I haven't encountered the ghoti thing before, but my Mother certainly regaled me with the Mairzy Doates song. No doubt one of many war-time things, like Mr Chad & Wot No... and Kilroy was here.
Huh, I'd known about Kilroy and Wot No ... and seen the cartoon of Mr. Chad, but had never known his name and had no idea they were all three connected, so thanks for educating me. So much of that time is lost to history, and when I remember things my parents used to say or sing, I'm never sure whether they were common references or just in-jokes between the two of them. I do know that they two had their own particular slang, which I thought was general slang, and it wasn't until I read The Girls of Slender Means in which a dashing young former air force man uses what is identified as World War Two air force slang that I realized that that was where it had come from! Glad you like the piece anyway...
George Bernard Shaw, who was, apart from being a great playwright, a thundering bore and a crank, the latter mostly about spelling but also about clothing, vegetarianism, etc. He shared being a spelling crank with Melville Dewey, of decimal classification fame, who ended up spelling his name Melvil Dui. Anyway, GBS was the first to put about the spelling of ghoti (fish). I tittered when I first read that but was about 8 at the time.
Thanks for providing the provenance cousin Hendon, I hadn't known that. I had known that Shaw was a disagreeable man, but must confess that I did laugh at ghoti, although I was considerably older than 8 at the time. The Donnelly branch were always immature.
I haven't encountered the ghoti thing before, but my Mother certainly regaled me with the Mairzy Doates song. No doubt one of many war-time things, like Mr Chad & Wot No... and Kilroy was here.
Huh, I'd known about Kilroy and Wot No ... and seen the cartoon of Mr. Chad, but had never known his name and had no idea they were all three connected, so thanks for educating me. So much of that time is lost to history, and when I remember things my parents used to say or sing, I'm never sure whether they were common references or just in-jokes between the two of them. I do know that they two had their own particular slang, which I thought was general slang, and it wasn't until I read The Girls of Slender Means in which a dashing young former air force man uses what is identified as World War Two air force slang that I realized that that was where it had come from! Glad you like the piece anyway...
George Bernard Shaw, who was, apart from being a great playwright, a thundering bore and a crank, the latter mostly about spelling but also about clothing, vegetarianism, etc. He shared being a spelling crank with Melville Dewey, of decimal classification fame, who ended up spelling his name Melvil Dui. Anyway, GBS was the first to put about the spelling of ghoti (fish). I tittered when I first read that but was about 8 at the time.
Thanks for providing the provenance cousin Hendon, I hadn't known that. I had known that Shaw was a disagreeable man, but must confess that I did laugh at ghoti, although I was considerably older than 8 at the time. The Donnelly branch were always immature.
Bravo Ethan!
He is a young man to watch, Rory!