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Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Homo Nudens
Or: The Rear, The Derriere
Or: Bad To The British Baden-Baden Bone
http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/28515
"Talking of baths, I read yesterday that the English are now taking more showers than baths, and that some people have only showers in their homes even though they have the space for a bath with a step and other good dodges of a rich nature. This may be an Americanism - Americans shower briskly and get to work in that "can-do" way, while Britons wallow in nostalgia and the bath. Three hundred million stereotypes can't be wrong." - Mary Jackson
Ms. Jackson provides as good an excuse as any other to once again bring up the following salacious anecdote about the British PM, who, no Little Lord Fauntleroy he, reportedly barked like a privy seal in the tub whilst playing with his rubber ducky and dinghy as he read of the Battle of Fonteney, as originally reported in the thoroughly vetted and vented National Lampoon:
Churchill was given to reading to reading in the bathtub and, while staying at the White House, he became so engrossed in an account of the Battle of Fonteney that he forgot President Roosevelt was due to drop by to discuss the upcoming conference in Yalta. At the appointed hour, the president was wheeled into Churchill's quarters only to be informed that the prime minister had not finished bathing. Roosevelt was about to apologize for the intrusion and depart when Churchill, puffing his customary cigar, strode into the room stark naked and greeted the nonplussed world leader with a terse, "What are you staring at, homo?"
http://forums.thestranger.com/showpost.php?p=45927&postcount=9
The American habit of getting to work in that "can-do way" - or at least, way earlier in the morning than the Brits, may have less to do with Ben Franklin's (famously no friend of the Pennsylvania "Dutch") "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise" than the industrial work habits of the German weissenheimer immigrants of the 19th century. Of course, with respect to those cousins of the Anglo-Saxons, the less "humour" attempted the better, in the matter of "showers."
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