Word: cockney
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. Nellie Wallace, 78, tireless, buck-toothed British music-hall comedienne, who for nearly 40 years was a popular turn at London's famed Palladium with her shrill Cockney songs, red flannel underwear and tattered feather boa; of bronchitis, contracted the day after a performance before the King and Queen; in London...
Spare Time. Charles Walter Stansby Williams called himself a cockney, though he was born (1886) in northwest London, well out of earshot of Bow bells. His father was a poorly paid translator for an importing house, who spent his free hours reading, meditating on God, and turning out an occasional poem or play...
...nurse (Joan Fontaine). With more kindness than gumption, she concludes that a young man so desperately weary is worth protecting. From the moment Nurse Fontaine makes this silly decision, her fate is hitched to the criminal's inevitable decline & fall. So is that of Robert Newton, a sinister cockney witness to the murder, who finally gets done in with a pair of scissors...
...therefore a Geordie (native of northeast England). As such, he would tend to give his aitches the harsh Teutonic guttural overemphasis of his Nordic ancestors. Never by any misadventure would he drop an aspirate. If he must be rendered phonetically (as you so love to do with cockney taxi drivers, who all seem to say "bloody" every fourth word-and, for the sake of accuracy, I'd like to point out that bloody has been superseded since World War II by a four-letter word as yet unprintable), what he said should have gone something like this...
Your London correspondent has wronged Will Lawther, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, and local pride. You give him either a cockney or a North Midlands accent when you make him say: "Just fancy 'avin' John L. Lewis comin' over here and tellin' us 'ow to do our bloody jobs. I'd say to 'im, 'When you take our two-foot-nine seams and give us your eight-foot seams, we might listen to yer' " [TIME...