The Most Annoying Common Expression in England

By -
You walk up to a shop till or a bar, and the employee behind it says, "Can I help?"

So far, I (barely) have resisted the urge to ask, "Can you help what? Ending world hunger? Halting global warming? Picking up the rubbish in the neighborhood? Driving me from the shop?"

If someone can't be bothered to add the single-syllable word 'you' at the end of that question, I feel less than confident that they are all that interested in 'helping.'

Comments

  1. Anonymous8:27 PM

    Hah! That reminds me of the first time I visted Ireland.

    Walk up to a bar, newsagent, dry cleaner, etc and they'll ask, "Are y'ok?"

    Umm...yeah, Im fine but I'd be better if you poured me a drink!

    Steve - absitinvidia.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. TT Tom11:48 PM

    Yeah, well, I was tending to some plants at the garden shop and one of the guys from the furniture side of the store says "Do you need any help?" So I said "Yes, but where should I start? My parents? Childhood? Or should we start with more recent issues?" He quickly made his way off and I suppose found something else to do.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Vache Folle3:19 PM

    In Barbados, the expressions "Are you safe?" and "We will keep you safe" don't mean what you think. Being "safe" means having enough to drink. A bartender kept asking me if I was safe, and I got more and more paranoid.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous10:58 AM

    Not half as annoying as being asked by the check-out assistant in the supermarket "How are you?", which is increasingly common.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more