The Onion does England

With some of this I’m incapable of telling the difference between real and simulated British idiom, but I still thought the story at the bottom of this post was funny.

How many centuries would it take for the various versions of English to become mutually unintelligible? It’s still not an everyday occurrence in England that I’m lost by what someone is saying, though it does happen. And there are the famous really confusing things like “tabling” a proposal having opposite meanings in the UK and USA. I also didn’t know what “banknotes” were the first time an English person asked me for some. (That’s “money,” in America.)

The newspapers in India sometimes already lose me: there are sometimes stories there in English that I don’t quite understand, for language reasons rather than knowledge reasons. They also display the phenomenon of language that is completely intelligible and correct, but rather archaic by the standards of American English, such as the great story I read in Chennai last year about the Tamil Nadu state crackdown on “rowdies, goons, and dreaded gangsters.” I also still don’t understand words like “crore” and “lakh” in India, which you find attached to monetary amounts in news stories. I’ve looked them up before, but always forget how much they are.

BBC Upgrades Flap To Row

LONDON—The nightly Ten O’Clock News program on Great Britain’s BBC One channel upgraded a minor flap in Parliament’s House of Lords to an all-out row Tuesday after Conservative Party leader Thomas Galbraith, 2nd Baron Strathclyde, told the Lord Speaker to sod off. “The fortnight-old handbags suddenly exploded into a proper barney when Lord Strathclyde had an eppy and called Baroness Hayman a ‘dozy slag’ and then buggered off for a Jack Dash in the bog,” BBC political correspondent Basil Islington said. “Needless to say, the other geezers went chicken oriental.” The BBC said if the tossers don’t jam their tarts by late afto, they will be forced to classify the bull and cow as a paddy, though they haven’t ruled out the possibility of a total fucking pagger.