Out Loud And Proud

Well, not completely. I do have moments of seriousness (usually in my sleep). You see, I’m obsessively interested in lexicology. No, idiot, not sexicology (which I might add I am supremely qualified in).Lexicology: the study of words. You know, those monosyllabic expressions you spit out when the Maltese utility bills with added 67% fuel surcharge arrive? So, I’m curious: where the heck did the British “SPEND A PENNY” originate from? To those uneducated in the official version of Her Glorious Majesty’s English (Americans pay attention), it means “take a piss”. Politely. Oh my pilgrim possums of the American Prairies, you may well ask how does one take a piss politely? After a lot of practice, that’s how. (Best results achieved when practiced at British Boot Camp Boarding Schools of which I am a sterling graduate). Unfortunately, right now I can’t conduct research to provide myself (and any other unemployed good-for-nothing idiots who might be reading this) with an answer, because I don’t have access to the internet or to my voluminous library of reference books (because I’m locked in the garden shed ok? Because I been a bad girl ok? Fuck off, we’re no way near to being on a need to know basis…). Was the phrase coined….oooh *screech!screech!* wadda pun! jeez I’m so clever with words I could slap myself with a lamb shank! You too? Get in line…. Beetch!. Ahem.…*adjusting wig after heated gesticulating and subsequent falling off chair---makes mental note to next time buy chair with seatbelt*, so…was the phrase “SPEND A PENNY”…umm…penned…by the British Great Train Robbers who, after conducting the biggest robbery in British crime history, had to swallow some of their loot to hide it?

Other deeply meaningful quests I’m on…...a search for the source of the Maltese language. Judging from its interesting phonetics, I reckon it all started with a bunch of miscreant babbies who’d been rounded up and locked in a pen by their Phoenician Mammies and told they better give their Mammies a bloody good reason to justify their sodding existence or they’d be fed to the One-Eyed Monster over in Greece. So, the bunch of devious delinquents held an Extra-Ordinary Meeting in their pig pen and decided to invent their own secret code to spite the Mammies. And the Maltese language was born. Take for example babby sounding words like: deek and dak and deen, bot bot, bish and biss and omm and bizza. But their true genius revealed itself when they wrote their newly invented words down on their compressed palettes of pig poo.

Lets fast forward to the present to demonstrate their inspired genius. I am escorting a hapless American tourist to Malta’s Main Tourist Crafts Village (housed in a field of dilapidated abandoned WW2 British tin bunkers which the government has ensured retains its authentic dilapidated bombed-out appearance…makes the Brits feel nostalgic; makes the Germans squirm; makes the Yanks wash their hands before and after entering). The hand-painted sign reads: TA’QALI Craft Village. “Oh” says tourist, quick nervous glance at sign, “so this is…uh…the Tequila Craft Village?” That silent “Q”, which is peppered throughout the language, has tripped up many a hapless American who is accustomed to (read more….go on..I dare you..)