The song of the yellowhammer
Sep. 12th, 2019 05:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustWhen we arrived at the pub for the quiz last night, we found C scrolling through the documents which have just been released under the title 'Operation Yellowhammer', which purport to be the government's assessment of the worst we might face from a no-deal Brexit.
The thing that puzzles me about this document is who chose its name, and whether they did so with malice aforethought. But when I said this, F said he assumed the government had a list, a system for generating names by combining a noun from this group and an adjective from that... Which is what I would have thought, too, had the result in this case not been so suspiciously apt.
To appreciate this, though, you have to know that the document in which the government assesses the risk of food shortages is named after a (once but no longer common) hedgerow bird whose song is traditionally rendered as A little bit of bread and no cheese!
The thing that puzzles me about this document is who chose its name, and whether they did so with malice aforethought. But when I said this, F said he assumed the government had a list, a system for generating names by combining a noun from this group and an adjective from that... Which is what I would have thought, too, had the result in this case not been so suspiciously apt.
To appreciate this, though, you have to know that the document in which the government assesses the risk of food shortages is named after a (once but no longer common) hedgerow bird whose song is traditionally rendered as A little bit of bread and no cheese!
