In which the pond harrumphs about the quality of reptile harrumphing ...

The situation is now so bizarre and mind-boggling in the United States that the pond turned to the reptiles to settle down, perhaps with a bit of decent domestic harrumphing …

The pond loves a good harrumphing,  though there's the technical question of whether the modern spelling 'harumph' should be adopted, and there's the matter of the origins, with nobody having much of a clue, except it apparently came into vogue in the 1930s …

There's something about imitative words that appealed to Lewis Carroll, and to the pond, and yet something also curiously old-fashioned about a good harrumphing …

Don't ask where the pond found that, somewhere on the full to overflowing intertubes where gramps are always shouting at something …

In these moods, when only a good harrumphing will satisfy, the pond turns on a Saturday to the likes of nattering "Ned", and indeed it seemed promising …

Awaken the beast?

The pond could sense fire in the belly, the beast aroused and stalking towards Canberra, smashing and smiting … and yet, what turned up?

That's it? 

That's the full harrumph? Why the CV is almost as long as the piece …

The pond felt a "pshaw" coming on, and while it has a longer ancestry than harrumph, there's the question of an errant p'shaw, and an anxiety that perhaps 'pish posh' might haven been better, and then came the worry as to whether it should be pish tosh … and even worse, came this anecdote …

Happily, I recently made the call, took a deep breath and ordered all twenty glorious Volumes of the OED, which now are just behind me and with one 180-degree spin of my swiveling desk chair, are before me, and thus I’m able to merrily seek all adjectives and adverbs that adequately describe them. “Pish” was used as early as 1592 an exclamation for contempt and also as a form of “piss”. “Tosh” meant neat and tidy in 1776, but later meant rubbish and twaddle in 1892, and was used as a school slang verb for splashing. Thus there were, no doubt, young lads who used combined the two to mean a “piss bath.” (here).

Well yes, that's the feeling the Donald possibly had in Moscow and the pond frequently feels when reading the reptiles.

And that's how the minuscule harrumph of nattering "Ned" led the pond down the garden path …

Sheesh, what to do you know?

... "to lead one up (or down) the garden (or garden path) - This expression, in frequent use by English writers, has not yet gained much currency in the United States. It is relatively new, dating probably no further back than around the end of World War I. When I wrote to Sir St. Vincent Troubridge, whom I have quoted variously elsewhere, to inquire whether he could suggest a possible origin, I advanced the theory that seduction might have been the aim in the 'leading.' He did not agree with that view, though he was not able to offer anything more plausible. Nevertheless, to quote the 'Supplement to The English Oxford Dictionary,' the saying means 'to lead on - mislead,' and the earliest printed quotation that is cited in from Ethel Mannin's 'Sounding Brass' : 'They're cheats, that's wot women are! Lead you up the garden and then go snivellin' around 'cos wot's natcheral 'as 'appened to 'em.' If that doesn't imply seduction, then what does it imply? Be that as it may, current usage rarely, if ever, carries other meaning than to bamboozle, to hoax, to blarney, to pull one's leg, to deceive." ("Heavens to Betsy" by Charles Earle Funk (Harper and  Row, New York, 1955, quoted here).

And there was the pond thinking it was all about an English vegetable patch in the back yard ...

The pond decided that it needed an additional 'harrumph' and luckily had a spare Dame Groan it hadn't thought to use during the week.

It looked pretty solid and compelling … it's only a few days old so the flesh hasn't quite dissolved and the gases seemed reasonably contained ...

Ah no doubt Dame Slap would be explaining about the gig economy, and how the forces of tech presaged an enormous transfer of wealth to the private sector thanks to the employment practices of the likes of Uber and Deliveroo and any number of franchises, and with it a consequent transfer of debt - in the form of social costs as an indigent casual workforce attempts to fund its retirement - to the government …

It was a classic tech reinvention of an old saw, privatise the profits, and socialise the losses, and perhaps this might be of interest and consequence, unless the old habit of making the elderly live with their spawn, perhaps in a shed out the back, was revived to help save the day …

By golly the pond knows how to get it wrong, everything is ship shape and sailing along ...

The pond could feel a 'phooey' coming on, or perhaps a 'pooh', or a 'what the dickens', or worst case, a fiddlesticks …though at least that explains why the pond doesn't give a fig, and feels very la-di-da about it all …

For those living outside the deluded world of the reptiles and the Dame Groan academic citadel …

One in four Australian employees today is a casual worker. Among younger workers (15-24 year olds) the numbers are higher still: more than half of them are casuals. These jobs come without some of the benefits of permanent employment, such as paid annual holiday leave and sick leave. In exchange for giving up these entitlements, casual workers are supposed to receive a higher hourly rate of pay – known as a casual “loading”. But the costs of casual work are now outweighing the benefits in wages. (much more here).

As a spent force, the unions aren't in a position to stop the trend, but in due course, a hard rain is going to fall on the young, and the not so young paying taxes to keep them above the poverty line …though the pond and Dame Groan will be long gone by the time the worst of it happens …

Well if the harrumphing isn't up to much, at least there's always a Pope cartoon, with more papal pleasures here …