We have a bint at work who recently joined the group, a HRT menopausal type who is a little naive & more than a little dim although rather pleasant. A couple of weeks ago she came out of the office into the lab & asked the whole lab if somebody could explain "what a bell end is?". She really didn't know. Obviously I offered to show her but was intercepted by another who took her to one side & sensibly explained in a grown up way. Last week we were in a planning meeting & when finding it difficult to allocate a study project HRT turned to Armelle, our French Sandwich student, & said without battering an eyelid "Why don't you pick it up Armelle, when you go home to the cheese eating surrender monkeys this could look good on your CV" It certainly put an edge on the rest of the meeting. She couldn't understand why there was a subsequent complaint. Anyway up the Ecuadorians.
It was explained the next day as a pa failure, but they were disgusted! far more so than the average brit would have been.
Easy target, they'll just stick their hands in the air, shrug their shoulders & avoid getting involved.
The thing is that calling the French cheese eating surrender monkeys is the politest I ever get about them. It's not an insult, it's a term of endearment. A josh. A bit of a giggle. A warming tease between two established lovers injecting a little frisson into their comfortable, pleasant shared life. If I want to insult I tend to go honest. And call them a bunch of ******ed, arrogant, unsociable, poly-linguistically deprived, immoral, socio-pathic, incomprehensible gesturing ****s. But only when I want to insult.
