🧦 Archers thread #133: Woolley socks it to them! Discuss The Archers and its Woolley thinking and plotting here.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Thank you, @PseudoBadger, for kicking off this long, long series of Archers threads.

All views on The Archers welcome here! New blood welcomed. We don't all agree on all points and most of us are posting tongue in cheek a lot of the time, so don't worry about revealing that you would love to take part in the Mysteries, or other unusual views.

Spoilers: not on this thread, please. We don't wait for the omnibus to discuss the weeknight episodes, but we do try our best to avoid cross-contamination from www.mumsnet.com/Talk/radio_addicts/4197199--The-Archers-spoilers-thread-6-Cant-wait-for-7-02pm-Join-us-here, where spoilers are positively welcomed!

For newer listeners, lurkers or those who just have no idea what we're talking about, @DadDadDad has created this useful thread: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/radio_addicts/3557323-For-Archers-fans-a-guide-to-acronyms-on-the-long-running-discussion-threads-and-any-other-meta-thread-questions-you-may-have - BOOP point for him! (See thread for explanation.)

Thanks to @ButtonSister and @BorsetshireBanality for title suggestions. I went with their idea in the interests of keeping the title fairly short.

@LillianGish and @FoxgloveSummers made cracking but longer suggestions, which (mashed up) will do a great job of kicking off our new thread.

Evictions (Tom and Tash), depictions (Bridge Farm Christmas card), conniptions (entire cast and crew of the Mysteries), convictions (Philip) and addictions (Alice) - what are our predictions for 2022 in Ambridge? All sure to make this the Best Ambridge Christmas Evah!

This thread should take us through to early January unless something very exciting happens (ha ha, fat chance). My predictions: this is a bit left field, but I wonder if Peggy will offer to buy the shop and flat so Tom and Gnasher (great coinage, whose was it?) can stay put. I don't believe Hazel is sincere about wanting to live in/regularly visit Ambridge. She's always been utterly two-faced and rotten to the core, why would she change now?

The Mysteries will, of course be a triumph and briefly borrowing the🔮 (sorry, Bore!) I expect we are going to hear them at some point over the New Year period.

Over to you!

I made toad in the hole in the microwave. It wasn't a success

I must make toad in the hole sometime. Any recommended recipes?

The Quorn one ready made.

I like the BBC Good Food recipe. It has 4 eggs and makes it really puffy. My mum used to use 1 egg. Austerity version.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

I must make toad in the hole sometime. Any recommended recipes?

Yes, because for me this works every time if I use the Pyrex dish rather than a metal one. It's adapted from a Yorkshire Pudding recipe; to Toad it, you cook the sausages in the oven first, for about ten minutes. Then it takes about 30-40 minutes to become a Toad once the batter has been added.

This recipe works with 2 eggs or 3 or 4; the only regulator is the size of tin available, and I suppose the size of glasses.

allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/5931/fool-proof-yorkshire-puddings.aspx

Ingredients
2 eggs
approx 2oz plain flour
approx 1/4 pint milk
pinch of salt and pepper
3 tbsps vegetable oil or lard

Method
Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees C (gas mark 6).
Place oil/lard in Yorkshire pudding tin and place in oven. (For a Toad, the sausages as well.)
Line up three identical glasses. Add eggs to first glass. Add flour to the second glass to the height of the eggs in the first glass. Add milk to the third glass to the height of the eggs and flour in the first two glasses.
Whisk eggs, flour, milk and salt and pepper in a mixing bowl.
When sausages are browning, pour mixture over them in the tin and place immediately in the oven.

Cook for a further thirty minutes or until the rising mixture has hit the shelf above/fallen onto the floor of the oven under its own weight/turned a healthy brown about two inches above the level of the tin (the last is the desired result, the others have happened with other recipes so I thought I'd include them as a warning).

If you are me, you make the mixture in the blender, about an hour in advance, and leave it to settle.

Sorry; the recipe I linked to has vanished. But the text is much as it was, and is how I make Toad.

Thanks, all! Not sure how soon I will get round to this, but I will report back when I do.

Just stumbled upon this in my inbox. Was there any mention of it last week in Ambridge?

campus.dartington.org/thriving-together-at-the-oxford-real-farming-conference/

@WhoppingBigBackside

The Quorn one ready made.

My mother went to the local Quorn factory 45 years of being vegetarian was abandoned after an hour.

Welsh and Irish use different orthography from English English. So not surprising that the English apply the rules of the English orthography to Welsh and Irish words.

Then there is the question of phonemes, the individual sounds of a language or dialect. Once you've learned your native tongue you won't be able to pronounce the other language correctly, as its phonemes are different eg.my French friend finds it hard to say "feather" which comes out as "fezzer."

Plus the English have always nicked words from other languages and integrated them into English, mispronounced or not.

So there!

(There seems to be nothing more to say about recent episodes, and I am procrastining by writing a long post instead of doing a bit of work)

Mmmm, toad in the hole...

@TheSilveryTinsellyPussycat, aye, they do but it's insulting to take a name like Llio and pronounce it as Cleo.
3 letters and only getting 1 right!

Imagine if a Welsh person named their child an English name and said it the way it looks in Welsh, You'd probably think they were half-witted. It works both ways.

It's all Welsh Pat's fault.

TheSilveryTinsellyPussycat
Plus the English have always nicked words from other languages and integrated them into English, mispronounced or not.

There aren't that many Welsh words in English, though. And some of those may be cognates of Indo-European origin rather than loanwords.

When it comes down to claims such as penguin: possibly from pen gwyn, "white head". "The fact that the penguin has a black head is no serious objection." I do boggle slightly. Because it really isn't usual for something which absolutely does not mean something to become a loanword.

And I don't count eg bara brith or cawl, which are not words-in-English, but Welsh. I'll grant you bard, coracle and corgi: Welsh things for which the English didn't bother to invent a separate word...

I suspect there may actually be more words in common English usage that are of Indian origin than of Welsh, what with cot and pyjamas and dungarees and khaki and shampoo and bungalow and veranda and bangle and dinghy and jungle and punch and typhoon and thug.

(Is that as boring as recent episodes? Probably, but it meant I didn't have to finish a bit of work -- and now some wine has been opened and I had probably better not!)

@FoxgloveSummers maybe weeks later but thank you. I suffer severe mental health issues including PTSD and I have maybe heard my rape minimised or “if you wanted to die you would have” from my parents enough now. I gave it a good try with what I had available, it broke. I took enough to kill an elephant, I woke up. I know Alice started as a party drinker but after a point it is just miserable. Alcoholics cause harm but we don’t mean it - someone said in vino veritas in Latin but that doesn’t make it true. I cried listening to that episode because Amy was so kind.

@CecileDeRetour sorry to hear life has been tough for you at times

There aren't that many Welsh words in English, though.

This boggles me a bit though, because (I know many people know this but many people don't) the earlier form of Welsh would have been language spoken - with regional differences - across Britain. Now it's seen in the Welsh and Cornish languages i.e. the bits the Anglo-Saxons didn't conquer or got to later. That's why the languages are so similar.

But we really can't work out how much of "English" is derived from old pre-Anglo-Saxon words used by the British peoples, or at least it's an uphill struggle for etymologists.

When it comes down to claims such as penguin: possibly from pen gwyn, "white head". "The fact that the penguin has a black head is no serious objection." I do boggle slightly. Because it really isn't usual for something which absolutely does not mean something to become a loanword.
Probably just coincidence

And I don't count eg bara brith or cawl, which are not words-in-English, but Welsh. I'll grant you bard, coracle and corgi: Welsh things for which the English didn't bother to invent a separate word..
Cawl is just the Welsh word for soup or stew. It's not some special recipe. It could just be tinned tomato soup or oxtail or leek and potato or something a bit more hearty like a veg and meat stew.,

Bara brith is bread with bits in. It's a bit like saying 'fruit loaf' is a special English term.

Corgi is a breed of dog, but the word just means 'shippon dog'

Coracle is of Welsh origin, bard of celtic origin.

The one that winds me up is''hiraeth'. It means homesickness, nostalgia, grief, or longing depending on context. You could use it to describe that you are missing hot sunny days of summer or that you miss your dead grandmother or that that you miss having a Woolworths on your high street or that you are homesick. That it has some special mystical meaning is tosh.

Cromlech is a Welsh word that English has loaned

@BowerOfBramble, there are place names in England that have derived from Welsh or Brythonig. Penrith, Avon and Dover are examples - probably from Pen+rhyd, Afon and Dwfr.

100% - absolutely tonnes of them. In my SW neck of the woods it's the "English" place names that stand out.

On penguin, I don’t know if it makes any difference but it’s «penguin» in French and I doubt they borrow much from Welsh…

OK I maybe have to take that back. It’s manchot. Pengouin may be a loan word…

If I am in doubt about the origin of a word I remember the picnic. At one point the English dictionary we had said it was from the French, piquenique; the (rather old) Larousse said that pique-nique was from the English, pic-nic.

(I thought manchot was a one-armed man. So I learn all the time.)

@CecileDeRetour

On penguin, I don’t know if it makes any difference but it’s «penguin» in French and I doubt they borrow much from Welsh…

There are words where there's an obvious relationship between Welsh and French - the Welsh for church (eglwys) being an obvious one. It's not a loan word though, but is presumably from the same early root. Welsh and Breton are closely related of course.

Both from the Ancient Greek ekklesia, I would imagine, same root as ecclesiastical.

Pinguis is the Latin for sleek and oily, so seems like a good root for penguin.

@WhoppingBigBackside

Sorry, why did I apologise. I care passionately about my culture and language

It was a very interesting post, I’m not clear why you addressed it to me though? I wasn’t claiming any authority on Welsh names, just telling a story about some people I met recently?