Word: cockney
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...truce to this Anglo-American bickering, and a plague on those who foment it ... I have this to say to la Phillips of Hove [TIME, Feb. 23]: "Cockney" (and I'm a born Londoner) is an unpleasant whine, "Lancashire" murders the Queen's English and "Mayfair" is definitely, but definitely, effete...
...worn out with age . . ." Does TIME mean then that the speaker was an old man with a quavery voice? Or were you referring to the mode of expression and pronunciation? If this last is the case, then I venture to say that the British accent, be it Scots, Lancashire, Cockney or merely Mayfair, has more vitality, variety and general caress to the ear than the flat, nasal monotone that passes for speech...
...always start with about eight cups of tea first thing in the morning," a cockney said last week in London. "Then there's the tea break, then lunch, then tea, then supper. Pot's on the go the whole time." For the country where the pot is on the go despite rationing (varying between 2 and 3 oz. a person a week), the Tories had good news. After twelve years, the government stopped rationing of tea. In future, only the price (averaging 65? a Ib.) will prevent tea addicts from buying as much as they want...
This Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere was thickened by the mixture of formality and laxity that prevailed at court. No one dined with the Queen without invitation -but this might come in the form of a cockney footman's brisk bark to a roomful of ladies-in-waiting: "All what's 'ere dines with the Queen." Ponsonby was not allowed to smoke, even when decoding dispatches in his own room; the stench, complained the Queen, permeated the papers. But, on occasion, footmen and Highland servants could get so drunk that a royal dinner was punctuated by .the crash...
...mildly dirty stories, and I loved her from then onwards." Once, her teacher led her to a piano, put a piece of paper under the strings, and struck a chord. "That," she said, "is what your voice sounds like." Gertie worked hard to get rid of her cockney twang. On a Sunday excursion to Brighton, she put a penny in a fortune-telling machine. The pink card she got told her her fate: A star danced, And you were born...