"It's a bish-bosh, wish-wash, car crash mishmash!"
Ever wondered where the word ‘hoo-ha’ comes from? Why there ain’t no party like a double negative party? And why ‘bead’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘bread’, ‘machine’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘nine,’ and don’t get me started on ‘yearly’ and ‘early’?
From gangs of gung-ho Anglo-Saxons and smelly Vikings to Covidiots and Instagram influencers, from enormous vowel movements to katsu curries self-isolating in the Twitterverse, this one-woman show by spoken word artist and linguistics nerd, Melanie Branton, explores the history of the our lovely language through the media of performance poetry, silly hats and dad jokes.
You’ll be invited to heckle Vikings and play Simon Says with a bossy bishop, but the show also doesn’t shy away from the more unsavoury chapters of the past, in a celebration of the good, the bad and the downright bizarre in the history of our glorious, multicultural tongue.