I DO DESIRE WE MAY BE BETTER STRANGERS

Admittedly, this isn’t too commonly heard these days, but this brilliant put-down from Shakespeare’s As You Like It was too good to miss. Said by Orlando, this excellent little quip is so cleverly worded you might think you were being complimented if you weren’t paying attention. The play actually has a wealth of put-downs that encapsulate the British idiom – consider “Let’s meet as little as we can”, “By my troth, I was seeking for a fool when I found you”, or the oddly scathing “Truly thou art damned, like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.”

BLOWING HIS OWN TRUMPET


This, of course, refers to the ancient English practice of having a trumpet blown when somebody important arrived at court. The implication is that the person being insulted thinks he’s important, but in actual fact is so unimportant that he has no-one to blow a trumpet to announce his arrival; embarrassingly, he has to announce his own importance by ‘blowing his own trumpet’. Really, this is reflective of how much the British hate the smarminess of self-promotion, which is probably why we all feel so uneasy about going into sleazy banking jobs.