Journal Entries
No mean city
Posted Aug 4, 2006
I was recently listening to Battlefield Band's "Dear Green Place", and was musing on the origin of the expression "no mean city". This is widely used to apply to Glasgow, and I naively assumed it always applied to Glasgow. But a quick search of Amazon for works with the phrase in the title turns up books on Belfast, Dublin and Toronto, as well as the album by Nazareth (the popular beat combo, not the city).
Curiously, when the phrase "no mean city" is applied to Glasgow, it usually has connotations of a very mean city indeed; this is almost certainly due to the 1935 novel of that name by A. McArthur and H. Kingsley Long, which painted a very bleak picture. Then again, maybe it's because of "Taggart"!
But the phrase goes back long before 1935, and didn't originally refer to Glasgow. No, a little more research revealed that it was originally applied to Tarsus, by Saint Paul of that burgh. So there you go; I learned something new.
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Latest reply: Aug 4, 2006
Polonius
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