Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Moka yesterday
I believe the comments are closed on the other thread.
If I'm not mistaken, we may be the couple who left. We left because we had finished our breakfast and were in a bit of a hurry.
Yes the kids threw a wobbly - everyone watched in sympathy for the mum and a little bit of amusement as the piece of cake caused such emotion in the toddler. It was all quite normal and maybe perceived by the mum as worse than it was cause she was dealing with it.
I'm not going to make any comment on Mokas attitude towards prams cause I don't have any. I like the place.
My main concern is being called 'elder' if we are indeed the couple!
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by piolabar on
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And....my elder husband just reminded me, the lady was on her own? You seem to allude you witnessed the event Richard? Unless we are mistaken (at 40 memory can play tricks....) you weren't even there.
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Permalink Reply by HoL Site Admin on
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At the request of its author, the 'other thread. has now been deleted.
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Admit it, Richard. You weren't at Moka yesterday. Your partner dealt with the child or children who threw the "paddy". You later trumped up a post to have a go at Kevin and Moka's anti-child vibes. Fabulous fiction, but they've rumbled you.
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Re the other thread....as an Irish person I had alwys assumed
'throwing a paddy' was a polite middle class English expression. Not sure it has any pejorative connection...
Or is that perjorative???
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Philip, if I as an Irishman may add a fillip or stimulant to your enjoyment of English politeness, try:
i.) Collins English Dictionaries: "in a paddy - in a fit of temper. Informal (C19 from Paddy)".
ii.) Oxford English Dictionaries: "in a paddy - in a tantrum or fit of temper, late 19th century from Paddy, associated with obsolete 'paddywhack' Irishman (given to brawling)".
For further enlightenment on what you call "polite middle class English expression" I refer you to practically any issue of 'PUNCH Magazine' from 1841 to 1922, but especially its cartoonery of the last quarter of the 19th Century, as well as selected issues of 'THE TIMES of LONDON' of that period, and choice issues of the London 'EVENING STANDARD' of the 1970s & 1980s.
In the other deleted thread, Tom Devine's comment was indeed a brief but divine intervention.
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I, as an Irish woman, used the word wobbly rather than paddy. I don't for one minute think the use of the word paddy was intentional and we should not be over sensitive but.... We should also be sensitive that these once offensive terms were used and the passing of time doesn't excuse them - we should all educate ourselves to historical insults. Having said that - 1980 is recent enough that people have a genuine right to call this out, even when no insult was intended. It's not a nice turn of phrase with many better alternatives.
Understand the origin of Language you use and you will start to understand unintended perception
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yes but if no one feels offended then no offence is caused. In the same ballpark as 'welshing' on a deal or 'scotching' a rumour.
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No, Philip, not in the same ballpark at all. And your tautological "if no one feels offended then no offence is caused" proves nothing at all.
i.) welsh or welch is "of unknown origin" but can be traced to the 19th century, according to most authoritative English (& American) dictionaries (e.g. OED, Merriam-Webster, Collins). No evidence that it derives from Welsh or from any characteristic behaviour alleged of the Welsh.
ii.) scotch as in scotching a rumour has no more to do with Scots, Scottish or Scotch than, say, the adjective niggardly with its well attested Scandinavian roots has to do with the N-word whose Latin(niger) and Spanish(negro) roots once had perfectly neutral descriptive meanings, to wit black or a black man.
scotch, as noun or verb, meant a mark or to make a mark, for example with a tool or stone on a pavement if you want to play 'hop-scotch'. (a game that should be all over Wightman Road just now as it's a game in which no Scotsmen, not even of the Douglas clan, die or suffer
). It also meant a wound or to inflict a wound. So scotching a rumour would mean dispatching it, quashing it.(By the 19th century it had come to have this meaning of finishing something for good.) It may be linked to scutch as in scutching flax, because of the striking, tearing, teasing, beating motion involved, a bit like carding wool in the old days.Curiously, the English Bard WS of 'The Scottish Play'(1606) has Macbeth warning Lady Macbeth: "We have scotch'd the snake, not killed it." - using the older sense of temporarily disabling something threatening. Macbeth knows that Duncan's murder is only the start - Duncan's sons as well as Banquo, Macduff and their offspring need to be dealt with. This older sense of temporarily disabling something later came to have scotch meaning to wedge, as in wedging something under a skidding cartwheel.
No, scotch and welsh/welch are not in the same league as paddy. One might avoid using scotch or welsh to guard against misunderstanding by the ignorant, but to ditch them as being in some way racist, derogatory or pejorative would be, as John D put it in the earlier deleted thread, "a black day for the English language"!
On which note, Ossie Davis's "The English Language is My Enemy"(1967) is still worth reading - but when Macduff interrupts Ross, who has come south to England to tell Macduff in a roundabout way that Macbeth has butchered his wife and babes at home in Fife, we should not think that Shakespeare or Macduff is being racist when he says roughly, "Be not a niggard of your speech - how go'est?" Obvious, yes. Yet every time I taught Macbeth over in Highgate (1979-2003) I had to walk on eggshells as we made our way around the apparently offending word. As Piolabar suggests above, English words should be ditched out of real knowledge, not out of ignorance.
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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Well, I have to apologise and plead ignorance OAE. It had never occurred to me that " to throw a paddy ", " Nick, nack paddiwack " and " paddywagon " were pejorative references to my Celtic cousins across the water. I know now and will refrain from using them in future. To be absolutely sure, I shall also scrap my planned treatise on the growing of rice
Re your final paragraph, I was once banned from a Canadian-based chatroom because I complained about my niggardly pension
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Permalink Reply by EMC2 on
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Mind you John (IMHO), Paddy is nothing like as pejorative as 'Mick' - in my 31 years in London, in my hearing, I was only called 'the Mick" once. And by a Scot.
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You're right there, Eugene, on the 'one-name-fits-all-Paddies' syndrome. Possibly the perceived level on the pejorative scale has to do with "thick Mick" being more wounding (or 'scotching') than "thick Paddy"???
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