Socialized medicine, and what it leads to

Good to see that Mark Steyn keeps his British Slang dictionary by his side when writing. It gives it such an air of authenticity — he must be right.

‘the unloveliness of any British city after six in the evening – the dolly birds staggering around paralytic, the pools of “pavement pizza”, the baying yobboes gagging for a shag and hurling bollards through the bus shelters to impress the crumpet – is a natural consequence of what happens when the state relieves the citizen of primal responsibilities.’

Not that anyone sane gives a shit about Mark Steyn, but:

‘dolly birds’: no one uses this phrase any more. It’s a ‘sixties-ism’: unless Mark Steyn is indeed to be the new companion of Doctor, fighting on behalf of the forces of evil throughout history, or unless he really is Austin Powers (or his fictional nemesis Mr Non-Groovy Straighttrouser) he won’t need that particular phrase from his ‘How to Talk Hip like ‘with it’ Hep-Cat!’ phrase book.

“pavement pizza”: he means, I think, ‘pavement bolognese’ a phrase invented by Billy Connelly.

‘Yobboes’. Yobboes? Another word from the vocabulary of Mr Straighttrouser, methinks.

‘bollards’: an Americanism (Canadia-ism?) this time (I think). I don’t even know what the word means. (Oh now I do. ‘A bollard is a short vertical post typically found where large ships dock’. How many of these are to be found in most British cities (even after 6?)).

‘crumpet’. Oh Mr Steyn, you’re so groovy.
Fancy a shag?

After doing more research than Mr Steyn has ever done, I have discovered that ‘bollard’ can be used to refer to those signs on traffic islands and that ‘The American Heritage Dictionary describes this use of Bollard as “chiefly British”, although the term has crept into the jargon of some American universities where dense traffic necessitates the use of bollards for access control.’ So I’ll grant him that. The links between ye old British pastime of ‘bollard throwing’ and ‘Primal Responsibilities’ (The name of Bobby Gillespie’s Christian rock band in an alternative Mark Steyn run Universe?) remain opaque, however.

You’ll have to grant him “Yobboes” too, Hidari, though the plural is slightly bizarre. A “yobbo” or a “yob” is an aggressive male prole, usually pissed. Private Eye has a long-running cartoon: “Yobs.”

Does Mr Steyn think British pubs close at 6pm, or at 6am?

A bollard is a concrete post, about 3 foot high and nine inches across, embedded in the pavement and used to stop e.g. flaming jeeps.

Mighty strong, these yobboes.

Mark Steyn’s fluent but slightly-unusual use of outdated slang makes me suspect that he has outsourced his journalism to someone who used to write for the very splendid and worthwhile Times of India. Prepare yourself for his criticism of dacoits. In the meantime, I will mentally add the word “lah” to the end of each of his sentences.

When he says bollards, he probably means traffic cones. Bollards are permanent fixtures, traffic cones are the orange cone-shaped thingies beloved of drunken students. The rest of the slang he is attempting to use is just cringe-worthy.

And if he really wants to check the association of public drunkenness with socialised medicine, he probably wants to check out the rest of Western Europe. Wide scale public drunkenness is pretty uniquely British, and predates the NHS by, well, centuries.

“lah” Singlish lor?

Ah what a heady, iniquitous place it would be here if the dolly birds were already paralytic at 6pm . . .

they are, as long as you have your watch set to American time, which Steyn presumably does.

I’d have thought that staggering around gagging for a shag is one of the primal responsibilities.

London’s Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has promoted “beautiful bollards” as part of its improved street furniture campaign for many years. They are included in short promotional films (advertisements) shown prior to the main picture at local cinemas. You can even report a problem with one on-line.

You can see a traditional RBKC Victorian bollard here, but it looks like Winchester might be giving them a run for their money these days.

Who would ever had imagined that one day the Internet would allow you to report a bollard fault? Isn’t the Internet great?

Somehow the French have managed to socialize medicine while avoiding this “natural consequence of what happens when the state relieves the citizen of primal responsibilities”.

It’s always a good idea to keep some of Mark Steyn’s writings to hand when relieving oneself of one’s primal responsibilities, in case there’s no paper.

Some choice quotes from Steyn:
“in the United Kingdom the jobs Britons won’t do has somehow come to encompass the medical profession…no amount of gold can persuade Britons to spend their working lives in the country’s dirty decrepit hospitals”

“white males comprise 43.5% of the population but now account for less than a quarter of students at U.K. medical schools: in other words, being a doctor is no longer an attractive middle-class career proposition.”

Where to start?

I say “la” is Singlish.

Pastry Priest? But those things aren’t made of pastry. Perhaps I am a Deacon of Dough, or a Bread Bishop.

Dermatology pigeons only attack if you show fear, Alex.

You snivelling coward — afraid of a pigeon!

yet still they must gag for crumpet under the jackboots of the socialist octopus

the unloveliness of any British city after six in the evening – the dolly birds staggering around paralytic, the pools of “pavement pizza”, the baying yobboes gagging for a shag and hurling bollards through the bus shelters to impress the crumpet – is a natural consequence of what happens when the state relieves the citizen of primal responsibilities

Steyn is so dead on here. I mean, remember what the cities of Britain and America were like in the 19th century when the poor and working classes were entirely on their own for their “primal responsibilities”? Clean air, clean streets, clean water, the complete absence of crime, the rigorous sexual mores followed by everyone, the lack of addictions to alcohol and other opiates…

Oh, those were the days, my friends, oh yes, those were the days!

“Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can’t wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No.”

Does anyone want to tell Steyn that the “Doctor” driving the Land Rover, who later set himself on fire, was a PhD Mechanical Engineer, not a medical doctor?

The OED lists “yobboes” as an acceptable secondary plural for “yobbo”. A headline in the June 1, 2007, edition of Gloucestershire Echo reads: “Drunken yobboes wreck charity shop”.

LexisNexis lists 18 uses of the phrase “dolly birds” in British newspapers since June 1.

Alex writes: “Find me a man who can lift a bollard and I will marry him to a crumpet.”

“Beer kegs and bollards were also thrown.” (The Irish Times, March 20, 2000)

“A rioter hurls a bollard at long-suffering gardai.” (Sunday Mirror, March 5, 2006)

“Another car – this time an Audi – was also damaged on February 18 when yobs threw road bollards at it from a footbridge.” (This is Dorset, March 7, 2005)

“A 20-year-old who hurled a bollard through the plate glass window of a city centre food shop told a court he ‘went silly’ whenever he drank too much.” (The Gloucester Citizen, May 31, 2006)

“They threw a bollard through the 8x6ft double-glazed front window, destroying it.” (Aberdeen Evening Express, November 29, 2005)

“Outside he threw a bollard at a car.” (The Observer, May 8, 2005)

“Beer kegs and bollards were also thrown.” (The Irish Times, March 20, 2000)

“Outside he threw a bollard at a car.” (The Observer, May 8, 2005)

Oh, god dammit. Now I’ve got my work cut out.

Nat, what a sterling example you are of the receptiveness to understanding other countries’ cultures which has served America so well in the last few years.

Re #48:

Being a dumb American, I’ll need you to simplify the objection you’re raising if you want me to understand it. Surely, you’re not objecting that the OED and the words British people write in British newspapers don’t qualify as evidence when it comes to British word usage.

Nat, the problem is that people still use words like ‘crumpet’, ‘dolly bird’, ‘spiv’ or whatever as arch anachronistic references – hence Emma Peel in your first quotation.

Hmm, I meant to say that the reference to Emma Peel as crumpet is anachronistic now, but suitable to the time she was strutting her stuff in the Avengers.

pj wrote: “you couldn’t actually hurl a concrete bollard through a window”

“An appeal for witnesses has gone out after vandals threw a concrete bollard through the window of Northam public swimming pool, leaving glass in the water.” (North Devon Journal, September 23, 2004)

“At approximately 1.30am residents saw a youth run from the opposite side of the road and smash into the reinforced display window using a concrete bollard as a battering ram.” (This is Lancashire, August 10, 2004)

“Thieves smashed the shop’s front window with a concrete bollard in the early hours of December 12 last year.” (Lincolnshire Echo, February 3, 2004)

nat, you’re actually proving that Steyn is, as usual, wrong – socialized medicine has given British youth the exquisite physics that enable them to heave heavy concrete objects hither and yon.

Nat, neither of those last two indicate ‘hurling’ or ‘throwing’ of concrete bollards (which are bloody heavy). As for the first reference, I am impressed they got it through a window but I don’t think it was quite a routine throwing since “the bollard shattered the 8ft diameter architecturally designed window and broke the outer layer of a second window” – you’d need more than one person for that. But I don’t think trading anecodtes is going to tell us much – do you actually know what a concrete bollard is or have you only heard of it through Newspaper articles.

If you want to keep laying this game, find an article on bollards being thrown through bus shelters.

Many of these terms may be current regional slang but are obsolete or never known outside that. I can guess what `dolly bird’ means but would never use it: `crumpet’ is a word only my more upper-class relatives would use, and only when *they* were parodying the upper-class twit of the year.

Bollards can indeed be traffic cone things or huge great concrete-and-steel lumps with rounded tops.

Steyn’s scribblings sound wrong not because his slang is not slang but because it’s so plainly picked out of a dictionary: even that subset which is current derives from all over the UK and is highly unlikely ever to be used by a single speaker.

(And, well, except for run-down places like Middlesbrough and hellholes like Glasgow most UK towns are quite nice at night, I think. Certainly the only public disorder I can remember in the towns I’ve lived in in the last few years was a non-drink-related near-riot in Southall in late 2001, and an IRA bomb.

Yes, people get drunk. No, it isn’t remotely as bad as the media say it is.)

Hmm, only able to find one example though. Steyn must read the British press assiduosly.

PJ’s comment is pretty funny.

pj wrote: “Nat, if I find “cool cat” has more than a handful of Lexis Nexis hits for recent US articles can I assume that Americans talk like beatniks?”

Non-beatnik Americans do use the phrase “cool cat”.

pj wrote: “you’d need more than one person for that.”

So? Did Steyn specify one man, one bollard?

Yeah, that Nam grass will do it to you, man.

Nat – there appears to be only one recorded incident of a bollard going through a bus shelter – that does not make it a very good generalisation even if you specify multiple ‘yobboes’ (I’m sure it must have happened more than once, but otherwise it is trivially false through the use of “bollards”).

john protevi wrote: “And people who don’t listen to hip-hop use the phrase “da bomb.” That doesn’t mean they don’t sound ridiculous when they do so (w/o a twinkle in their eye or some other sign they’re using it ironically).”

The local alternative radio station has a witty spot where detractors of hip-hop use hip-hop language to ridicule it. My impression was that Steyn was choosing his words here analogously. Perhaps he should have used emoticons to alert the irony-impaired.

pj wrote: “I’m sure it must have happened more than once, but otherwise it is trivially false through the use of “bollards””

If you’re “sure”, why should we care about “otherwise”? Because (see #57) you’ve been sure about other things that are false?

Did Steyn specify one man, one bollard?

No, man, but that unhep cat’s wig was all whipped up, dig? I’m telling you, it’s bible, Buddy Ghee!

John Protevi wrote: “Wait a second. You spend all that time using Lexis-Nexis to defend the authenticity of Steyn’s usage, and now you’re saying he’s doing it ironically?”

You think authentic street language can’t be used ironically by a non-street person? Now that’s mind-blowing!

Nat, I think that’s you picking the second horn of the dichotomy, not a false dichotomy.

I’m going to do some work now, so I’ll have to leave Nat and Steyn to educate the rest of you as to how authentic British people talk.

pj wrote: “Nat, I think that’s you picking the second horn of the dichotomy”

That would be “he’s accurately talking in Britishisms, in which case we’re all well aware of what he is trying and failing to do.” But you’ve “all” been repeatedly wrong in your assessments of failure. The original complaints were that British people don’t use such words and phrases, not that Steyn fails to have the street cred to use them.

John Protevi wrote: “So you’re saying he was ironically deliberately using British slang in order to ridicule make a serious point about the British?

I’m saying that his usage of British slang was both ironic and deliberate–unintentional irony isn’t too impressive–and that he was making the serious point that the sort of behavior he was describing is ridiculous. Has your mind been expanded?

Who can forget the seminal British punk album, “Never Mind the Bollards”? Only a baying yobboe (a portmanteau word, referring to a yobbo playing an oboe) . . .

By curious cooincidence, pandagon has a post on bollards, too!

http://pandagon.net/2007/07/12/phallic-symbols-parking-posts/

I found 22 hits for “cut of his jib” on google news. So that means that all the “hep cats” are using that phrase nowadays. Its the bee’s knees!

“The OED gives “a (desirable) woman” as one of the definitions of “crumpet”.”

OK let’s lower the tone. It is 1959, and a working class couple are arguing in the street in Romford.

“Shut up, bitch, or you’ll get a winkle-picker up the crumpet” was the cry of the deferential son of toil in that far-off civilsed era.

I guess the OED wasn’t there.

I think Americans have a place for that sort of thing, I believe it is called ‘college’.

You mofos be trippin. Steyn is just taking it old school. That shit is tight!