High Peak in Derbyshire is a fair distance from the sea in any direction, which may explain a wistful email that arrived from there a couple of days ago. “I think it was last Wednesday,” Jeremy White wrote, “when your front page carried a delightful picture of two young women sunbathing on the beach at Bournemouth. Just in case some killjoy writes in to complain can I just say that I thought the picture had an old-fashioned air of seaside innocence about it — the phrase ‘bathing beauties’ comes to mind. We need more bathing beauties, not fewer on your pages.”
We also need warmer weather, but full marks for the sentiment — one not shared, I’m afraid, by others who got in touch.
“Why did we need a photograph of two scantily clad young women on your front page?” asked Sally Hardisty. “This is outdated, sexist and, in the current climate, insensitive.”
By “climate” I infer that she’s not talking about the recent blizzards. While James Bowen put the picture choice down to “the culture and traditions of male dominated newsrooms, selling newspapers by the titillation of barely clothed women”, Jenny Blount from Cowes, Isle of Wight, asked “How tone-deaf does The Times have to be to carry hard-hitting articles about violence against women, only to have a voyeuristic front-page drone-shot of two young girls in bikinis? Have we emerged from lockdown back into the Seventies? Is there truly not another way to illustrate hot weather?”
Well we could have had a scantily clad chap, although Aidan Turner, our usual fallback, told the Review last Saturday that he’s now a married man so presumably his smouldering Poldark days are gone. The last time we wheeled out our favourite picture of “the drooled-over king of Sunday night television”, complete with scythe, was on March 22, and no one complained then about objectification of men.
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The issue seems to be whether women’s bodies should be seen. At which point let’s pause to give thanks that we don’t live in Pakistan, whose prime minister seems to think that women dressing modestly will solve his country’s rape problem. If women were genuinely likely to be safer on our streets if we were only portrayed in concealing clothes I’d say yes, let’s illustrate the first hot day of the year with a prancing lamb or a bunch of daffs.
We all know, however, that it’s not women and how we might choose to present ourselves that causes violence. If we feel unsafe it is because some men are unsafe. The tone of some of this correspondence seems to me to be victim-blaming the whole female sex.
Snook not snoop
Do you cock a snook or a snoot? Neither I’m sure, since we’re all grown-ups here, but whatever we feel like doing when next door’s children squirt us with their water pistols we do not cock a “snoop”, as several readers pointed out when we aired that version recently. Mike Ryan of Shoreham-by-Sea quoted our own style guide at us: “cock a snook not snoop, please”.
Where does that leave “snoot” then? Collins dictionary rules that the gesture, also known as thumbing one’s nose or, in America, the five-fingered salute, should be referred to as cocking a snook, although the origin of “snook” is a bit vague. One suggestion is that it derives from the Dutch “snoek” for pike. The connection is supposed to be that pike have long noses, although this seems far-fetched to me and if we’re looking for a link then surely snoot, from “snout”, is a better fit.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang gives citations for both forms, although it looks as if cocking a snoot features more often in the US, where they also have a similar expression for a bollocking, which goes “to blow someone’s snoot off”.
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A citation for “snook” in the Oxford dictionary comes from a correspondence in The Times of 1904, headed “Flogging in the Navy”, in which Vice-Admiral Penrose FitzGerald describes the effect of do-gooding reforms: “The young monkey puts his tongue in his cheek and cocks a snook at you”.
One early depiction of the gesture, by the way, is in Pieter Bruegel’s Festival of Fools (1560), although this appears to be predated by a plucky Saxon in the Bayeux Tapestry who is cocking a snook, or a snoot, at the Norman invaders.
Foul play
I owe an apology to Surbiton, I fear, after suggesting that urban parks were all seas of mud because of lockdown exercisers. “Oh dear, what a generalisation,” Margaret Chandler wrote. “You should come and visit Surbiton. It is delightfully green.”
Glad to be put right, sorry.
Richard Philips of Twickenham says we relocated the building where a blue plaque is to commemorate a former resident, Princess Diana. “Your headline suggests this mansion block is in South Kensington. But South Kensington Tube station is a walk of 1,120m whereas Earls Court station is half that distance. This erroneous description of the location smacks of the sharp practices of the less reputable estate agents.”
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What a shocker. Thank goodness we didn’t say Chelsea.
Mind the corgis
Marguerite Adam would like more precision from us on doggy matters. “There are two very distinct breeds of corgi, the Cardigan and the Pembroke. The Queen has always had the latter whereas the former are bred for herding, are longer, with front feet slightly turned outwards, long tails, large pricked ears and a range of colours. When you refer to a spaniel, poodle, terrier, etc you give the variety involved. Could you in future specify which corgi is involved?”
With our record on the animal kingdom, it would be rash to promise.