Origins of Wonga The payday lender Wonga has gone into administration. How did ‘wonga’ come to be used as slang for money? — The term is believed to have derived from the Romany word ‘wangar’ which, although used as a term for money, in fact means ‘coal’. This in turn has Indo-Iranian origins. — In English, too, ‘coal’ or ‘cole’ were used as slang for ‘money’ in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the possession of coal really did equate to wealth.
After communism collapsed in 1989, Poland wiped its hands of socialism. Capitalism swept in, bringing fast-food chains and shopping malls. Today, the country is the EU’s sixth-biggest economy. GDP per capita has overtaken Greece’s and is catching up with Portugal’s. Yet despite this outward success, many Poles feel left behind. In response, the Polish government proposes “solidarism” – capitalism with a social face, involving more social support, especially for families – as a sort of third way. This doesn’t mean that the Polish cabinet is made up of a bunch of Corbynistas. Far from it. Though typically described as “right-wing”, the Law and Justice (PiS in Polish) party, which has
There was once a belief that for TV and radio commercials, a Scottish voice was more ‘trustworthy’. This was particularly the case for financial services ads. It was, however, a belief entirely without foundation. ‘We made it up,’ a banking executive once told me. ‘We’d moved our call centres up to Scotland, so we decided to use Scottish voices on our adverts.’ The ‘trustworthy Scot’ myth quickly gained currency. From the late 1990s onwards, you could hardly turn on the radio or television without hearing a Scottish voice telling you about mortgages, loans, terms and conditions. Soon the demand for Scottish voices moved beyond the financial sector: they began advertising
It was a dark afternoon in November, and the wind was rattling the casements of the bare schoolroom. My small but enthusiastic class of Greek students nibbled chocolate biscuits and listened politely as I ploughed through yet another list of irregular verbs. Suddenly, standing by the electronic whiteboard, I had a sort of minor epiphany (Epiphany: from the Greek term for a god’s manifestation to undeserving mortals). Why, I asked myself, were these bright teenagers devoting so much time to studying a difficult language which they would never be able to use to communicate, whose native speakers died two millennia ago, and in which it would take years to reach
The key phrase is LIKE A TANSY (39). The scientific name of the tansy is TANACETUM VULGARE (4A 12); remaining unclued lights are synonyms of tan (4D, 34), ace (25, 33) and tum (3, 19). First prize Eileen Robinson, Sheffield Runners-up Peter Moody, Fareham, Hants; Mrs L. Ashley, Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex
All good things must come to an end, including summer holidays and bull markets. The bull run in US shares that began in the aftermath of the financial crisis in March 2009 has now officially passed the previous record of 3,452 more-up-than-down days from October 1990 to March 2000. This time round, the S&P500 index of US stocks has risen by more than 300 per cent — and that rise has continued throughout Donald Trump’s reign, despite his trade war threats and other follies. But it has not been reflected in major European markets, which have drifted sideways, and has been increasingly sustained by a small number of top tech
In this week’s books podcast, I’m talking to Sebastian Faulks about his brilliant new novel Paris Echo, which describes the twined stories of a Moroccan teenager and an American academic in the French capital – and the way that the ghosts of the past, from the Occupation to the decolonisation of North Africa, still play out in the present. I asked Sebastian whether writing from the point of view of a 19-year-old Moroccan means he’s going to be chucked in the Lionel Shriver High Security Prison for “cultural appropriation”, whether Paris Echo is an excursion into Magic Realism, how his serious literary novels coexist with his writing James Bond or
With another year of public exams behind us, the education sector continues to navigate its way through the government’s significant programme of reform at GCSE and A-level. These changes are aimed at raising standards, a mission that few would argue with; and in pursuit of this laudable goal, the independent school heads I’ve spoken with are broadly unopposed to the considerable amount of time that we have all devoted in recent years to implementing and adjusting to these reforms successfully. However, heads are all grappling with the same challenge: how do we structure and focus our curriculums to provide the necessary time to deliver the new syllabi without compromising the
C.S. Forester, creator of Hornblower, a great student of Anglo-French relations, wrote a now often overlooked exhortative novel titled Death to the French. Contemporary readers might consider it triggering if not racist, yet it captures well a traditional British reaction when angry Frenchmen start throwing missiles at us. Here in the south of France we are some distance from the troubled waters of the Guerre de Coquilles Saint Jacques. On the shores of the Mediterranean, oysters are favoured and war fever muted, although nobody at Chez Trini’s café doubts that the perfidious English are up to their usual conneries. I tend to agree, but then I’m applying for an Irish
Last week, it emerged that Linda Bellos, veteran feminist of the Old Left, faces legal action for having said the wrong thing about transgender people who hit women. This week’s transgender thought-criminal is Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party. Someone who might well be considered impeccably on-message on gender issues is accused of being that most terrible thing, a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and is being punished accordingly. Lucas leads a party that is deeply devoted to the orthodoxy of transgenderism and the unquestionable mantra that “transwomen are women”. So keen are Greens to embrace the right of people born male to be considered women if they say they are
Under David Remnick’s editorship, the New Yorker has become stronger than ever during a period where many titles have collapsed. So you’d think he might be able to fend off the kind of nonsense he’s just experienced. The New Yorker has branched out to publish unmissable podcasts, regular emails, blogs and events which combine to push the magazine sales up 10pc. Remnick hasn’t torn it up and started again. He managed to keep everything the same, by changing everything: projecting and protecting the magazine’s identity, on and off the page. So when he decided to conduct an interview with Steve Bannon live on stage, as part of the New Yorker
The Catholic Church is confronting a series of interconnected scandals so shameful that its very survival is threatened. Pope Francis himself is accused of covering up the activities of one of the nastiest sexual predators ever to wear a cardinal’s hat: his close ally Theodore McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington, DC. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI are also implicated; they did nothing, or almost nothing, while Mc-Carrick was seducing every seminarian he could get his hands on. (‘Hide the pretty ones!’ they used to say when he visited seminaries.) Yet powerful cardinals kept quiet and are now suspected of lying their heads off after Mc–Carrick’s crimes were
I first became aware of Alastair Cook in the Ashes summer of 2005 when he was named the Young Cricketer of the Year by the cricket writers’ association following some epic performances in the county game, not least taking a double hundred off the touring Australians. The assembled brains on our table, including Mike Brearley, agreed that the boy would go far. And how… The greatest of current English players, Cook — happily married and impeccably polite — set a perfect example. There were no nightclub brawls, no pedalos, not even any light aircraft. Blessed with incredible stamina and single-mindedness, he knew what worked and kept at it. He wouldn’t
We were going to run an entirely French offer this week courtesy of FromVineyardsDirect, but I couldn’t resist the 2017 Esterházy Estoras Grüner Veltliner (1) from Austria. I used to drink buckets of GV with my late godmother, the novelist and sometime contributor to this magazine, Sarah Gainham. I’ve never lost my taste for it. This example, produced for the Esterházy princes in Eisenstadt by the celebrated Joseph Pusch, is well up to snuff and my godmother — who single-handedly (apart from my occasional help) kept her local winzer Josef Pimpel in business — would have loved it. It’s crisp yet creamy with a whisper of pepper, spice and nuts,
Abusing children is one of the most terrible things men do. We all agree about that. And I think we’re all aware, as Sajid Javid announced on Monday, that it’s a growing problem. The same technology that allows millions to share videos of romping kittens has created an awful, expanding market for images of children — mostly very young girls. There has been a 700 per cent rise in reports of child abuse images since 2012, said Javid: an average of 400 arrests a month. Police think that there are now 80,000 people in the UK who pose a serious threat to kids. Javid is shocked by the scale of
Alas, the great Alan Partridge never got to make Inner-City Sumo, despite his famously desperate pitch to BBC TV commissioners. ‘We take fat people from the inner cities, put them in big nappies, and then get them to throw each other out of a circle… If you don’t do it, Sky will.’ Nor did we ever get to see Cooking In Prison. Arm Wrestling with Chas and Dave. Youth Hostelling With Chris Eubank. Or — the ne plus ultra — Monkey Tennis. Some ideas, it seems, are just too strange for telly. Fortunately, there’s a place for them on YouTube. Plenty of people have uploaded videos of themselves playing tennis
With September marking a decade since the Lehman Brothers implosion, stand by for a slew of economic retrospectives. Any meaningful analysis, though, needs to get beyond historic balance sheets and plunging share price graphs — however dramatic the data. For the most significant impact of the biggest financial and economic upheaval since the Great Depression has been the growing loss of faith in western liberal capitalism. Politics has been upended by the 2008 crisis — doing much to explain Trump, Corbyn and the broader shift away from centrist parties towards extremes. The demise of Lehmans, a once-impregnable investment bank, exposed a US financial sector riddled with chronic debts and fraud.
Cannock Chase is the long, low range of hills that’s visible to your right as you drive north up the M6 beyond Birmingham. If you’ve travelled by train between Euston and Crewe, you’ve practically brushed its cloak. Soon after Rugeley the landscape closes in, and a palisade of dark pines presses down the slope before your Pendolino ducks into the tunnel that Lord Lichfield made Robert Stephenson dig in 1846 so as not to spoil the landscape of his Shugborough estate. You don’t see much of the Chase, but you certainly sense it. It’s an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, but that feels rather an effete description for something so
Boy and I have been driving the Fawn mad by singing the ‘Johny Johny Yes Papa’ song. It goes (roughly to the tune Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star): ‘Johny Johny/ Yes, Papa/ Eating Sugar?/ No, Papa/ Telling Lies?/ No, Papa/ Open Your Mouth!/ Ha Ha Ha.’ In the likely event that you don’t know it, you’ll probably find it as irritating as the Fawn does — especially the misspelling of Johnny and the bad Indian accent. But in the unlikely event that you do, you’ll be congratulating yourself on your pop cultural credibility. This is because for a brief period peaking around last weekend — ‘Johny Johny Yes Papa’ was the
It takes seven years to know your way around Parliament. That’s what I was told when I arrived in the Commons press gallery seven years ago, but I am still none the wiser about how to get from the Snake Pit to the North Curtain Corridor, and have only recently discovered the location of the Yellow Submarine. As a building, the Palace of Westminster is a confusing, contradictory rabbit warren of underground corridors, secret briefing rooms at the top of towers and rooms with strange names. The very fabric of the building is dysfunctional, with pieces of masonry falling onto cars, and mice creeping through kitchens. Winston Churchill famously said
