Bob's Your Uncle

As a follow on from yesterday's post on avuncular nepotism, here's a brief account of exactly why Bob is your uncle.

It should be noted that there are several theories for this, and a new one is invented every week, but the standard line* is that it refers to the political career of Arthur Balfour. Balfour was Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1902 to 1905, which, given the size of the British Empire, made him pretty much the most powerful man in the world. However, it was not always thus. When he was first elected to parliament in 1874 he was considered a bit of a joke; and when he was suddenly made Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1887, everybody thought that it was rampant nepotism because the prime minister who promoted him was his uncle, Robert Cecil.

So, Balfour's easy success was down to the fact that Bob [Cecil] was his uncle.

As I said, there are a bunch of other theories, partially because the earliest written reference comes in 1931. However, if you wanted to know what Uncle Bob looked like, you should (probably) see the picture below.

*Despite what a citationless Wikipedia article may tell you.

Bulldoze

First came the shotgun and then came the shotgun wedding. First, came the railroad, and then people were railroaded into doing things. And I had always assumed, by this pretty pattern, that first came the bulldozer and then came the bulldozing of people. How wrong I was! How wrong and how innocent!

A bull-dose is a dose of the bull-whip, or maybe a dose strong enough to kill a bull; and it was the punishment given out in the 1876 American election to those black citizens of the United States who were considering voting for the Wrong Party.

The wrong party in this case was the Republican Party, and the bull-dose given to those who were southern and black and ready to vote for the Elephant was a couple of hundred lashes. The OED's first citation runs:

If a negro is invited to join it [a society called ‘The Stop’], and refuses, he is taken to the woods and whipped. This whipping is called a ‘bull-doze’, or doze fit for a bull.

That's democracy for you. People were thus bull-dozed long before the invention of the bulldozer. In fact, several things including guns were given the name of bulldozer before the large vehicle that we know today was christened in the 1930s.

And it's got nothing whatsoever to do with dozing bulls.

An enemy of freedom

The Literary Efforts of the Leaders

On the same subject as yesterday's post, Colonel Gaddafi has written several poems and stories. Many political leaders have heard and heeded the plaintive calling of the poet's pen. So I'm going to set you a little puzzle. Here are six little literary efforts by political leaders. The authors are Colonel Gaddafi, Barack Obama, Radovan Karadzic, Chairman Mao, Jimmy Carter and Saddam Hussein. But can you guess who wrote which?

Goodbye Assassins

Goodbye, assassins, the boundaries between
The worlds are trampled
Instead of the heart, a hornet drones in vain.
History turned its back on us.
What should one shoot at?
Like an octopus, the age hides its vertebra,
And the winter approaches
With white drifts.

Extract

Is not life in the midst of ordinary things filled with the most extraordinary things? Is its consistent flow not interrupted by some unexpected leaps? Could the colours of life be rich if the most ordinary things were not interspersed with miracles? Would a valley bring delight to the eyes of the one gazing at it if there were no mountain peaks above it?

Yellow Crane Tower

Wide, wide flow the nine streams through the land, 
Dark, dark threads the line from south to north. 
Blurred in the thick haze of the misty rain 
Tortoise and Snake hold the great river locked.
The yellow crane is gone, who knows whither? 
Only this tower remains a haunt for visitors. 
I pledge my wine to the surging torrent, 
The tide of my heart swells with the waves.

Liberia

The miles of rubber trees bend from the sea.
Each of the million acres cost a dime
nearly two Liberian lives ago.
Sweat, too,
has poured like sap from trees, almost free,
from men coerced to work by poverty
and leaders who had sold the people's fields.


The plantation kiln's pink bricks
made the homes of overseeing whites
a corporation's pride
Walls of the same polite bricks divide
the worker's tiny stalls
like cells in honeycombs;
no windows breach the walls,
no pipes or wires bring drink or light
to natives who can never claim this place as theirs
by digging in the ground.
No churches can be built,
no privy holes or even graves
dug in the rolling hills
for those milking Firestone's trees, who die
from mamba and mosquito bites.


I asked the owners why.
The cost of land, they said, was high.

On Death

Is death a male or a female? God knows ... My father killed the snake with his strong foot. But death ran away quickly from under my father's foot and masqueraded as another snake which intercepted my father on his way back home so when he put his hand in a bush, to light a fire, this second snake caught him and it emptied its poisonous saliva as one injection in his arm ... this time death expected its stubborn adversary not to escape. Yet it forgot that my father had vaccinated himself against snake poison by being bitten before.

Underground

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.


So who wrote what? You had:

1) Goodbye Assassins
2) Is not life in the midst of ordinary things....
3) Yellow Crane Tower
4) Liberia
5) On Death
6) Underground

And the writers were:

1) Colonel Gaddafi
2) Barack Obama
3) Radovan Karadzic
4) Chairman Mao
5) Jimmy Carter
6) Saddam Hussein

Now before you go and look at the answers, I want you to take a minute to decide which one you liked the most. In the blind tasting of poetry's wine, without the prejudice of politics, which of those was the best and which was the worst? Decided? Right. You can get to the answers by clicking on this link.

What an artist dies in me.

Paradoxical Workers

The first two words of the Daily Telegraph the other day were "Unemployed workers". The article then went on about the root and branch (but not trunk) reforms of the benefits system.

I liked unemployed workers. I liked it for a lot of reasons. First, it is an oxymoron in the proper rhetorical sense. Like Shakespeare's:

O heavy lightness! Serious vanity!
Misshapen chaos of well seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!

Or Bart Simpson's "This sucks and blows at the same time." Or "She's hot and she's cool" or "Military Intelligence". In that sense it fits happily into the language of dating and love that I wrote about the other day.

Second, there is the distant ancient voice of Marxism calling from the front page of the Telegraph. Workers of the world unite! To a convinced communist there are only workers and the bourgeoisie, just as in the eyes of God there are only sinners and saints. The notion that a worker is a worker whether he works or no has a long linguistic pedigree.

And in a related sense, there is the idea of the working class: from the great triumvirate of upper, middle and... working. It is the euphemism denied by context: rather like tourist or economy class on an aeroplane.

Finally, unemployed workers recalls that great paradox of identity. Is doing being, or being doing? Or, as Frank Sinatra put it: do-be-do-be-do-be-do.

The famous French tosspot, Jean-Paul Sartre, observed that if you spend all day every day waiting tables, then it's no use claiming that you are, in reality, an artist. In reality you are a waiter. He denied an interior truth that might, like a potent dream, outdo the mere existence.

And all that in two words. The Daily, Shakespearean, Marxist, airborne, anti-Sartrian Telegraph is one hell of a read.



N.B. The phrase was confined to the print edition, which just goes to show that you should fork out hard cash if you want the gems.

Taliban Classes

Taliban means students, but class means called to battle.


Taliban means students. There's an Arabic word tālib, meaning student, and, if you make that into a Pashtun plural, you get taliban. This is because the Taliban were, originally, just a small group of religious students who wanted to clean up Kandahar. They then got carried away, as capering students often do, and invaded Kabul.

Class, on the other hand, means those called to fight. There was a Proto Indo European word *kele, that meant, shout. From that the Romans got the verb calare, meaning call to arms. The early Roman population were always getting called to arms. When there were calared, the male population would form up as a c[a]lassis, and set off to find some Sabine women to rape.

The Roman king Servius Tullius divided the Romans into six classes so that he could tax them more efficiently, and so classis then came to mean a group. A classis could still be a military group like an army or a fleet, in the same way that an English division can still be military. But class could just be a part of a whole. Thus a school or a society could be broken up into classes, and the animal kingdom could be classified.

Incidentally, the reason that they are classified ads, is that they are arranged by subject, just as the Roman subjects were arranged for battle.

The Inky Fool found cross-dressing was much less fun in Kabul

Thomas Derrick, Jack Robinson and Dr Guillotin

Once upon a time, hanging was the punishment for almost any crime. Even Ben Jonson, for the trivial offence of murder, was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted when he proved that he could read and thus got Benefit of the Clergy. He had a T branded on his thumb and was sent home with a warning.

The T stood for Tyburn, which is where the hangings used to take place. The man who would have executed Ben Jonson was called Thomas Derrick. Thomas Derrick was a nasty man. There hadn't been enough applicants for the role of executioner and so the Earl of Essex pardoned a rapist on condition that he would take on the job. That rapist was Derrick.

Modern recruitment companies could learn a thing or two from the Earl of Essex.

Which isn't to say that Derrick was technically bad. In fact, he was something of an innovator. Rather than just slinging the rope over the beam, he invented a complicated system of ropes and pulleys, and it was by this method that he, in 1601, executed the Earl of Essex.

There's a moral in that, but I haven't the foggiest notion what it is and this is an counterethical post because Derrick's name survives. The rope system he invented started to be used for loading and unloading goods at the dock and that is why modern cranes still have a derrick.

There are three main theories on why things happen before you can say Jack Robinson. The first is that Robinson used to be the French term for an umbrella (because of Robinson Crusoe), and that French servants were usually called Jaques. This meant that when rich Frenchmen visited England and were surprised by the inevitable rain they would shout "Jaques, robinson."

The second theory is that there was an eccentric fellow in early nineteenth century London who would walk out of parties without warning, often before you could even say his name, which was Jack Robinson. However, there is no contemporary evidence for his existence.

The third and most plausible theory is that it comes from Sir John Robinson who was constable of the Tower of London from 1660 to 1679. He was therefore in charge of executions and was a stickler for efficiency rather than solemnity. The prisoner was marched out, put on the block and shortened without any opportunity for famous last words. He did not even have the time to appeal to the overseer by crying 'Jack Robinson.'

So derricks and brief spans of time are both named after cruel and psychotic executioners. The guillotine, on the other hand, is named after a jolly nice chap.

Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had nothing whatsoever to do with the invention of the Guillotine. In fact, so far as anybody can tell, he was against the death penalty. Nobody's sure who designed the first modern guillotine, but it was built by a German harpsichord-maker called Tobias Schmidt.

It was Guillotin's kindness that got the machine named after him. You see, in pre-revolution France poor people were hanged, whereas nobles had to the right to be executed, which was considered less painful (although I'm not sure how they worked that out). When the poor French were revolting, one of the key demands was the right to be beheaded. Dr Guillotin was on the committee for reforming executions. He decided that the mechanism with the blade was the least painful and most humane method available. He recommended it.

In the debate that followed, on the first of December 1789, he made one silly remark: "Avec ma machine, je vous fais sauter la tete d'un coup-doeil, et vous ne souffrez point." With my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it.

It's a great line. People loved it. They composed a comic song about it. Here's an English translation:

   Guillotin,
   Politician,
And physician,
Bethought himself, 'tis plain,
That hanging's not humane
   Nor patriotic;
And straightway showed
A clever mode
   To kill - without a pang-men;
Which, void  of rope or stakes,
Suppression makes
   Of hangmen.


'Twas thought, and not in vain,
   That this slim
   Hippocrates limb
Was jealous to obtain
The exclusive right of killing
By quicker means than pilling.


   The patriot keen,
   Guillotin,
The best advice to have
   Before the next debate
   Consults Coupe-tete
Chapetier and Barnave;   
   And then off-hand
   His genius planned
   That machine
That 'simply' kills - that's all -
Which after him we call
   'Guillotin.'

So Thomas Derrick and Jack Robinson were both sadistic, heartless thugs, whose names live on in innocence, if not glory. Poor Dr Guillotin's family were so embarrassed that they had to change their name.

There is, as the fellow remarked in the empty magistrates court, no justice.

The Inky Fool catches forty winks

Undermine

Sometimes I just like to sit around and contemplate a word's original meaning. Undermining, for example, is an old military technique used in sieges. One way of getting through the castle walls was to tunnel underneath them until the collapsed. Thus all this talk about David Miliband undermining his brother gives me the image of a bunch of Blairite politicians with pick-axes and miner's helmets chipping away in the dark beneath Labour HQ.

Incidentally, the idea was not that the tunnel would collapse upon the diggers, although I'm sure this often happened. The attackers would dig a little mine under the walls, then they would put an explosive in there, light the fuse and run. That's why explosives are to this day called mines, because that's where they were left. Thus a connection between miners and minefields.

The Inky Fool was interrupted mid-attack

Slogan

Once upon a time a slogan was a battle-cry. When ancient Gaelic warriors raised their kilts and ran into battle they would shout the name of their tribe or their capital before rushing like wolves to the slaughter. If you imagine the modern football hooligan screaming the name of his club, you probably have some idea.

Their army-shouts or sluagh-gairms did not have the desired effect and the English language spread by spear-point and sword into all but the boggiest parts of these rainy islands. Sluagh-gairm was anglicised to slogan and taken up by politicians and plutocrats, cabinet ministers and corporations. Yet, I still like to think of the advertising executives and PR girls girding up their kilts, shrieking their slogans, and running to their brave and selfless deaths.

Cruel and Unusual

The Inky Fool doesn't usually get involved in politics. Why fall into a camp when you can stay in a hotel? However, the guards at Guantanamo have finally overstepped all bounds of human (or inhuman) decency. They are giving the inmates Dan Brown novels to read. It's true. There's an article about it in Time if you follow this link.

Oh the humanity.

Take this sample torture sentence from the first chapter of The Da Vinci Code:

These were the gardens in which Claude Monet had experimented with form and colour, and literally inspired the birth of the impressionist movement.

Now, aside from the fact that Claude Monet was part of the impressionist movement not an inspirer of it (as, say, Turner was); if you literally inspired a birth you would need to inhale a foetus.

The Da Vinci Code is also such a one trick pony of a novel: there's somebody chasing them so the traffic jam is meant to be exciting. There's somebody chasing them so visiting the library is meant to be exciting. There's somebody chasing them so...

Let them die.

To be fair to The Da Vinci Code, I didn't even make it halfway through. Perhaps somewhere midway it morphs into a better version of Shakespeare. I was forced to give up my reading by the demented tripe that passed for New Testament textual analysis. The only thing I learnt from the novel was that Dan Brown should probably be sent to Guantanamo.

Odd little thing, but did you know the song Guantanamera was originally about a girl from Guantanamo? You did? Oh well.

Moreover, I have just invented the greatest* cryptic crossword clue the world has ever known:

Darn Clue! (5,3,7)

A typical scene at Inky Fool Mansions

*Actual quality may vary. The manufacturer cannot accept responsibility for words uttered in whimsical excitement.

Aux Armes, etc

Today is Bastille Day. So here, for your political edification, is a history of the French Revolution done entirely in terms of when words first appeared in the English language. All of them, of course, imported from the French. 

1789
Aristocrat

1790
Sans Culotte

1791

Capitalist, Functionary

1792
Regime, Commune, Emigre

1793

Demoralise (meaning to corrupt) , Disorganise, Guillotine

1795
Terrorism

1798

Tricolour

There's a fantastic Blake poem called The French Revolution, but I can't find it on the web.

Talknophical Assumnacy

I'm flummoxed. Yesterday I mentioned the lovely word snollygoster meaning a dishonest politician. The OED cites this quotation from the Columbus Dispatch of 1895:

A Georgia editor kindly explains that ‘a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy’

The problem is that the OED has no definition for either talknophical or assumnacy. It's happy to use the words but not to explain them, and I can't work them out for myself. I would guess that they are portmanteau words, but of what? Talknophical might be talk and philosophical? But then where does the N come from? Assumnacy could be assume and... obstinacy? The Reverse Alphabet Dictionary lists only four words ending nacy: effeminacy, indeterminacy, obstinacy and lunacy and none of those could have been readily guessed.

Any advance on my frail theories?

Three snollygosters talknophicating

The Horse's Mouth

Though I know nothing about horses, I know that you can check their health by inspecting their teeth. This is why you should always look a gift horse in the mouth, a lesson the Trojans learnt to their cost. The horse's mouth, though, is merely a particularly good source for a racing tip. He heard it from the stable-boy, you heard it from the trainer, I heard it straight from the horse's mouth.

I know I am a lone voice crying aloud in the wilderness on this subject, but that paragraph was merely a lead-up to pointing out that you can only truly understand international affairs and the glories of English prose if you read the official news website of the North Korean government. The guy who writes it has clearly just learnt the word bedevilled and this account of the sinking of that South Korean ship is fantastic. Here is an unedited paragraph:

Branding the south Korean puppet conservative group as one of most wicked traitors who bedeviled the north-south relations to serve outsiders, a gang of vicious anti-reunification elements who dampened the nation's desire for reunification, a diehard traitorous clique who scuttled the inter-Korean cooperation and dangerous warmongers keen to bring nuclear war disasters to the Koreans, the indictment cites facts to prove its crimes.

Scuttled is a beautiful, beautiful word. Full article here.

Clearly the North has better curtains

The Generous Haystack And The Crooked-Nosed Robber-Chieftan

The Clegg family motto is, apparently, "Qui potest capere capiat", which means "Let him take what he can get".

That is as far as the Inky Fool's political analysis goes. There was an old Norse word kleggi that meant haystack. So far as anybody can tell (and opinions are hung) there was a place in Lancashire called Haystack Hill that was therefore called Clegg and the name of the village survived even when the hill's name was changed to Owl. People from Clegg were called Clegg.

Meanwhile there was an Scottish chap who suffered a broken nose. The Gaelic for nose is shron and the Gaelic for crooked is cam, so this chap became known as Crooked-Nose, Cam-shron, or Cameron. He had children who had children who had children in a huge teleological domino-run of parturition that led inevitably to the current leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

In 1169 some Englishman invaded Ireland. Why they did this I can't imagine, but they did and they got a little bit of territory. Territory is best marked out with stakes (steaks don't work) and the Latin for stake is palus and so such territory is called a pale. So the territory around Dublin was called The Pale and everything else was Irish and beyond The Pale.

Anyway, the English rampaged about, driving innocent Irishmen from their ancestral peat-bogs. These innocent Irishman found that in their straitened and vagabond conditions innocence no longer paid and many turned to banditry. They became thieves, or to give the proper Irish word tories.

The word tory found its way into English as a pejorative term for an Irish Catholic. The English were mostly protestant with a protestant king called Charles II who died and was replaced by James II who was (like Mrs Malaprop) of the Roman Obedience. James II was not simply Catholic, he also appeared to have plans to give his Irish Catholic henchmen their land back and so his supporters were insultingly called Tories.

The Tories did all right for a while. They didn't get to keep James II, who was ousted in the Glorious Revolution; but they stuck around well into the eighteenth century until they were wiped out by the Whigs. In the late eighteenth century the Whigs themselves split and one faction, the Friends of Pitt, were insultingly referred to as Tories. Everybody had by this time forgotten that tory meant thief. The term essentially meant "You're like those people from a hundred years ago that we wiped out".

Even in 1812 when they were in government they preferred to call themselves Whigs. They were the true Whigs in the way that the Real IRA consider themselves real. (I'm more frightened of the surreal IRA). Then in 1834 there was the Tamworth Manifesto and they decided to call themselves Conservatives and the name became official.

Tory has always been an insult. Indeed, the posters in this election campaign saying "I've never voted Tory before but..." were the first official posters ever to use the word.

As liberal means generous, all of this necessarily implies that the generous haystack is currently in talks with the crooked-nose chief of the robbers.

Meanwhile, labour, as any mother will tell you, is agony and is best survived on drugs.

The Inky Fool casts his vote

Ballots and Balls

Ballot comes from the Venetian word ballotte, which means small balls. Indeed, the term arrived on English shores inside The Historie of Italie by William Thomas. The idea was that you could cast votes by placing different coloured balls (or pebbles) into a bag.

This idea leads back to ancient Athens. If the Athenians wanted to banish somebody for not being classical enough, they would vote on the question by putting little black or white fragments of pottery in a box. White meant yes: black no. These tiles were called ostrakons. Hence ostracism. Ostracism has nothing to do with ostriches but is distantly related to oysters (both words relate to bone).

The first verbing of ostracism was in this apt couplet by Andrew Marvell:

Therefore the democratic stars did rise,
And all that worth from hence did ostracize.

The method and term survives to this day in blackballing. In the gentlemen's clubs of London an application for membership may be refused on the basis of a single black ball in the ballot box.

In ancient Syracuse votes for banishment did not use shards of pottery. They used olive leaves and so ostracism was called petalismos, which is far more beautiful.

A brown ballot box containing balls, darling.

The Drunken, Addled, Insane Parliament of Bats and Dunces

History had better names. Richard the Lionheart, Charles The Fat and Louis The Sluggard were far more memorable monarchs than the modern, numbered variety. Wars, which used to be named after roses or Captain Jenkins’ stray body-parts, are now dully geographical: Afghan, Iraq, Falklands. However strongly we may now feel on the subject, can you imagine a schoolchild of the future getting excited over the Second Iraq War?

It is almost indisputable that the voter apathy that afflicts modern politics is down to the fact that we don’t give our parliaments memorable names any more.

We used to. There was the Rump Parliament, which was all that was left after Cromwell had forced out those MPs who didn’t want the king violently shortened. There was the Parliament of Dunces in 1404 from which lawyers were banned (presently the legal profession makes up about 10% of MPs). There was the Addled Parliament of 1614, which was dissolved without doing anything at all. And there was the Parliament of Bats in 1426 where the members were banned from carrying swords and so carried clubs instead.

Many of the names are a trifle misleading. The Pacific Parliament was not oceanic but peace-making. The Barebones Parliament (pulled from the Rump) was in fact convened by a puritan called Praise-God Barebone*. The Insane Parliament of 1258 is probably just a misreading of Insigne. But the Drunken Parliament of 1661 did exactly what it said on the tin.

And our current legislature? It is the 54th Parliament and by that name history will forget it, unless we move fast.

Tony Wright, the Labour MP, suggested last May that they might be remembered as the Moat or Manure Parliament and there was a sterling effort, mainly by The Times, to make the Manure stick, yet by June it was pretty much forgotten. The Pay-Per-View-Porn Parliament is alliterative but far too long. The Duckhouse Parliament has a good ring to it and conjures an amusing image. Or perhaps the Parliament of Cabbies. That would really confuse posterity.

We have until Friday to baptise.

The Warm Parliament of 1834

*His full name may have been Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone, which beats David, Gordon and Nick hands down.

Bigot

The main theory (though there are several) on the origin of the word bigot, is that it derives from the words by God. The idea was that those who were always invoking their morality and piety were in fact rather nasty and hypocritical.

Any connection this etymology may have to current events is purely coincidental.



N.B. The Inky Fool is non-party political and believes in government by whim.

Girouettism

A political journalist just asked me whether I had seen her flip-flops and for a second I thought it was a reference to a change of policy: the dithering of a politician or the tergiversation of an editorial line. It turned out she was talking about shoes.

I don't like the term flip-flop. Even though I can see that it flips the one way and flops the other and that it combines this with ablaut reduplication (like ping pong or tick tock). Perhaps I just don't like the fl sound.

Imagine if Tennyson had changed the last lines of Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind from:

O spirit and heart made desolate!
O damnèd vacillating state!

To:

O damnèd flip-and-flopping state!

He would never have been ennobled.

Far better is the word girouettism, which means "the practice of frequently altering one’s opinions or principles to follow popular trends". It comes from the French for weather vane because of course a weather vane turns whichever way the wind blows. Girouettism also allows you to accuse your opponent of being a girouettist, which would cow anybody or at least send them scuttling to a dictionary.

In Quebec the word is considered so rude that it banned in parliament.

P.S. There is more on windy politicisms in this post on straw polls.

When Metaphors Collide

From yesterday's Sunday Times:

I imagine a ninja creeping through the hospital by night. Mrs Malaprop has already written on axes here.

Appealing

I was reading this week's copy of The Week and was astonished to discover that:

  Brown appealed to voters last weekend

I felt that I had missed something, and not just any little thing but a huge upheaval in the British political landscape (I love the idea of the political landscape: I imagine moral highgrounds, clear blue water, emotional hiterlands and disputed centre-grounds all overhung by mountains of debt). However, reading onward I found:

to "take a second look at Labour"

Ambiguities are bound to infiltrate even the most careful prose and I suppose this one could only have been avoided by resorting to that obscure and arcane word "asked".

Who could resist that puppy-dog smile?

Spot the Labour Election Slogan

1) Full fathom five thy father lies
2) Far from the fiery noon
3) The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,/The furrow followed free
4) A future fair for all
5) When fishes flew and forests walked

I think the Labour Party may be on to something. There's a funereal and melancholy grandeur to alliterative Fs. Returning to the traditional, indigenous alliteration of Anglo-Saxon verse (since ruined by Norman immigrants) may even claw back some votes from the BNP. There's also the delicious verbal hint of "A future free-for-all", which gets my vote.

A working draft of the Labour manifesto