What Sunday would be complete without Peter Hitchens?
His Mail on Sunday column today begins by talking about "our new power elite" and their "hate" for "lifelong marriage", and the BBC is his specific target:
Why does the propaganda arm of our ruling class, the BBC, promote a drama called Wanderlust with publicity which, in the BBC’s own words, ‘asks whether lifelong monogamy is possible – or even desirable’. You know as well as I do that they’re not really asking.
They are saying, amid countless wearisome and embarrassing bedroom scenes, that it is neither possible nor desirable. This is a lie, as millions of honest, generous and kind men and women proved in the better generations which came before this one.
Mr. Hitchens, of course, knows as well as we do (if not more) that the BBC is a 'progressive', 'socially liberal' organisation and that BBC drama has been relentless in promoting that particular outlook for donkey's years.
In writing that sentence and using the term "donkey's years" I was inspired to 'do a Peter Hitchens' and investigate that phrase - in true blogger's style.
According to the OED, it's a “punning allusion to the length of a donkey’s ears and to the vulgar pronunciation of ears as years.”
I'd actually assumed it itself had been around for donkey's years, but it's apparently more recent than I though - i.e. just over a hundred year's old, which I don't count as being donkey's year ago.
Two 1916 books - a novel by E.V. Lucas called 'The Vermillion Box' and 'With Jellicoe in the North Sea' by Frank Hubert Shaw - used the earliest published references to it, respectively:
“Now for my first bath for what the men call ‘Donkey’s ears,’ meaning years and years”
and
“This isn’t a battleship war at all; it’s a destroyer-submarine-light cruiser show. They’ll never come out in donkey’s years, not they. They know jolly well we shall scupper ’em if they so much as dare to show their noses outside the wet triangle.”
The E.V. Lucas quote points to the outstanding question of which came first: “donkey’s ears” or “donkey’s years.” It looks as if it may have been “donkey’s ears”.
Anyhow, I won't be watching Wanderlust, however steamy it is.
