
In my day to day life here in England, I often hear unique words or phrases springing forth from the lips of either my husband or someone else.
One such phrase that tickled my funny bone when I first heard it was “...and Bob’s your uncle!”. My first thoughts were (a) ‘what the heck?’ – I had no idea what they were talking about, and (b) ‘how did you know?’ – since I actually did have an Uncle Bob! Well, apparently they weren’t talking about my family tree at all. In Britain, this phrase is used quite commonly and means “and that’s all there is to it”, or “and you’re all set”, usually put at the end of a list of instructions. Who knew?!
I love the richness and diversity of the English language, and the many different forms of it that you hear all over the world. This is the subject of an exhibition at the British Library – Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices. This free exhibition opened on November 12th and runs until April 3rd, and includes many iconic books and manuscripts as well as recordings of famous speeches by Churchill, Gandhi and Mandela. Visitors to the exhibition can even record their own voices, reading the children’s book Mr Tickle, and have the recording added to the British Library audio archive as a part of the collection. There are also examples of early advertising posters, lists of slang, early newspapers, comics, text messages and so much more included in the exhibition. More information on all of this can be found at http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglishand if you are on Twitter, then you can also tweet using the hashtag #evolvingenglish.
I recently played an online quiz related to the exhibition at http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish/quiz.html and scored 6/6 on the “easy-peasy” level (the less said the better about how I did on the more advanced levels!). You could always follow the link yourself, take the quiz and share your own score ...and Bob’s your uncle!
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