Play With Words

Nick Roddick described the reaction of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days winning Palme d’Or in Guardian:

The film world’s collective jaw may have dropped on Sunday night when 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – a Romanian film about abortion with no stars and costing under half a million pounds – walked off with the Palme d’Or in Cannes.

如果翻译成中文：大约是“全世界的电影人都在满地找眼镜”。

BBC Newsnight Review 的三位嘉宾的预测也错了，但还不算太离谱。《潜水钟与蝴蝶》得了最佳导演奖。

Guardian’s Simon Hoggart described the crowd who support woman MP Harriet Harman’s contest to be Gordon Brown’s deputy.

She had backing from 61 MPs. Of these, 31 are women. They, with a handful of men, marched into a committee room at the Commons like Japanese tourists who has lost the lady with the flag. They knew it was important, but they weren’t quite clear why they were there.

Joke in expense of Harriet Harman’s gender…or the ladies who support her perhaps?

专栏作家Bernard Levin在1994年布莱尔成为工党领导人之后在《泰晤士报》上的文章，向我们演示知识分子是如何骂人的：

Labour at last has a modern leader ready to sweep to power and end this sorry era.

The longer and more frequently I contemplate Mr Blair, the more I like the cut of his jib. This has nothing to do with the alternative; I long ago concluded that the present Government was worm-eaten, exhausted, dishonest, incompetent, lazy, mendacious, ignorant, rotten, false, disreputable, deceitful, unsavoury, squalid, abominable, soiled, piratical, shifty, discreditable, infamous, improper, obscene, hateful, impure, degraded, dilapidated, shabby, grovelling, discredited, renownless, tarnished, disgraced, shameless, creeping, abject, two-faced, unscrupulous, villainous, treacherous, untrustworthy, prevaricating, sinister, crawling, insincere, fishy, spurious, unclean, felonious, infamous, venal, base, vile, bribable, rancid, disloyal, scheming, unsavoury, sickening, fetid, nauseating, putrid, defaulting, mouldering, evil, vicious, damnable, maleficent, wrong, ineffectual, mean, inferior, contemptible, superficial, irrelevant, expendable, powerless, pathetic, nugatory, impotent, jumped-up, cheap, insalubrious, flea-ridden, unsound, nasty, baneful, foul-tonged, cursed, unwarranted, execrable, damned, abnormal, unreasonable, virtueless, peccant, sinful, unworthy, hopeless, incorrigible, tergiversating, brutalised, nefarious, culpable, scandalous, worthless, flagitious, gross, indefensible and unpardonable to say the least. But Blair, as far as I can see, is to be found on his own feet, not measuring by the scabrous (I missed that one) Lilliputians now arrayed against him.

不过如果你仔细看，他还是重复使用了 infamous 和 insavoury 两次。

After the loss of election in England, Scotland and Wales of various degress, the retiring Tony Blair was seen being interviewed in some nondescriptive office, with a mug of tea in hand. The Times’s Ann Treneman wrote:

Mr Blair, who denies he is in denial, denied things were so bad. Then, casually, he dropped his soundbite cluster bomb. “It’s been a dreadful set of results for the Liberal Democrats,” he said chattily. “And the Tories have not broken through, particularly in the northern cities.” Within seconds, this was being flashed up as BREAKING NEWS. The mug had struck again.

Soundbite is a weapon a politican must master.

Stephen Bates wrote in The Guardian:

The courtship is being conducted with all the formality of a Jane Austen novel. Effie is being introduced to the others one at a time and for strictly limited hour-long meetings each day to avoid unpleasantness on either side. Informally, the keepers call it speed-mating.

What is this all about? Obviously there is certain ‘Kate Moss of gorillas’ who is about to be introduced into the ‘Gorillas Kingdom’ in London Zoo.

How the Kate Moss of gorillas gave Ziggy the hump at London Zoo’s new enclosure

Daniel Taylor of The Guardian describes the difference between two teams that will meet this evening:

It was a classic shot of the differences between the two teams who will meet in Catalonia this evening – on one side, the millionaires with their diamond earrings and Louis Vuitton man-bags and, on the other, the assortment of part-timers, wannabes and never-will-bes with their modest tracksuits and the air of lost tourists.

And David Rodrigo, coach of Andorra, says:

We think of them as excellent football players but we will not be asking them for their autographs. And they might be famous but we do not consider them to be from another planet. We will do everythng we can that England won’t want us to do. We want to show them that a small nation can play football as well but we will also provoke as many problems for them as possible.

Andorra’s jacks of all trades get ready to enjoy spot of overtime

Nancy Banks-Smith of Guardian explains the plot of the new American TV series Kidnapped:

We meet them the morning a New York Times reporter arrives to do a feature on “Breakfast with the Cains”. She should have stuck around for elevenses because – what a scoop – Leopold is kidnapped on the way to school, and his bodyguard shot and left starfished on the road.

I like the expression ‘starfished’.

elevenses: pl.n. Chiefly British. Tea or coffee taken at midmorning and often accompanied by a snack.
scoop: Informal. An exclusive news story acquired by luck or initiative before a competitor.

Nancy Banks-Smith on last night’s TV:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv_and_radio/story/0,,2033152,00.html

Kathryn Hughes explains Jane Austen’s philosophy is more about pragmatism than romance.

Everyone in Austen’s world comes with a price tag that announces, in terms as clear as a livestock auction, just how much money is on offer and how much is expected in return. Thus a stonking great income of £5,000 a year is quite enough to wipe out body odour and the fact that no one in three counties can stand your screechy laugh. But with only a paltry £100 a year, you’d better have the kind of cleavage Andrew Davies dreams about.

Never mind the cleavage

Andrew Davies: writer of Sense and Sensibility (2007 TV series), Bridget Jones 2, Bridget Jones’s Diary

Guardian’s Michael White explains Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn’s 2020 Vision website is about to those uninitiated:

Does yesterday’s call by Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn for a wholesome debate on Labour’s future policy direction mean what it says on the website tin. Or is it really a surrogate leadership campaign, one in which Corporal David Miliband is pushed up out of the Flanders trench by a couple of grizzled old sergeants who want someone else to test the machine guns?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2023852,00.html

The Times’s restaurant critics Giles Coren:

But English film critics are not red-blooded. And that is why most of them didn’t get Rocky Balboa. They kvetched about believability, sneered at sentimentality and mocked Stallone’s muscular, monosyllabic conception of masculinity. This is because English critics are a snide, whey-faced, nerdy bunch, who at the age when I was grinding out press-ups to Eye of the Tiger, were getting hard-ons for Belle de Jour and pinning another Morrissey poster to the wall.

American critics are not like that. It’s why they have Updike, Roth, Clint Eastwood, Joe DiMaggio and Champion the Wonder Horse while we have Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Hugh Grant, Mark Ramprakash and Muffin the Mule.

And he is supposed to review a restaurant. Who are Morrissey, Updike, Roth, Philip Pullman, and Mark Ramprakash anyway?

kvetch: To complain persistently and whiningly

snide: Derogatory in a malicious, superior way

whey: The watery part of milk that separates from the curds

whey-faced: with a pale face