31 October 2021

The Western as quite literally an enduring genre at High Noon

 This COP26 Conference in Glasgow has hilarious possibilities.

I just heard Prince Charles say: "Quite literally, it is the last chance saloon."

Exquisite! Such gems adequately justify all the expense of having a Royal Family! One wonders what confused kaleidoscopic images were dancing round in the poor poppet's mind when he drafted that. At least, it must prove that (unlike Good Catholic I'm Irish Biden) he does write his own speeches.

His sister, Princess Anne, also writes her own speeches. I infer this from the fact that she once came to give a 'lecture' at the college I taught in, and it was totally captivating. Nobody, clearly, had ever explained to her that a sentence should contain a main verb!

Perhaps some readers employ the same dodge to stay awake as I do when forced to listen to twaddle: trying to render it simultaneously into Latin. No need for such contrivances when the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Battenberg get up onto their haunches.

I earnestly entreat exhort and beg readers to communicate via my thread the funniest bits they hear from the COP26.

With so many fully qualified windbags in the same place at the same time ... 

(That's an aposiopesis.) 

5 comments:

wonastow said...

The funniest thing about COP26 is that Mankind is being asked to change his habits so that his lifestyle can remain the same.

John Nolan said...

One can argue that a sentence requires a subject and a predicate but not necessarily a verb. This applies to interrogative sentences as in 'More tea, vicar?' and sentences where the verb 'to be' is missed out as in 'No fool he.'

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard people use 'literally' when they mean 'metaphorically' and only the other day Prince William came out with 'to Catherine and I'.

Joshua said...

Such a pity that the Princess Royal won't inherit the throne. Apart from anything else she clearly takes after her father.

John Vasc said...

Perhaps Princess Anne has imbibed millennial Tony-Blair-English:
Occasionally using present participles (occasionally even having reached out for imperfect ones), sometimes adverbially suggestive, often avoiding any indefinite article in ludicrously stretched-out-portmanteau-type synthesis, often inserting an antithesis, all for the sake of the padded-out prepositional phrase rather than for the mere preposition. A swathe of pseudo non-sentences. And never, never without rhetorical repetition. For the words are the many, and not the few.

John Patrick said...

When I first did a web search on "COP26" I found out that 26 Colombian Pesos is worth about .7 cents in US money. Much more interesting than what I read on the actual COP26 page.

A typical paragraph from the "adaptation" page:

"In responding to the key priorities of parties and civil society organisations, we are driving progress to close the adaptation gap and respond to climate impacts. Our Glasgow Adaptation Imperative, sets out action to date and progress that is required on the pathway to COP27 to build a climate resilient future for all."

The key priorities of most of the parties I have been to involved good conversation and the consumption of moderate amounts of alcoholic beverages. I have a feeling that their priorities may be different from mine.