Reading
quietly in bed this morning with my pint of tea, I suddenly found myself
convulsed by such uncontrolled spasms of laughter that the neighbours were soon hurrying in
to see if they needed to call a doctor, or if the was any flood risk to the
occupants of the flat below from split sides.
The cause
of the attack was the paragraph heading reproduced below from The Quest,
Daniel Yergin’s excellent follow up to The Prize. After
600 pages of severely Protesto-Talmudic fact about the entirely humour-free
history of the modern international energy industry, I spotted a joke. Of
course, I immediately realised that it was not a joke, but yet another example
of what separates Americans from the rest of the English-speaking world, from
Aberdeen to Woomera, namely the absence of any genito-urinary innuendo in
the way Americans use the word “knob”.
The mental
image of a group of sturdy renewable energy pioneers climbing up
“Grandpa’s Knob” to site a huge wind turbine there was what caused my sudden
descent into hysteria and all concerned citizens within earshot running to my bedside, some equipped with respirators and smelling salts, others with
chloroform pads. One even brought an old, Stalin-era straight-jacket.
By now I
have probably ruined the joke for you. Sorry. But consider the possibilities of
continuing it with one of our esteemed American friends. Ask him or her if he or she has ever climbed on top of ascended “Grandpa’s Knob” and see what happens. “Did you ascend by the North Face?” I can see him or her maintaining
a bemused, Protesto-Talmudic po-face while every other English-speaker in the room
cracks up, though hopefully not as wildly as I did if only out of compassion
for the only “knob head” in the room.
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