Lilac Urine
On Passing Lilac Urine is just a bunch of amusing oddments. It references Hardy and Elkie, probably. Can you tell I’m struggling for things to say?
See lyrics to On Passing Lilac Urine
Dave F.
I’m The real Slim Shady.
By the inflection, I think Feng Shui is said as a question with OK being the reply.
7 February 2009
Ricardo
Another reference to Tess of the d’Urbervilles (see also Thy Damnation Slumbereth Not). “It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing…”, which Thomas Hardy took from Shakespeare. (“The adder hisses where the sweet birds sing,” from The Rape of Lucrece.)
20 July 2009
MIKE IN COV
The Eminem/Slim Shady reference surely falls in the How obvious was that? category, but I suppose it should be noted.
16 July 2012
John Burscough
The same might be said about “Blackpool lights” which, for the benefit of Southerners and other foreigners, refers to the seaside resort’s end-of season Illuminations, traditionally switched on with great whoop-de-do by a celebrity such as Robbie Williams or the Bee Gees. (There is no corresponding Switch-Off celebration.)
Likewise, feng shui, the Chinese art of aligning buildings and furnishings in an auspicious manner (in this case, in order to keep the DVD player out of the hands of debt-enforcing bailiffs).
I have no information regarding Marshall Mathers III’s tennis tendencies, but The Real Slim Shady did feature at this year’s Madrid Open. http://blogs.tennis.com/racquet_reaction/2012/05/madrid-s-williams-d-vesnina.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+racquet-reaction+(Racquet+Reaction)
16 July 2012
MIKE IN COV
Off piste I know, but a quick Googling revealed that (a) Eminem does not play tennis, apparently, and (b) 50 Cent once compared him favourably with Serena Williams, on the grounds that they’d both succeeded in activities usually associated with a different skin colour.
16 July 2012
Rubber Faced Irritant
I’ve always assumed the ‘hour in lieu’ line was also a play on ‘hour in Looe’. That is, the town in south west Cornwall. See also ‘a walk in bath/Bath’.
16 July 2012
MIKE IN COV
@RFI, that had never occurred to me before – but seconded, I like it.
@Charles Exford, what’s the Wirralian pronunciation of “lieu”? I remember days in lieu from time spent at a factory in Holywell, t’other side of the Dee, but can’t recall whether it was “loo” or “lyew” there.
My reading is that the man in the van gets an hour off his working day in lieu of the statutory breaks, but that doesn’t stop him taking breaks anyway. Views, anyone?
On second thoughts, I don’t think my previous post was off piste: the 50 Cent link explains why it was tennis rather than any other sport.
17 July 2012
Charles Exford
@ RFI – the clue is in “North, East, South, West”, i.e. the lunch-time waterboard vans are (or certainly were) a common sight throughout the country as you pass them parked up just off the B-roads, i.e. a play on words with Looe doesn’t really work ‘cos they’re (or they were) everywhere.
@ Mike – irrelevant though I think it is to the song, that doesn’t usually stop me, so I’d venture that I’d say generally throughout the country that “lieu” is pronounced /lu:/, like “loo” by the majority of the working population, who either don’t know it “should be” /lju:/, your “ljew”, or would feel funny pronoucing it the latter way ‘cos nobody else they know does, which is often the way with a lot of borrowed French words I suppose. Wirral would be no exception to that.
Essentially, he’s having a 2-hour lunch-break because he reckons he deserves it, which is probably fair enough in most cases.
18 July 2012
Rubber Faced Irritant
@Exxo Fair comment and granted this sight will be repeated around the land. But in my mind’s eye I’ll still picture the protagonist walking down a lane into Looe and seeing said vans in each direction at this appointed time.
19 July 2012
MIKE IN COV
@Charles. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard both my suggested pronunciations at factories in various parts of the UK (Coventry, Bridgwater, Grimsby, N Wales, Preston, Barrow-in-Furness). E.g. If you’re called in to work Saturday, you might take Monday off as a day in lieu.
“loo” and “l’yoo” might have been better transcriptions. It’s an English word now, the vowel’s pretty much the same everywhere, and nothing like the clipped French “l’yeu”. It’s a regional thing: the difference is, whether or not there’s that ‘y’-type forward tongue-movement after the ‘l’. I use it; but then I also pronounce the ‘l’ in alms, the ‘t’ in “often” (but, oddly, not in “soften”), and tend to say “baff” (short ‘a’, rhymes with “laff”) rather than “bath” (long or short ‘a’, take your pick). Lord Reith would never have given me a job.
So, Q: does the lieu/Looe pun work in a Wirralese accent or not?
As I suspect you like irrelevant etymological quirks, try the French word “soupe”, which first came into English as “sop”, something boiled in water, and separately a century or two later as “soup”, water something has been boiled in.
No, it’s not fair enough, the idle bastard is rolling his-tea-into-his-lunch-into-his-tea-breaks because a daft system and clueless management let him do so and he has no respect for either of them. Can’t say I blame him, though.
19 July 2012
Charles Exford
Yes, how did you guess Mike? I do like them –and it’s fortunate that I do, ‘cos otherwise the linguistics part of my job would be a bit of a drag – I have to spend a certain part of my part-time teaching days quibbling with students about this stuff (though I like to disguise that fact with plenty of typoes on here). So this post carries a health warning, for those who have disliked my previous linguistic offerings, NOT TO BOTHER READING ON.
So as I thought I’d said, it seems to me highly unlikely that any play on words is intended in this song (unlike, say the more probable “walk in Bath”, or the fairly certain “cant conformism”), but yes, if Nigel wanted to pun “lieu” and “Looe” they would indeed sound the same, allowing RFI & yourself the perfect liberty to hear “Looe” if you wish to do so. Puns should be made for a reason, even knock-knock jokes about the patron saint of Llandudno, but go on then if you want, let’s stick it on Stuart’s HMHB map (along with my embarrassing “Ollerton” perhaps
? ) … why not?
Language variation is not a black and white phenomenon these days, lots of shades of grey and overlap within the same region and doubtless sometimes within the same workplace, especially in cases where factors other than regional ones are operating. So if you have yourself identified regional variation, I respect your experience, but this one does not seem to me to be mainly regional; certainly not on the Wirral, nor here in Yorkshire, nor in London nor in Cambridge where I worked for years in any of the other regions of which I have experience. In all of those places there is a more common /lu:/ “loo” and a less common /lju:/ “lyoo” existing alongside. In other areas regional factors may outweigh social factors – I can’t claim to know – but I’m convinced that nationally the pronunciation of words like this one is divided more according to social factors than region – if it were regional there would be other examples of similar variations with the same sounds, but apart from a few regions saying “new” as /nu:/ (“noo”) instead of /nju:/, there is little such evidence.
The grammar schools, the universities, the civil & colonial service & later the old-style BBC (etc, etc, etc) try/tried to hand down a supposedly ‘educated’, standardised version of pronunciation of many words nationally and internationally and some people acquired & still acquire them (or can choose to adopt them), while others don’t/won’t/can’t. This word is a particularly good example because both its French origins _and_ its “management regulations” context mean that those institutions would feel that the word belonged to them, and so they and their followers would pronounce it if not in the French way, then closer to the French way, i.e. /lju:/. Of course then American pronunciations come along and start affecting us all, but that’s another matter.
My school was less than a mile from (the other) Nigel’s, my home about 4 miles, but it seems that we learned to pronounce the word in two different ways. These days I would pronounce it in two different ways myself, perhaps “code-switching” according to the context I found myself in, perhaps just using them interchangeably when it didn’t matter.
Nigel might well pronounce the word differently in the song, had he wanted to/been bothered to/ been coached to pass the (sort of) eleven plus exam that we both sat, on the same day almost certainly, in the same room possibly, when we were ten and a half. But he (and we, the Biscuitistas) are probably extremely lucky that he didn’t.
I hope Nigel wouldn’t mind me saying here that he told me once that he felt a whole new aspect of his self-education (he didn’t term it like that of course) kicked off the day he saw a very early Channel 4 programme, in about 1982-3, with Mike Brierley interviewing John Arlott. The conversation turned to Thomas Hardy, and the most dramatic, spine-chilling moment of “Jude the Obscure”. Nigel’s interest was stirred, and he took it from there. Jude’s prospects were always bleak, in a novel that turns on education, and its role in maintaining social division. Like I say, it all fascinates me in more ways than several.
19 July 2012
MIKE IN COV
@ Charles, a shot in the dark, really.
As to “lieu”, pronunciation could well vary both regionally and societally; and I’ve got a hypothesis. “Lieu” is a lawyers’ term, hence “l’yoo” in BBC English (lawyers’ French and Latin is unlike anything native speakers would understand). Its use in statute and thus in the workplace is relatively recent, hence “loo” and possibly also “l’yoo” depending on how people reacted to this novel word; some would have known the US pronunciation of “lieutenant”. I only wish I’d paid more attention when I was moving around the country…
I remember Mike Brearley’s interview with the peerless John Arlott; I think it was spread over several programmes; they certainly shifted a fair amount of claret during its course. (As Arlott began a commentary stint on TMS in the 70s, it started to rain. He occupied the whole of his 20 minutes describing the covers being put on. It was gripping, and masterly.) Arlott left school at 16, and worked as a clerk and as a policeman before moving into broadcasting; he was widely-read and a poet. I suspect he might not have exactly been into the music, but am sure he would been delighted to know that he’d inspired even one viewer.
Even if the pun wasn’t originally deliberate, it strikes me as the sort of thing NB would strive to maintain once recognised.
19 July 2012