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

Inspired by ~JWF's~ thought, not by his visage:
"Face like a bag of spanners".

Conversation remembered from my youth:
"She can't help the way her face looks!"
"No, but she could stay at home."

"Ugh, he looks like my uncle Fred!"
"Oh, is he ugly?"
"I expect so, he's been dead for ten years."

(Sorry)

Were not native to Britain (unbelievable as that now seems if you drive down a Lincolnshire lane) Can't remember if the Romans had them, but think they came with the Normans who _did_ farm them, in fenced warrens. As always, the common folk weren't allowed to eat them. (This explains derivation of family names Warren and Warrender)In my youth poor people ate rabbit and some poor people still kept their own pigs, but those were the days when chicken was a rarish treat. My recipe for rabbit pie involves leeks and bacon and is delicious.
I don't know any synonyms for ugly - everyone in my world is beautiful.
What's the derivation of "the world's your oyster"? (they used to be cheap food in Victorian times, seemingly)

jwf, I take you as seriously now as I ever have, or ever will .

It's mainly because oysters have pearls in them, and it might have something to do with how easy it is to open them if you know how. Oyster can be used figuratively to mean something which promises reward.

TC - small correction. I cannot take credit for the Helen as a measure of beauty, specifically of women; that was some else. I proposed the less fashionable 'Quasimodo' as a measure of male ugliness/handsomeness.

I recall some months ago listening to an actor reading from his autobiography on Radio 4. Anthony something-or-other, I think, who came from a working class background 'up north'. It was based on correspondence between him and his mother, so perhaps it wasn't really an autobiography. Anyway, his mother was saying how instead of having the traditional rabbit for Christmas, they were having turkey, which was considered posh. Now turkeys are de rigeur; so as rabbits are not so cheap and common, perhaps they could make a Christmas return.

(Best Homer Simpson impression) Hmmmm Rabbit! My dad used to "acquire" rabbit from a local chap who spent a lot of time walking the hills. It were very nice. Unfortunatley Chernobyl came along and irradiated the hill side. It was illegal to sell the sheep on those hills for meat for fifteen-ish (they've just lifted the ban) years, as they glowed slightly. Strangely this seems to have coincided with us no longer "acquiring" rabbit.

(Best Elmer Fudd impression) Hmmmm, Wabbit!

As the subject's been brought up, and I managed to find the original, I thought I'd reproduce Kaeori's definition & reasoning:-

*************************************

Subject: Re: [H2G2_BritEng] Measuring male beauty
Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2001 15:21:14 -0000
Status: Normal
From: "Kaeori"

Oh, go on then, I'll tell you. (In truth, I can't wait for the possible resurrection of h2g2). And Nikki-D, I can't say *how* this came to me.

Let's begin by recollecting that the Helen has been proposed as a measure of (female) beauty (we're talking 'face' here, nothing deep or internal), 1 Helen being the amount of beauty that is sufficient to launch exactly 1,000 ships. Thus a milliHelen is the beauty of a face that can launch just one ship. (I claimed to have a nanoHelen of beauty, which I reckoned was enough to launch a rubber duck - as you will soon see, this is not as modest as it may first appear.)

But no handsome male role model was ever found to measure the 'beauty' (=handsomeness?) of men. Who had ever been that beautiful? And what would be his equivalent of launching a 1,000 ships?

It struck me that the 'Helen scale' may not have as its lower limit zero'. Would a complete absence of ship-launching beauty necessarily
imply 'ugly'? No! It seemed to me that 'zero' on the Helen scale would equate to an 'averageness', somewhere precisely between beauty and ugliness. And for that to work, we would need negative Helens.

So, -1 Helen might just be the amount of ugliness to sink 1,000 ships (a terrifying weapon, no doubt).

So my claim to a nanoHelen of beauty turns out to be a plea to be
accepted as slightly above average!

The measure of ugliness, then, is just the opposite (i.e. negative) of the measure of beauty.

Step forward, please, the 'Quasimodo'! Do not take offence, men - not just yet. I propose that 1 Quasimodo (sounds good, doesn't it) is the amount of male facial ugliness need to ring 1,000 bells. (No lame jokes about '...but his face rings a bell'.*) You could, I suppose, shorten it to Quasi if you felt milliQuasimodo has too many syllables.

And so the measure of male beauty now follows, being the negative of
the Quasimodo. So -1 Quasimodo would be, say, the beauty of a man for whom a thousand bells ring? Et voilà!


Kaeori


(* '...but his face rings a bell' is the ending of a long, long shaggy-dog story. Apologies for mentioning the unmentionable, but as an aside I'd like to know why 'shaggy-dog stories' are so called.)

************************************

Butt Ugly
Mingin
Minger
Hit with the ugly stick

(Well its better than doing real work )

Nikki-D, I'm impressed with your data retrieval system.

The first such stories seem to have been variations on a story about just such a beast. Eric Partridge said it came from a story widely circulated in the early 1940's and a collection of these taradiddles was published by name in 1946.

"Mirror, mirror on the wall
Who is the fairest of them(us?) all? If you actually expect the mirror to answer, you're practising catoptromancy (divination by mirrors)

As opposed to cattripomancy, divination by tripping up cats?

Kaeori - your eloquence HAD to be saved for future generations !!

(I'm sure I've offered this explanation of the shaggy pooch story before, but) ...it's from shagging the pooch, meaning wasting time, doing nothing, spinning your wheels (and going nowhere), chilling out, doing nought, hanging out (or about), shagging the pooch, making puppies - originally 'f*****g the d*g' meaning bored silly, bored to tears, inactive, laying about.
Hence a 'shagging the d*g' story was told to merely pass the day, fill up the time, and was by definition long, meandering, mildly amusing but relatively unimportant.
jwf (.007 on the quasiscale)

jwf, that simply cannot be true!

Why not ..?

Consider that 'shagging the dog' would have been 'current' in the first decades of the last century, before the F word replaced it as the most popular vulgarity after WW2.

The expression "A shagging-the-dog story" gets contracted to "a shaggy-dog story' for the sake of innocent ears ..and voila!
Still got plenty of time to meet that 1940-something publishing date mentioned above.

peace
jwf (sometimes known to 'speculate' or even strew a few garden paths but not this time)

Just listened to 'Word of Mouth' on Radio 4 (recorded earlier today) - a must for all those interested in the English language.

There was a discussion about muffins - we've discussed this here. But the program uncovered the fact that the English 'muffin' comes from a French word, while the American 'muffin' comes form Low German - they said this explains why the same word describes two different foods.

.. I thought Kaeori meant that the .007 bit wasn't true. But who can tell?