Knight-Commander of the Honourable Institute for the National Good

 

In view of the recent Sunday Times report, which quoted an ex-party chairman saying

The truth is the entire political establishment knows this happens and they do nothing about it… The most telling line is, once you pay your £3m, you get your peerage."

and in the spirit of one Lord Fisher, commonly cited (wrongly  and/or trivially, I would argue)...

<prescript intro="And here's why">
...As I write I have the BBC‘s Julius Caesar in the background; and the line Who is it in the press that calls on me leapt out at me with its two anachronistic puns: press and call on. And this reminded me of a recurrent annoyance, apparently irrelevant but similarly depending on an anachronistic pun sadly repeated ever and anon (is that Shakespeare?) by people who should know better: the roots of OMG:

This one’s for all you amateur internet archaeologists out there: The first recorded use of the ubiquitous texting abbreviation OMG wasn’t uttered by a precocious tween in the 1990s, but by one Lord Fisher in a letter to none other than Winston Churchill.

          Time report

Well well; silly us! There‘s everyone thinking that abbreviation's a child of the late 20th Century. How wrong we were! Umm,  no. Lord Fisher‘s "OMG" was a joke based on the names of honours such as "OBE" and "CMG". Here's the context:

To cite it as the etymological basis of the SMS-based abbreviation "OMG" is to indulge in an anachronistic pun – the sort of textual "discovery" that is increasingly common in these days of easily accessed electronic text  databases. In the words of that prescient ophthalmologist Friar Lawrence [HD 2021: in Romeo and Juliet]

What a pair of spectacles is this?

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Lord Fisher's is not "The first recorded use of the ubiquitous texting abbreviation OMG"; it's the first recorded use of those initials in that order, with a not dissimilar approximate meaning, but in a totally different context and a totally different intention. You might just as well argue that Shakespeare was a hi-tech whizz-kid because he coined the word "unfriend".
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</prescript>

...as the "source" for the abbreviation OMG, I would like to suggest the introduction of a new honour, Knight-Commander of the Honourable Institute for the National Good,  specifically for Tory donors: that's a bit of a mouthful, so you may want to abbreviate it in some way.  KCHING, perhaps.

 

Noticed in passing 

In the first episode of the BBC TV drama Show Trial, the spoilt brat at the centre of the story wiles (sic)...

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See this (the footnote in the red note). "Whiles" isn't wrong, but my omission of the h is both deliberate (I've thought about it) and intentional (I mean it).
</and_heres_why>

... her time in custody by singing a French nursery rhyme (which is curiously appropriate in a macabre way – possibly intentionally or possibly accidentally (the actor having been told to sing something to herself, foreign if possible, to underline her insouciance and sophistication). We'll see.

What makes it macabre is that it relates the story of a little sailor-boy who on his maiden voyage (un petit navire qui n'avait ja- ja- jamais navigué) is ship-wrecked. He and his fellows take to the life-boat, and  here's where it gets really dark.  After s few weeks the victuals start to run out...

<autobiographical_note>
This line (Les vivres vin- vin- vinrent à manquer) was my first exposure to the passé historique (in a hideously irregular form  – which my teacher at the time was wise enough to gloss over); what stuck with me was the expression tirer à la courte paille (which the little sailor boy does, of course ("draws the short straw")
</autobiographical_note>

... and they decide to draw lots to see who would be the first one to be eaten.

There are four things that make this story appropriate (five, if you include the fact that it's a French nursery rhyme –  with all that that implies about the culture and education of the singer):

• Its watery background, echoing the place where (spoiler alert  –   whoops, too late) the body is found
• Its matter-of-factness, underlining the nonchalance of the suspect
• The fact that it deals with death, with a hint of greater or lesser illegality
• The fact that the death is of a young innocent

So well done, or Chapeau!, to either the writer or the actress.

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After seeing the final episode it's clear that it was intentional on the part of the writer: the song and the singing formed a crucial part of the back-story (no spoilers though :-) )
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But I must get on, preparing for my first live concert in nearly two years:

No tickets on the door, and only 160-odd to buy in advance (Covid restrictions). So get them while they're hot (I've got a spare –  first come, first served!)

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And here's a review:

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Update: 2021.11.29.17:00 – Added <INLINE_PS/>s