Tuesday, October 15, 2024

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

MP for Ashton-under-Lyne and our current deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and, hem hem, adult entertainment performer Lauren Phillips (that link is safe, search for anything else and you're on your own). I mean, obviously it's mainly the hair. Anyway, one of them has regular encounters with Black Rod, and the other is a British politician; I expect you can make up your own jokes.

Leaving aside the knob jokes for a moment, I suspect Ashton-under-Lyne is one of the most commonly mis-spelt British place names, in that many people will assume it mirrors the form of the slightly better-known Newcastle-under-Lyme and therefore put an "m" in it. Ironically both suffixes seem to derive from words meaning "elm", in this case presumably elms on a hill, since the "under" conjunction usually (as you might expect) denotes that the thing after it is either the name of a nearby hill or a prominent thing on a nearby hill. 

There are quite a few place names of this type in Britain, some hyphenated, some not, including the splendidly named Weston-under-Lizard, which, like Newcastle-under-Lyme, is in Staffordshire, and not, as you might imagine, Cornwall

Anyway, other easily mis-rendered place names include Mevagissey (which is in Cornwall this time) which I genuinely spent a good chunk of my life assuming was called Megavissey, which not only rolls off the tongue more easily but also allows me to adapt the joke I made here and here and suggest that you get there by going through Millivissey and Kilovissey; if you get as far as Gigavissey you've gone too far. There is also the strange case of the Scottish town of Dumbarton (with an "m") being in the county of Dunbartonshire (with an "n") which can only be a cruel joke designed to catch people out. 

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