Chris’s relative Bernie shares a few fascinating facts . . .
Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
Quite often I find myself visiting a care home to see my elderly relative Bernie.
Well, I was there again a few days ago, maximising my opportunities to pop in before getting the ferry home.
Just to be clear, it’s me who lives on an island surrounded by forts, not them. It’s an old folks’ home, not Alcatraz.
Bernie, as usual, was great to talk to, and amongst many other pearls of wisdom he imparted was the following.
In theatres in the olden days, with everybody paying cash for entry, the cash was put into a box, and taken to a locked room for safe keeping. And that room was called… the Box Office.
Just like that, he’d given me the origins of a term I’d never queried in my entire life! Box Office! Who knew. Well, Bernie did.
Being the avid collector of trivia that I am, I hounded him for more. He looked surprised but immediately came up with two more facts, this time regarding Americanisms.
“I always love how everyone thinks words are American, but they’re just old English,” he said, warming to his subject.
“It’s, like, if you say ‘howdy’, everyone thinks of cowboys – but actually it’s just 16th century northerner talk for ‘how do you do’… how dee?”
I imagined myself in conversation with a 16th century Yorkshireman (as you do) and immediately knew that Bernie was right!
“And sidewalk – very American, yes?”
I nodded earnestly.
“No – it’s just an old English word they emigrated with and kept, while it was us who dropped it and changed it to ‘pavement’, which just means something like ‘trodden on’ in Latin – funny lot, us English.”
This educational visit was over too soon, with me needing to rush back to catch the prison barque back to Alcatraz, but there was one further very notable incident, just before I left.
Bernie has a cuddly toy dog in his room at the home, which he calls Monkey. I have no idea why he thought Monkey would be a great name for a
