h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I guess I was following Northern English usage...but that's also The Proclaimers' usage. 'I'll come back to you talking nonsense' makes little sense.

That's not how The Proclaimers use it...

"If you haver, you know I'm gonna be the one haverin' with you"

Referring to two lovers talking sweet nonsense at each other, at no point do thay sing that they'll come back haverin'.

Pardon my faulty memory. But it's still in the sense of indecision rather than talking shite.

I'm not a native Scots speaker anyway - although I do insist on using the word 'outwith' in any report I write - and even once taught it to an audience of Swedish academics. However, I am at the stage where I sometimes struggle to find translations for indispensable, everyday words like 'stooshie' or 'clipe' or 'cowp'.

I've never come across the other use of 'haver' before. You often find that these things suddenly pop up. When my wife and I first moved here (she's a native, I'm an immigrant) she was in hysterics when someone said, in the context of someone who'd been arrested for 'going equipped', 'He wasnae going out to buy a pokey hat'. She just hadn't heard it in years. (Translation 'He wasn't going out to buy an ice cream cone.&#39

She was also convulsed when, in England, she first heard university letter racks referred to as 'pigeonholes' rather that the far more sensible 'dookits'. (They mean pretty much the same thing: dookit = dovecote)

>>But it's still in the sense of indecision rather than talking shite.

Ah. No. You're absolutely right. That was me mishearing and misunderstanding because of the usage I was familiar with.

A curiously disjointed piece in the Telegraph -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8420098/David-Willets-feminism-has-held-back-working-men.html

“Feminism trumped egalitarianism,”

Two Brains is quite crafty, isn't he? He's blaming women for The Pinch and disregarding other structural economic factors which have increased inequality. The plight of men would have got worse *irrespective of* Feminism.

That's quite a creepy article.

'..“Feminism trumped egalitarianism,” he said, adding that women who would otherwise have been housewives had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious working-class men...'

Use of language like 'otherwise housewives' and 'ambitious working class men' suggests his stance is not entirely one of the neutral observer of data.

Also, I don't see that he's made a case that one equality has been bought at the expense of another - especially given that working class women have suffered even more than working class men.

Coming from the right, as he does, class politics are anathaema to him, so he prefers to see things as Effers points out, in terms of individual endeavours. (Women succeeded by marrying upwards; hard working men would be able to better themselves if only women hadn't taken their jobs). He ignores the fact that there is, overlaid on this, a yawning class-based inequality gap...because the reasons for that kind of don't figure in the right's worldview. (the C word. or K in the original )

So, yes, class inequalities remain and are increasing. Well spotted. We could have told him that. Their solution? It's probably going to be things to do with addressing the inequalities themselves. It's probably not going to require us to reverse the baby steps we've made in mitigating gender inequalities. so why make out that they're the problem?

I don't begin to understand the complexities of data interpretation..presumably this Willet guy does..heaven forfend that he's just making a political point..without the academic knowledge required to interpret the data.

Why is he bringing sex into the argument. Playing women off against working class men. Like playing oysters off against bananas ?

NtM - "cowp", as I recall has a rough translation as "dump".

"cowp" can also mean to tip or push over. As in going coo-cowpin'

A cowp is also a mound of waste material from mining. And also an archeological term - as is the Scots 'midden'.