Word: cockney
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Panama has always been a place where strange truth gives fiction a run for its money. In John le Carre's 1996 novel The Tailor of Panama, a Cockney living in Panama City tricks money out of British intelligence by stitching up a plot involving Asians' taking over the Panama Canal. In real-life Panama, the story is no less peculiar: a new President is about to be sworn in amid charges that the government has switched control of the canal to a company allegedly controlled by the Chinese People's Liberation Army. The catfight over that is just...
...just run into another remnant from that same period of antiquity in the news business. Furry, flabby and foul-mouthed, a dislocated Brit turned foreign correspondent tells an intern about reporting, as he knows it. "Thay're in jayill naow, the fahks." For the old hack, possessed of a cockney so thick it sounds Australian and a mouth as foul as Sammy Sosa's late swing, the march of history is not poignant--it is a hard blow to the gut. He speaks of the former owners of United Press International, scoundrels whose skullduggery contributed to the proud organization...
...directly to Virgil and Homer. Relaying a dialogue in which a simple man assumes El Salvador is somewhere in Southern Alabama, the speaker--in contrast--demonstrates his own learning. "When Mongols conquered the Chinese..." he begins the eleventh stanza, immediately before which he describes a voice as "the London cockney of a Lebanese immigrant." Thus, the speaker in the elegy is separated...
...spill. Just know that our gang (Flemyng, Jason Statham, Nick Moran and Dexter Fletcher), scrounging to find that half a million quid, overhears the goons next door plotting to steal money and drugs from four ganja growers nearby; our lads hope to cash that booty in with an Afro-Cockney gang. (Clear?) Then it all goes as wrong as a bad day in Bosnia. "Could everyone stop getting shot?" one of the goons pleads--and this is before a shoot-out that makes the St. Valentine's Day Massacre look like a heart-shaped box of Cadbury chocolates...
...with 'Hail, Satan'"). In a family of noisy eaters, he is perhaps the loudest, at least in decibel-to-kilogram ratio. He has a few weaknesses: exposing his buttocks, sassing his father, making prank calls to Moe's Tavern ("Is Oliver there? Oliver Clothesoff?") and speaking like a Cockney chimney sweep. One of the few trophies on his bedroom shelf is labeled EVERYBODY GETS A TROPHY...