What's in a place name?

I should warn you that there's a hidden counter on this blog that tells me, among other things, which country each visitor comes from.

Recently, quite a few have come from India, from where some, according to data from India, come from a place called 'Bombay', not from 'Mumbai', as the BBC and other news programmes have been calling it all this week. 

I find this very reassuring, as the British media has taken to telling us that there is something politically incorrect about calling cities by the names we've always known them by -- or, to be more precise, cities that are a long way away from Europe.

So this year's Olympic Games were not held in Peking but in 'Beijing' (though we have yet to be notified as to whether we're now supposed to call Pekingese dogs 'Beijingese' dogs).

But there are plenty of cities in Europe that are called something different by people from other countries in Europe. I've never heard any Brits complaining about the fact that the French say 'Londres' when we call it London.

And do Austrians complain when we call their capital city 'Vienna' rather than Wien, do the Czechs complain when we call theirs 'Prague' rather than Praha or the Italians when we talk about 'Rome', 'Florence', and 'Venice' instead of Roma, Firenze and Venezia?

We also say 'Moscow' when the Russians say 'Moscva', 'Gothenberg' when the Swedes say 'Göteborg' (and pronounce it 'Yerterborrier') and 'Copenhagen' when the Danes say 'Kobenhavn'.

None of this seems to cause anyone any problem at all, and even the media have so far made no attempts to correct the way we all refer to these cities. 

So, if the Indians themselves are quite relaxed about referring to Mumbai as 'Bombay', why on earth do our broadcasters and newspapers keep telling us to call it 'Mumbai'?

Content-free sermon by Alan Bennett

A couple of years after the release of The Best of Sellers (see previous entry) came the revue Beyond the Fringe, which launched the careers of Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller.

One of the many high spots in the show was Alan Bennett's sermon preached from the text "My brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man" - a nice contrast, followed up by some fine examples of repetition, rhetorical questions, similes and anecdotes - but more or less completely devoid of content.

When I was at school, a group of us persuaded the chaplain, or padré, as Bennett would have called him, to listen to it. Perhaps predictably, he didn't seem to think it was at all funny and couldn't see any connection between it and the sermons he and visiting preachers were inflicting on us at the compulsory services we had to attend every Sunday.

See if it reminds you of any sermons you've heard - and, if you want to see the full text and other gems from the show, click the title above to access details of the book on Amazon.

50 years since Peter Sellers recorded his memorable political speech

After mentioning a content-free political speech by the late Peter Sellers in an earlier blog entry, I’ve just discovered that you can listen to the original track from The Best of Sellers (1958) on YouTube - which you can access by clicking HERE or on the title above.