Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009

On 05 Jul 2009, Roland Hutchinson wrote

Presumably just exoticism;  they'd gone through the Japanese craze
in the late 19C, so some other faraway land of strange customs and
new sounds needed to be mined.

FWIW, though, the tune of "O'Brien is Tryin'" didn't do anything
Hawaiian at all -- it just name-checked the place.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7_3C3OVkVQ

[...]

That's right. Public companies should watch out too. We, the
shareholders, have as much right to question the pay of fat-cat
'workers' in public companies as we, the people, have to question the
tax-funded pay of MPs and Jonathan 'Let's Talk About w.nking Again'
Woss and tin-pot town-hall dictators. Indeed shareholders have a duty
to do so, not only because it's prudent to look after your investments
but because the insanely high pay of the fat cats employed to run
large public companies created the sense of entitlement in the public
sector that is (at long last) getting everyone's knickers in a twist.
MPs feel hard-done-by for being paid a mere twelve times the minimum
wage for doing their jobs badly (very little new legislation receives
proper scrutiny) because the likes of Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin and
Dennis 'Schmoozer' Stevenson are paid totally, scrotally grotesque
sums for doing their jobs badly.* Shareholders (particularly
institutional shareholders) are ultimately responsible for the mess
we're in. It's time they (I don't own any shares) went after the fat
cats and reminded them that they are employees, not entrepreneurs, and
paid them an employee's annual salary not an annual entrepreneur's
windfall.  No amount of macho bluster about risk justifying reward and
peanuts attracting monkeys conceals the fact that none of the
corporate chieftains (or the brainiac yobs who gamble with other
people's money in the City) is risking anything of their own. They are
doing a job, that's all, and no job is so difficult that you can
attract suitable candidates only by offering hundreds of times the
minimum wage. It's a cartel and I fart in its general direction.

*In 2007 Lord Stevenson was paid £821k plus bonus and pension
contributions for attending 14 meetings as non-exec chairman of HBOS,
which all but crashed the following year, almost taking Lloyds with
it.** (He also received in excess of half a million that year from his
other sinecures.) Assuming his 14 meetings required 14 weeks' work
(surely generous) and ignoring his pension contribs and bonus, that's
[(£821,000/560)/£5.73] 256 times the minimum wage - for a job for
which he had no formal qualifications and, as things proved, no
natural aptitude. Nice. Where are these jobs advertised? I wouldn't
mind a go myself.

**English usage at last! When questioned in February this year about
the bonus culture and its part in the wrecking of HBOS, Stevenson told
a parliamentary committee: 'I of course receive no bonuses, just to be
quite clear, so in a sense I can speak reasonably objectively.' The
2008 accounts hadn't been released by then and all the previous
accounts showed Stevenson receiving a bonus, so it's odd that the
committee didn't query this statement.

Never mind. That's parliament for you. The real point is whether
Stevenson lied. Let's assume that he had already told the HBOS board
that he was going to waive his right to the delayed bonuses that had
accrued from earlier years and would normally have been paid in 2008,
which is what the accounts eventually said he had done. Are his use of
'receive' in the present tense and 'bonuses' in the plural justified
by the facts and by standard English usage? If for seven of the eight
years of your chairmanship of a company you receive a bonus and only
in the last year do you waive that bonus, is it correct in English
usage to tell an inquiry into what happened during all of those eight
years that you don't receive bonuses? I don't think so. Especially
when in that last year Stevenson received £815k for his seven months
as chairman - a rise in monthly pay so enormous that it surely
constitutes some sort of informal bonus. At the very least, Tony
Blair's old chum was being economical with the actualité. The noble
lord ought to be in jail.

--
VB

"We mentioned a few of those the other day.  Include Whip Wilson.  But
today I saw the face of another old hero--and he did look older than he
useter--"Wild Bill Elliott", who made a few movies in his own name.  The
film today was something about an evil land baron or banker, but
"William Elliott" wasn't on horseback.  The date was 1946, (as I say, he
looked older than he useter) and I think it was called "The Violent Man
(or Land or Men)".

Bill Elliott (III)
Actor: Hellfire. Born Gordon Nance in 1904 on a farm in Pattonsburg,
Missouri -- a small... Visit IMDb for Photos, Filmography, Discussions,
Bio, News, ...
www.imdb.com/name/nm0254381/

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0254381/bio
...He made his first movie in 1925. A steady stream of movies followed,
first silents and then talkies, in which he played too great a variety
of roles to be "typed." In many of these movies he was billed as "Gordon
Elliott." In 1938, however, Columbia cast him as the lead in its
15-chapter serial, The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1938), and
Elliott's identification with westerns began. He even began to adopt the
names "Bill" or "Wild Bill." He also became famous for using the line,
"I'm a peaceable man ... " (which was inevitably followed by an outburst
of violence). Elliott reached his peak of popularity at Columbia when he
was teamed with Tex Ritter ...

Trivia
Pitchman for Viceroy cigarettes during the detective series "The Lineup"
(1954).

Elliott's first horse was called "Sonny" (although several different
horses were actually used), and later in his career he had another horse
called Dice. During the making of his Red Ryder series his horse was
called Thunder. "

The Lineup!  OMG!  Now I get a lump in my throat!  Oh, yes, he died of
lung cancer!  And wouldn't you have some identity problem with a last
name like "nance"?

My late father-in-law (who was late before I had a chance to meet him)
had a recommendation for keeping women in good condition: treat them as
a piece of machinery or as a metal tool. My brother-in-law passed on
this recommendation to the husbands of two of his daughters in his
speeches at their wedding receptions. Sadly times had changed and only
two or three of the older men present at his third daughter's wedding
would have understood the recommendation to wipe her down with an oily
rag.

Sorry to hear that. I have a Goodmans telly. Very reliable, very
solid. (Very, very solid. A CRT job weighing several tons. I do wish I
could decide once and for all whether it should be upstairs or down.)
My Freesat box is the preposterously expensive and feature-rich Humax
PVR. I bought it about two weeks after swearing that I was done with
buying gadgets for good. So much for resolutions.

I presume that you have a satellite because, like me, you can't get TV
any other way. I must say, I feel a bit miffed about shelling out for
the TV Licence all those years when, until Freesat came along, the
Beeb's own transmission system for both TV and radio didn't penetrate
this far. (We can't get mobile phone signals either.) To get radio and
telly via Sky I had to pay two allegedly one-offs for 'free' cards to
go in the box. And even those payments wouldn't have been enough if it
hadn't been for my local MP. (Must look up his expenses on the Web.
(There's gratitude.))

Which is everywhere. :(

--
VB

They did.  It's not something I wish to be reminded of.

I was at school with that Mrs Sting, you know.

Songs From the Labyrinth is no Classical Barbara.  

On the other hand, Edin Karamazov is no Nelson Riddle.

Au contraire, neither was German, which is yet another thing they had
in common.

Did you know that line does not appear in the original novel of "East
Lynne"?  It was added by whoever wrote the script for the play based on it.

    When I started this song I was still thirty-three
    The age that Mozart died and sweet Jesus was set free
    Keats and Shelley too soon finished, Charley Parker would be
    And I fantasized some tragedy'd be soon curtailing me.

I am proud to have shaken Harry Chapin's hand.  Before he died, you
understand.

No, she is Antonio Saglieri.

Yes, and Elizabeth Taylor as Papagena.

Which one of  the many female love interests in MJ' life is Contanze
Mozart?