Dealing with numpties

Homer Simpson exclaiming the famous quote
D'OH!

A friend of mine works in a call centre and today had a little tiff with a customer. A customer who obviously likes to throw big words around, but who doesn’t understand what they mean. This sentence she quoted me creased me up:

“Right, OK. I won’t speak ‘hypothetically’ since you have such a problem with it but let’s just say…”

In the words of the great Homer J.: “D’oh!”

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As the actress said to the bishop

Humphrey Lyttelton and producer Jon Naismith during a 2005 recording of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue at the Edinburgh Fringe

Humphrey Lyttelton died earlier this week. For those too young (i.e. who don’t listen to “old people’s radio”) or too non-British to know who he was, he’s most famous for presenting a Radio 4 show called I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. It’s one of those quiz shows with celebs in it, and some daft questions. Along the lines of TV’s Have I Got News For You, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, and – to some extent – Who’s Line Is It Anyway?

It was/is (I don’t know when it’ll pick up again) a remarkably funny show if you get a chance to listen to it. The link above is to the official page with lots of samples to download and enjoy. I confess I didn’t listen to it regularly, but if it happened to be on when I was in the car it was a great half-hour chuckle. And you’ve not lived (or stretched your imagination) until you’ve played a strenuous game of Mornington Crescent against an expert.

Lyttelton was most famous for his constant use of double-entendres. I had a “complaint” in my comments the other day that I use naughty words on here and therefore I have no appreciation of the English language or the wondrous variety of nuances within it. Let alone how to be smutty without appearing to be so.

Codswallop, frankly. I could have learned from this man how to talk fluently about porn without actually using a sweary. Finbarr Saunders from Viz could, in fairness, be a more knobbly-kneed, big-nosed version of Lyttelton. Between the two of them they could translate the entire letters page of Forum magazine into something you could hand to an 8 year-old and they’d never guess what you were on about.

This article on the BBC News site is a great summation of the show and Lyttelton himself. Definitely worth a read.