[45:00]
L: So, what else? “Scrooge” is about a stingy man.
J: A miser.
L: A miser is someone who only cares about collecting money. Stingy is someone who is mean, who is not generous with money. So a stingy person. Right? And so, Scrooge is the character in this story by Charles Dickens and Scrooge basically learns through this story that he should stop being so stingy and he should be more generous. Right? And one of the things that Scrooge says at the beginning of the story is “Bah humbug”. I don’t know what “humbug” actually means.
J: I don’t think it’s a very commonly used word. It’s just a sort of “humbug”. It’s a sort of… It’s almost a sort of way of saying gibberish or rubbish or nonsense or…
L: Or nonsense
J: Or there is a good another Anglo-Saxon word that starts with B, which is…
L: Now, bollox.
J: Bollocks. We can say that, it was proved in court that is not a swear word. The Sex pistols named their album “Never Mind the Bollocks”. Here’s The Sex pistols’. They got take him to court by the obscene publication act or someone and they fought it in court, only a Virgin Records, Richard Bredson went to court and he brought a lot of manuscriptions and texts showing that bollocks is a old British… English word meaning “testicles” and a such…
(laugh)
J: …with not such a just to __ swear word. It was in the dictionary and was not offensive. It was just English.
L: I reckon like some poor English teacher out there… has discovered this episode of Luke’s English Podcast and go…
J: …and he’s crying
L: Like some teacher in, I don’t know, Canada or something, you know, some teacher from somewhere, in like Japan has kind of gone “Oh, wow, I found this really neat episode of Luke’s English Podcast, which is all about Christmas. I’m going to, you know, just put the CD on, while my students, you know, in the classroom…
J: Recess.
L: I’m going to mark their exam results and they can listen to Luke’s English Podcast about Christmas… little does she know, that we were talking about…
J: What’s her name?
L: I don’t know – Jane. And little does she know that we’re talking about bollocks and snot and stuff like that.
(laugh)
L: We were meant to be talking about Christmas.
J: Okay. Get on with it.
L: We keep talking about bodily functions.
J: So “humbug”.
L: “Bah humbug”. It’s just means…
J: It doesn’t really mean anything, rubbish.
L: That means “Aaaa nonsense”. And that’s what Scrooge says “Bah humbug”, but we use the expression “Bah humbug” as a kind of phrase, a saying which means “Oh, I don’t care about Christmas”
J: It’s not a very popular phrase though.
L: No, it’s not…
J: I’ve never heard people say that.
L: I just wrote it down, because people do say that.
J: It’s worth pointing out an excellent version of “Christmas Carol” which is “The Muppet Christmas carol” featuring… what’s his name?
L: Kermit, the frog.
J: No that, the actor.
L: Michael Caine.
J: Sir Michael Caine.
L: Yeah.
J: (in Michael’s Caine accent) You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.
L: They’re not going to get that.
J: (in Michael’s Caine accent) “Zulus. Thousands of them. Just wait until you see the whites of their eyes lads”
L: What my brother is doing is having drunk two cups of tea, he’s getting a bit over excited and now he’s doing Michael Caine impressions, quite badly.
J: (in Michael’s Caine accent) Hello Luke. My name is Michael Caine. I’m here to talk to you about Christmas. (laugh) That sounded like a dog.
L: That’s not Michael Caine. (now Luke’s trying do that accent) The thing about Michael Caine is that everything he says is said in groups, in small groups of words.
J: Better.
L: That’s a little better than yours, but it’s not good by any…
J: But anyway he plays Scrooge in a “Muppet Christmas carol” which is an excellent reimagining of the classic Dickens tale through muppets.
L: Yeah.
J: Anyway moving on.
(laugh)
L: This is a crazy episode. Do you know that?
J: Come on. Move on.
L: This is like a slightly insane episode. So Christmas shopping… let me talk for a bit. Okay?
J: Okay. I’ll shut up. You brought me on this show to talk…
L: Okay, alright. You’re back in the room. You can carry on. I’m just trying to get through it in the next 10 minutes. I know I like the sound of me own voice as well maybe. So, Christmas shopping that’s probably the same in most countries, but here you have to buy gifts for all your close… members of your close family. So, you have to do those: trips into the center of town, which is a nightmare, because everyone is aggressively trying to buy their gifts for their families and so. It sort of becomes a bit… I can be a little bit aggressive.
J: A pain, can we say that, it’s a pain.
L: It’s a real pain.
J: That’s a popular English phrase: “Oh, it’s a pain”.
L: It’s a pain in the neck.
J: Which is just an abbreviation of “It’s a pain in the neck” or ‘It’s a pain in something else”, but we say that quite a lot “Oh, it’s a right pain”.