Sunday 30 June 2013

Piglet Cuckoo MP beer

  • In Polish, the word for please is proszę, which the British cannot distinguish in pronunciation from prosię, meaning piglet. How many times have I walked into a Polish bar and said "Two beers, piglet!"?
  • In Welsh, the word for beer is cwrw (do remember that w is a vowel). A cuckoo is, unsurprisingly, cwcw, which is a distressingly close thing.
  • The Greek for beer is μπύρα, which is bloody confusing for the linguistically inept mathematician who knows the letters, but not that mu and pi combine to give a b. So actually, they call it beer.
One might have assumed that linguistic Darwinism would have assured that all words relating to beer and its purchase would be unambiguous and easily understood by all: I favour calling it "beer" everywhere.

(The Polish for cuckoo is kukułka.)

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