I must say, it fills me with joy to publish a headline like that!
I mean… wow. I love this planet.
To make things even better, the story quotes one of the protesters using the following term: “a load of old tosh.”
Really. If she’d stopped at just “tosh,” wouldn’t that have been strong enough language? “Old tosh.” Wheeeew! Nasty!
You hear that, director Ron Howard? If that doesn’t scare you, trust me, “old tosh” is just the beginning.
Erm … the news item is from a Pakistani site, but the cathedral is in Lincolnshire, England.
tosh?? like pete?
No, as in Pish.
Furthermore, Jeffrey, it was the dean of the cathedral, not one of the nuns, who used that term.
Come on, Martin! You’re spoiling my fun! Haven’t you ever played telephone?
Well, that reminds me of a story about my most memorable game of telephone.
Mr. Mahan, my 5th-grade math teacher, had a giant Peanuts cartoon on the back wall of his classroom. It showed Snoopy and Woodstock playing football. Something untoward happens to Woodstock in the first three panels. In the fourth panel, Snoopy remarked, “Fortunately there was a flag on the play!”
One day Mr. Mahan announced a game of telephone. I sat in the corner nearest his desk, so he called me up to start the game. The phrase he wanted me to pass around? “Fortunately there was a flag on the play.”
I returned to my desk and whispered the phrase into the ear of Scarlett Cockerel, who sat behind me. Scarlett couldn’t make out what I was saying.
In an attempt at clarification, I whispered, “It’s on the back thing of the cartoon up there.” Back thing was a nervous 5th-grader’s term for “fourth panel.” I intended for Scarlett to look at the cartoon, see the phrase, and pass it on.
Instead she turned and whispered to the kid behind her, loud enough for me to hear, “It’s on the back thing of the cartoon up there.”
Just my luck that this would be the first game of telephone in history in which the phrase made it all the way around the room without being changed! Too bad it was the wrong phrase.
Some clarification on anglo-american dialect differences.
In England we call the game you’ve just described “Chinese Whispers”
Tosh, is actually quite a strong rebuke over here. I mean it’s not swearing at all, but it’s completely dismissive of whatever it describes, it’s like the word crap, only it isn’t swearing and it carries a muich stronger sense of the things pointlessness, uselessness, and meaninglessness.
For whateer that’s worth.
Matt
I am waiting for the part of the joke where the one armed midget comes out. I think I heard this one before.
No, as in Pish.
Isn’t the opposite of “pish” not “tosh” but “posh”?
You guys are killing me and I haven’t understood a single word.
Well, Mark, I think you got here after Jeffrey changed the title of this entry. It USED to read “Tom Hanks accosted by nuns in Pakistan”—which seemed an odd place for Lincoln Cathedral.
… whereas Jeffrey’d THOUGHT he typed “in Pakistani News” … and indeed might have lost that last piece due to computer error, or else accidentally hit ‘ENTER’ in the midst of finishing the line…
Granted, “accosted by nuns in Pakistani News” wasn’t going to be a very good headline anyway, so I’m happy to have had the ability to repair it. But no, indeed, why would Hanks have ever been in Pakistan in the first place?
Hey, it got me to read the article!
confession: i originally read it as “Tom CRUISE accosted by Pakistani nuns.”
which is funnier.
Well at least now I know why I was laughing.