The Dog’s Bollocks …

… or, It Pays to Increase your Word Power

inspired by

The English spoken in England can be a challenge to those from other countries, especially, I suspect, for Americans. How many readers here remember the Reader’s Digest in the Fifties and Sixties, with always a page devoted to Wilfred Funk’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power”? I couldn’t find one on Google Images, but without using AI was able to reconstruct one, as follows:

In those days, without benefit of the World-Wide-Web, you’d be tempted to yield to the travelling salesman who knocked on your door offering Encyclopedia Britannica, complete with bookshelf, for a sum of dollars $ or British £  paid by instalments over the years, so your kids could become learned and get to college, thriving forever more. How otherwise would you know what a “kulak” is? (You could tell yourself “It doesn’t matter”, but that would require actual brain power.)

And unless you are British or Anglophile, you don’t need to know about the dog’s bollocks, whether or not you own a dog.

But if you do, you are Excellent — the absolute apex.