'Tight about the hips'

She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season.

P.G. Wodehouse wrote his bon-mot (in Carry On,  Jeeves says IZ Quotes, although elsewhere it is credited to a different book) in the mid 1920s†.

This quote came to mind when I was having a discussion with Her Who Must Be Obeyed (and I've never been happy with Rumpole's carelessness with She when it's preceded by a preposition) about an armchair that she inherited from her parents. It was more or less contemporaneous with Plum's quip – earlier if they furnished their first home secondhand. We had it reupholstered about 20 years ago, and now  'it was about time we had a new one'

Armchairs available for sale today are,  as Bertie might have put it, broader in the jolly old beam. Modern armchairs are built for the modern form. This means that in the modern sitting room an armchair is wider even than many televisions (which is saying something: our first, for the matrimonial home, had a 12" screen...), because the modern form – in the fatcat West – is so much bigger than the pre-war ones that the inherited armcair was built for.

So it'll have to be reupholstered again, at the expense  – no doubt – of more than a new one.

Report from the word-face

The -II- section is done, and the research/handwritten notes stage of the -IO- is also done. It needs another week or two to render it in HTML, and then do the 'Sigil chassé' described here. Once that is done and tested, there is only the -IU- to do, and that's already been done –  up to a point – for the ELTon 2012. So V3.0  is well on schedule for a July release – some time before I go to the West country for my choir's tour – if you're at Buckfast Abbey on 20 July, Lostwithiel on 21 July, or Truro on  23 July, come and hear us.

b

†IZ quotes says 1930. If the other source is right, it was 1925. But both Jeeves books are collections of stories that had been published separately earlier. Anyway, for my purposes 'mid 1920s' will do.

Update 25.07.2013.09.30/10:50
Header updated:

---

 Mammon (When Vowels Get Together V4.0: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs – AA-AU, EA-EU, and  IA-IU, and – new for V4.0 – OA-OU.  If you buy it, contact  @WVGTbook on Twitter and I'll alert you to free downloads of the forthcoming volumes; or click the Following button at the foot of this page.)
And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: nearly 32,400 views**,  and  4,400 downloads to date. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with 1570 views/700 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.