You can’t even tell a joke these days.
Furious shoppers have vowed to boycott Iceland after one of its bosses called the Welsh language ‘gibberish’.
Iceland’s corporate affairs boss Keith Hann also said Welsh sounded ‘like someone with bad catarrh clearing his throat’ in an old personal blog post which recently resurfaced on Twitter.
Outrage began when father-of-two Mr Hann said ‘inhabitants of the UK’s Celtic fringe loathe all visitors’ – referring to people travelling to Wales – in a tweet which has since been deleted.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t a joke and he meant it. So what? I lived in north Wales for three years when I was a teen. I’d say he has it exactly right. At that time, it was pretty much a dead language – being of no use anywhere else and it was mostly confined to the north. A determined effort has brought it back to life since then. It’s still no use outside of Wales, though and, yes all those double ‘l’s do sound like someone is clearing their throat.
I’d also point out that these comments were made years ago, so someone has been indulging in offence archaeology here.
In a blog post written on September 17, 2014, he said that Welsh ‘supermarket signage’ was ‘incomprehensible’.
In another blog post, he wrote: ‘I regret to say that we are also only about two miles from Wales, thanks to the border lurching east from the natural boundary of the River Dee, and taking a bite out of England that can only have been designed for the convenience of manufacturers of jigsaw puzzles.’
Sounds fair to me.
Mr Hann’s Twitter account has since been made private and his bio reads: ‘All views my own and usually joking.’
Ah, so it was a joke. Some people really have thin skins, don’t they?
I’ll get my tin hat out now.
And he never mentioned sheep.
And the rest of the Celtic fringe are nowhere like this.
They will speak English if they know you are not a native. They will be very friendly, alghough you might call it noseyness so they can find out all about you. They will go out of their way to help you, because what else would they be doing.
What I did notice in Wales was there are lots of villages called Ysgol.
Not ‘anws o unman’ ?
I remember P. J. O’Rourke once said that ‘A Liverpool accent sounds like somebody buggering a goose with a car horn’. I assume that he was joking too.
Not heard that one before. He has a point.
Whereabouts did you live? I’m in the north.
Corris Uchaf.
I think Blackadder once commented that “in Wales, you cannot even ask the way to the station without a pint of phlegm in your throat”
So this chap’s response to this archeowokism could have been: he was merely quoting the BBC.
It reminded me of a joke Milton Jones told about being in a cafe in Amsterdam and he went to the assistance of a man who was choking but it turned out he was just speaking Dutch. Apparently as an afterthought he said “That works with Welsh as well.” 🙂
You got a sustained LOL with that post. As a frequent visitor to the Netherlands that is absolutely true.
When was it that the whole bloody world became so bloody delicate about having the piss taken?
You are a llwwlwttwlnyynnwmm
There that’s told you
How are you pronouncing that?