Oh I apparently missed the nationwide poll were the majority of the electorate decided to support that. There is a difference between sympathizers of criminals and formation of a common political will through voting.
You also missed the part where voting to leave an Union based on voluntary participation in a manner described by the governing documents of said union with threatening people with fire.
Not just bigots; but some curious subset of bigots. This article is the first time I have ever heard a “important thing in woodpile, implied to be concealed” as a figure of speech, whether in an overly bigoted flavor, a thinly reskinned version, or rebuilt around something else entirely that you might also be concerned about inhabiting your woodpile (like, say, the various animals that might well bite you for extracting some wood from their lair pile).
I assume that there are people at the intersection of “bigot”, “cultural experience with wood burning”, and “pre-civil-war references considered relevant”; but that’s kind of a specialized group; and so far from being one I’d expect to find a Tory MP in that I find it a trifle hard to wrap my head around.
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It was fairly common parlance in the UK for quite a while.
Examples from Wikipedia:
The phrase is also used in The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham. One of the American characters, on the brink of closing a business deal, says to the narrator, “I’ll fly down to Texas to give the outfit the once-over, and you bet I’ll keep my eyes peeled for a nigger in the woodpile before I cough up any … dough.”[9]
Agatha Christie used the phrase as the title of Chapter 18 of the 1937 Hercule Poirot novel Dumb Witness, which was later published in the U.S. as Poirot Loses a Client. The chapter was later retitled “A Cuckoo in the Nest”. The phrase was also used by a character in early editions of Christie’s novel And Then There Were None (originally released under the title Ten Little Niggers), but was changed in later editions to “There’s a fly in the ointment.”
English readers of the time would have been perfectly aware of the phrase and from my experience you would still have found people in the 80s who would have been incensed if you suggested there was anything wrong with the phrase.
These being people mind you who wouldn’t have dreamt of using the word towards an actual person.
See also Gollywog. Our history of racist language is not much better than the US.
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Thanks for the info, but your examples don’t really help me understand why it would be common enough to slip out in 2017.
I don’t know, not being alive, but I imagine the phrase was used more often in America in the 40s and 30s as well, hence it’s use in literature. I suspect you’re right that in certain locales, it would have been still cropped up in the 80s.
But like I said, in my entire adult life I have never heard anyone actually USE the phrase that I was just barely aware of. I wouldn’t have been too surprised if someone from the South of America used it today. But still surprised that what would be considered an obscure term today in America would be uttered in the UK by a politician, no less.
Of course that isn’t to say I am surprised someone in the UK said something racist or used the N-word. I remember going there many years ago and they had posters reminding soccer fans not to hurl racists insults at the players.
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As to the examples - Somerset Maugham: very popular author. Agatha Christie, even more so. Those books had the relevant phrases in them for a long time.
They also simply indicate that the phrase was well-known and was in use for a long time in the UK.
This specific phrase was one that was quite wide-spread here. I suspect it held on longer here than the US simply because we had fewer people willing and able to kick up a fuss about it.
It’s one of those phrases that people who use it here would almost certainly never even think of it having any kind of racist connotation or be likely to offend anyone. That said they’d probably never actually use it in conversation with a black person - mainly because they almost never speak to a black person.
As I say, I think there were probably plenty of people even in the 80’s who would not only have used the phrase, they would not even have thought of it having any kind of racist connotation and been genuinely offended if you said it had.
If your attitudes and vocabulary were fixed before then (this lady was born in the late 50s’)… and you grew up in and subsequently kept to a certain section of society, you probably don’t really see anything wrong with the phrase at all.
I suspect amongst themselves these people use those terms all the time. See the Bongo-Bongo land thing and far, far too many other examples.
If you want to see similar British attitudes from a more working-class perspective, try a Jim Davidson video. I suspect you probably don’t have to go too far back to find some pretty racist material. He has an OBE.
I believe throwing bananas was/is(?) also popular. Wankers.
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That probably explains it better than anything. Someone had a senior moment where they forgot that wasn’t acceptable.
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Have you never been to Boston?
Really? How is the n-word obscure? In what way is it? In addition to it’s use as a racial epithet that used to be regularly employed to describe African Americans in mainstream language, it also has broad usage in one of our major exports to the world, hip hop (in a different form, with a different context).
Or maybe it’s just not using the word because it’s disrespectful and hurtful?
I think he is referring to the phrase, not the word.
Nope. My kid was just there, though.
I meant Bostonians are kind of notorious for being super racist (I have family from MA, BTW). But reading down later I figured that out!
Was her experience anything like this?
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I hope not!
I used to read Something Positive. Eventually fell out of the habit. Ironically it was shortly after meeting the artist who doodled me a Choo-Choo bear in carbonite.
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‘Elephant in the room’ does have a very different meaning than the phrase she used.
The elephant in the room is something obvious that everyone is ignoring.
The phrase she used (at least in the UK) would mean something unpleasant that is hidden or non-obvious. Seems that’s the US meaning as well - apart from in both countries also meaning: “I am an elderly racist”.
The non-racist alternative would be ‘fly in the ointment’.
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Jealous! 
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