Book description
A JOLLY DECENT CUPPA ... is a wonderfully entertaining compendium of
the hundred words and phrases that have over the last century become the
cornerstones of modern spoken English, and have been used - sometimes
deliberately, but often inadvertently - to stake out the common identity
that unites the English, to define what makes us who we are, and thus
different from those beastly foreigners who lurk just off our shores.
Despite attempts by politicians and writers, despite lessons in
citizenship enshrined in the national curriculum, we have famously never
been able to define for posterity precisely what Englishness is. A JOLLY
DECENT CUPPA … takes certain well-loved and crucial expressions such as
sorry, nice, fair play, shag, common, posh, cuppa, chippy or the full
monty, explores their strange and wonderful origins, and demonstrates
with wit and charm how they are emblems of an era or an attitude, of a
heritage and of the traits and quirks essential to all our notions of
Englishness. Tony Thorne is Language and Innovation consultant and
director of the New Language Archive at King's College, London. He
broadcasts regularly on radio, including for the BBC, and has been a
Hollywood script consultant and an EU adviser on language and
communication.
