Claiming what is yours! And other stuff.

Whatever we may think of George Osborne in his handling of the nation's finances, he keeps tight control of the milk in his fridge in the Treasury. He has a padlock on the door of the fridge and there is also a guard. This is reported by the SENIOR political correspondent of the Telegraph. You would think such a senior person might have more important things to do. 

I can sympathise with poor George Osborne about the milk situation, however. In the staff room of one place I worked at we suffered from milk stealers among the teachers. Some people thought that whatever was in the fridge was legally everyone's and treated it accordingly. I even used to label my bottle of milk, politely explaining that it was, in fact, MY milk but if people were unscrupulous enough to steal it that I would appreciate their leaving enough for me to have a cup of coffee later. It didn't work. They usually left the empty bottle though. You would have thought they could at least rinse it out! 

Such are the people who are influencing the minds of the younger generation. And, it seems, running the country. I hold my hands up in horror. 

And then Turkey's president has been claiming that Muslims discovered America in 1178. But Vikings and Basques also claim to have been there first. Whose country is it anyway? It's all a bit childish, like kids pulling their tongues out at each other or thumbing their noses, declaring loudly, "I saw it first!!!" Load of nonsense but a bit of light relief in a world with too many serious things going on. Such as politicians stealing each other's milk. 

Maybe the milk thieves are following the example of a certain lady prime minister who was known, after all, as the milk snatcher. Not that she stole from the Treasury fridge but she did stop free milk to primary schools. Ah, the nostalgia! Little bottles of milk in crates outside the classroom: frozen in the depths of winter and slightly rancid in he height of summer! 

Mind you, according to some sources, we should stop drinking it. Some research shows that people who drink too much milk are at greater risk of heart attacks and other diseases. Who knew? Maybe we should just go on a bread and water diet! With perhaps a little cabbage thrown in! 

The cabbage comes from my Italian class this afternoon where we looked at idiomatic expressions involving "cavolo", Italian for cabbage. If you want to say, " What the ****!" you can simply say, "Che cavolo". In French they use cabbage as a term of endearment: "mon petit chou!" In English we can use it to suggest an air of stupidity or perhaps naivety: "he's not so green as he's cabbage-looking". But for the Italians it serves as a harmless replacement for swearing. Because I suspect that's how it started, putting "cavolo" in expressions where a much ruder word beginning with "c" might have caused offence. 

Idiomatic expressions are odd, especially when inadvertently and mistakenly changed. Someone was ranting on the Mind Your Language Blog in the Guardian about people saying "He's got another THING coming" instead of "He's got another THINK coming" when they want to say that someone is mistaken in their expectations about something. I quite agree with the ranter and I was put in mind of a German friend of mine who went around protesting when asked to do something unreasonable by saying, " I can't be asked to do that!" Then her daughter pointed out that it was really a much ruder expression than that. Oops! 

Finally, two silly stories about Peppa Pig, the children's TV series. First of all, in the series there is a character called Gabriella Goat. When the series was dubbed into Italian she became Gabriella Capra. A lady by the name of Gabriella Capra is suing the BBC because she has since been mocked by lots of people in her village. I wonder why no-one found her name funny before. And secondly, someone bought a Peppa Pig costume to wear to a playgroup fundraising event. She paid £210 pound for the costume to be sent from China but it was confiscated upon arrival in the UK for violating intellectual property rights. Apparently it had to be destroyed! 

You could not make up such stories of you tried.