● 'Oss – horse ● Bogger – troublesome person ● Cob on – sulky. A cob can also mean a sandwich ● Mardeh – sulky ● Gorra – Got a ● Gawd – goodness
there was this ‘oss, and he hated the bogger cos it always had a cob on. But the poor sod never saw the sun!
Oo-er! Don’t be so bleddy mardeh!
Does this mean that 2026 is the Year of the 'Oss?
I first read the word during my Master's degree when translating The Magician's Nephew, where one of the main characters, Strawberry, is an East End horse, or 'oss as he calls himself, who becomes Narnia's first pegasus.
'Oss is basically "horse" dropping the H (not only a feature of Cockney, but also of Romance languages), and with a rhotic accent.
So I am writing a Zodiac inspired fic series. Othello is a Scorpio
, Iago a Gemini, Cassio an Aries , Roderigo maybe a Cancer or Pisces , Bianca a Leo, Emilia an Aquarius (like yours truly). Desdemona should be a sign of Venus, but What sign?
Most votes said... LIBRA! (& Pisces For Roderigo)
(For the Zodiac signs of the Amis de l'ABC and their circle, Google "el semen de los ahorcados" or "StrixAlluka" on this very blog... Heads up: Enjolras is an Aquarius, Combeferre a Gemini, Courfeyrac a Libra, and Grantaire a Scorpio - the fic bible "why the seed of the hanged..." has the signs of everyone else!)
It comes as no surprise that Disney villains are, in general, 1) highbrow / cultured (Why does Scar say "quid pro quo" instead of a more Saxon "tit for tat," for instance?). And 2) queer (single, childless, flamboyant, seldom conforming to gender roles).
Matt Roth has an interpretation of Scar that surprised me. He interprets Scar as a liberal, who instaurates the Welfare State in the Pridelands - even though both goose-stepping Nazis and the Soviet flag (Scar becomes the hammer, and the Moon becomes the sickle) appear in the visuals of his villain song, "Be Prepared":
I think this means that both right-wing and left-wing totalitarianisms are wrong...
Referencing Leni Riefenstahl
On the other hand, Roth says Scar is not a totalitarian, but rather a liberal:
Meanwhile, Scar takes over. As the Bad Leader he brings the kingdom to ruin. Mannered and aristocratic, and clearly not producing heirs like his more manly brother, he is pointedly gay. He is also a rationalist and utilitarian, coveting the absolute power of kingship but not buying into its mystique. He exerts a corrupting influence on the young, skillfully putting all sorts of ideas into Simba's head. Worst of all, he willingly enters into an unholy alliance with the hyenas, a teeming brood of half-starved scavengers ghettoized in a "dark region" outside the Pridelands (think, for instance, of Jewish quarters, apartheid, etc). Taken as a whole, he represents that bête-noire of contemporary right-wingers, the Liberal Politician.
The hyenas speak in "street voices" provided by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin and clearly represent poor blacks and Hispanics. They are also stereotypical gang members, inherently criminal, cutthroat and mercenary — brawling with each other when not united by a common victim. As scavengers whose own neighbourhood offers slim pickings, they eagerly accept handouts. Scar provides them: he gains the hyena's loyalty by promising them a steady stream of meat, thus creating the Welfare State.
After he usurps the throne, Scar lets the hyenas out of the "dark region" and into the Pridelands, to the horror of the other species. Catastrophe follows: the lions' resources are squandered by the lazy and rapacious hyenas, who, in turn, harass the lions with petty terror. The balance of nature is upset: the herds flee, the water dries up, and the landscape soon resembles the wasteland where the hyenas have lived. The hyenas carry their blight with them; having brought down the productive ecosystem that used to provide them with scraps, their starvation only worsens. They offend Scar, who cares only about his power, by voicing nostalgia for the Mufasa regime which kept them in their place.
Demonstrating kingly mercy, Simba spares Scar — who, of course, tries one more backstab before he's done in by angry and betrayed hyenas, the very unsavoury types he has spent his years pandering to. A fitting end to the Liberal Politician.
But there to thwart this happy outcome, simultaneously trying to usurp heterosexual power and distract the hero from the heroine, is that neocon bugaboo — the gaymale. In an age (the 1990s) when anti-semitism has fallen out of vogue and Communism is not taken seriously, he has to bear the full brunt of fascist animus.
At first glance, Ursula, the villain in THE LITTLE MERMAID, seems a woman; on closer inspection, however, the Sea Witch resembles a flamboyant, Divine-ly inspired drag queen. Her octopus-like lower half further renders her gender ambiguous: the first view of her tentacles emerging from the darkness is played up for shock value (not unlike a similar view in THE CRYING GAME). Ursula eventually pulls off a drag queen's coup. She takes on the appearance of a svelte brunette called Vanessa, speaks with the Little Mermaid's stolen voice (solving a chronic problem for female impersonators), and seduces the virile young prince into marrying her. She reveals the deception by literally splitting the seams of her disguise, emerging in her opulent glory; she manages to reduce the hypermasculine King Triton into a worthless worm, and only gets defeated when either Prince Eric (in the animated version) or Ariel (in the live-action) impales her with the prow of a ship, thus contrasting his erect phallus with her flaccid tentacles. Her threat to heterosexual pair-bonding and patriarchal power is thus laid to rest.
The gay villain of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is, by contrast, hypermasculine. Gaston, vain and preening, covets heterosexual status in pursuing Belle, the beauty of the title; but he constantly ignores both her and the trio of blonde bombshells that swoon over him. He is only truly interested in male gazes, and blossoms in the midst of his all-male lodge, where he sings a showstopper celebrating his own masculinity. Provided, like Foulfellow with Gideon, with an elastic, high-contact companion Lefou, he is the epitome of camp. Mainly a figure of comic relief, Lefou's hard to take very seriously. The true evil of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, in fact, lies elsewhere: in the sexual dysfunction of the hero, the Beast-Prince who suffers from what clinicians call "infantile narcissism." The witch's curse simply brings his fetishism — in which inanimate objects are endowed with ego-fulfilling life — out into the open, transforming his castle into something like Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Constant parallels between his actions and Gaston's link his condition with Gaston's more deeply entrenched sexual deviance. The Beast finally breaks the curse — defeating Gaston and restoring his realm to "normal" — by embracing a prosaic heterosexuality with Belle.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is a men's movement response to feminist nagging. It is engorged with anxiety that masculinity might be a mask for homosexuality; or that natural male narcissism might forever alienate the women that feminism has made so intolerant. In the end, it is a plea that women understand and love men's "beasts within" (their inner "wild men"), and help mother them into maturity. It is early 1990s wish fulfillment.
ALADDIN represents a surprising liberal aberration from Disney's right-wing trajectory. To be sure, the villain is still gay: Jafar is dark, effeminate, and prissily evil; Scar simply repeats Jafar in the shape of a lion. Jafar, however, very much acts the role of a gay man's gay villain, twisted by his desire for heterosexual power and his consequent self-enclosure in the closet. Advisor to the sultan, he is a Roy Cohn type with Leopold-and-Loeb overtones. He is counterpoised, moreover, to a healthier gay icon: the Genie, who, with Robin Williams's voice, flames across the screen in a one-man cabaret show. (Of course, a male genie is already sexually suspect in a culture whose TV-sitcom associations mark genies as female.) The Genie shifts gender several times and uses his transformative powers to generally wreak havoc on social categories, making street urchins into princes.
THE LION KING was made by a studio run by Jews; the music was written by gays; many of the characters were voiced by respected black actors; and the writers were liberal enough to give the film a "multicultural" veneer.
It’s much the same theory as the ‘Circle of Life’ proposed by Mufasa in The Lion King (1994) – the ghettoised handout-dependent hyenas and their liberal, childless and urbane overlord Scar are fine, as long as they’re kept in their own sphere. When they take over, the Pridelands fall into ruin and corruption.
The title of this post may shock you... Master Bates?? What kind of potion have you drunk, Sandra Dermark?
Nothing but a can of Monster, I reply?
Monster, that Satanic brew? On the can, the three talon marks look like the Hebrew letter vav, that equals number 6. Vav-vav-vav... Six-six-six is no longer alone, he's getting out the marrow in your backbone... (Genesis, Supper's Ready)
I thought the Mark of the Beast was the Covid shot, that it had some silicon microchip... Three Covid shots and nothing happened to me! Well, I caught Covid in between the first and second shots, but I'm young and strong!
Anyway, on to Master Bates and how his legend is older than you, dearest reader, may think...
There was in the Nineties, you Commonwealth millennials might remember, an Anglo-Australian cartoon about pirates, called Captain Pugwash. As a Spaniard, I first got to watch it on YouTube, to verify a certain urban legend about the characters' names:
The animated series is widely believed to have featured characters with risqué maritime names such as Master Bates, Seaman Stains, and Roger the Cabin Boy ("to roger," as a verb, is synonymous with "to fuck" or "to shag"). Moreover, the captain's surname, "Pugwash," is said to be Australian English for oral sex!
It all is not as erotic as it sounds; Master Bates was actually Master Mate, Roger the Cabin Boy was actually called Tom (Tom the Cabin Boy, far more innocent than Tom Marvolo Riddle), the captain's surname was never Australian English for oral sex, and there was no Seaman Stains in the crew at all! It all is simply a huge Mandela effect popping up in the minds of now-young adult Commonwealth millennials!
But at least the "Master Bates" double entendre is older, dating back to the Victorian era! To Charles Dickens (or "Dahl's Chickens" as the BFG calls him by spoonerism)!
In Oliver Twist, one of the kids in the Dodger's gang is called Charlie Bates, and he goes by the honorific of Master. He always goes by "Master Bates," never by first name! Master Bates (tee hee!) thinks everything is hilarious, and that crime is just one long joke against the system.
As he said it, Master Bates caught up an end of his neckerchief: and, holding it erect in the air, dropped his head on his shoulder, and jerked a curious sound through his teeth; thereby indicating, by a lively pantomimic representation that scragging and hanging were one and the same thing.
I think this is INTENTIONAL on Dickens' part, isn't it? Given that the author was a Charlie himself, who knew what he did in the dark, under the covers? Especially in a Victorian era when masturbation was the worst of deadly sins, a scourge of physical and mental health! Like Jane Austen's "Rears and Vices," I understand why it was written as a double entendre. And both "Master Bates" and "Rears and Vices" have aged like a fine sherry (worth quaffing by Captain Pugwash), right?
In Otaku Academy in Escapist Dream, it looks like a U-shaped Japanese highschool, full of students in improbable hairstyle and improbable hair colour, in uniform (whether more modern blazers or 90s sailor fuku, and Prussian-style gakurans for the young men), and catgirls, delinquents in pompadours (think Josuke), etc. And of course there is at least one magical girl warrior:
Aika’s body began glowing in a colorful shining aura. He could not believe his eyes when Aika began having a magical girl transformation. She was naked save for all the blinding lights and colours. As a teenage boy, Charlie had a weird feeling from what he was seeing.
However, Aika did not wore any ribbons or wands. Instead, her hair became long and pink and horns sprouted from her head. She wore nothing but white bandages all around. Somehow, she hovered from the ground and Charlie could see transparent arms coming from her back that attacked the literary geeks. The appendages grabbed, sliced, aand mutilated the geeks without mercy.
TV TROPES: Aika can transform into a Magical Girl, but when she do so, she transforms into frigging Lucy from Elfen Lied instead.
Due to the new right-wing US government, PBS (with memorable, progressive edutainment shows like Sesame Street or Arthur) will maybe be replaced by right-wing juggernaut PragerU, who have given me serious pet peeves:
PragerU says Columbus was "neither a hero nor a villain, but a person;" and that we should NOT judge a Renaissance person by our twenty-first century standards... at the same time they praise Columbus for spreading civilisation and Catholicism among the barbarian natives, some of whom regarded a human baby as a toothsome morsel (but they don't give the whole story: were these babies those of the tribe itself, or child prisoners of war? And was that an everyday meal or a festive delight (like Christmas turkey or Easter eggs)? I think it was a festive delight, and that those babies were prisoners of war!.
But that is nothing compared to PragerU's perception of Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon! Not only do they put the Bard ON A PEDESTAL (they rank Hamlet up there with the King James Bible, Newton's Laws of Physics, and Plato's Myth of the Cave, and they say Shakespeare inverted the modern world/existentialism); they ONLY ALLOW us to read or watch certain of his plays:
Hamlet
King Lear
The Scottish Play
Julius Caesar
The Henriad
And that's it. No Romeo and Juliet, though it is about young love (love so young that in our days they'd be doing Maths tests and chasing Pokémon). No Othello, my favourite (though it stars the first Sub-Saharan and/or Muslim hero in Western literature, and depicts him in a loving interracial marriage --until that scoundrel Iago ruins everything). No Merchant of Venice (mostly for Shylock / Shiloh: "Hath not a Jew eyes?" sounds too controversial, but also Portia crossdressing and becoming a lawyer). No Midsummer's Night Dream (whose potions can be read as drugs), no Taming of the Shrew (which deals with gender roles and expectations), no Coriolanus (our Roman generals would never rebel against the Res Publica!), and last of all no Tempest (with a character like Caliban, anagram of "cannibal," and a plot about colonialism).
BTW, Shylock is actually Shiloh, Fluellen is actually Llewellyn, and Imogen is actually Innogen.
The only Shakespearean plays that PragerU approves of are royalist, patriarchal, and with an all-white cast. In all of these plays, a usurper assassinates the ruler and takes over the throne, but is in turn defeated by the rightful heir, ready to claim his place. No plays about social or identity issues (like gender, race, queerness, drugs, or colonialism). They're missing out on a lot of Shakespeare!
Moreover, PragerU states that Shakespeare COINED expressions like "breaking the ice," "wild goose chase," "all that glitters is not gold," and many others; when obviously these idioms existed before the Bard, they were spread by word of mouth, and it's in his plays that we first find them printed and published, as words that sit in black on a white page (or screen, nowadays). Saying that Shakespeare coined, for instance, "breaking the ice," is as ridiculous as saying that Andersen wrote "The Princess on the Pea" or "The Emperor's New Clothes," or that the Grimms wrote "Snow White" or "Hansel and Gretel." These fairytales already existed as oral tales, and the Grimms and Andersen only wrote and published their own versions, and those versions became canon. The same goes for Rafael Pombo and "Rinrín Renacuajo" ("Froggy Would a-Courting Go"), "Simón el Bobito" ("Simple Simon"), and "Pastorcita perdió sus ovejas" ("Little Bo-Peep"); like PragerU's saying that Shakespeare coined expressions like "breaking the ice," "wild goose chase," "all that glitters is not gold," and many others is like when many Latin Americans say Pombo wrote these nursery rhymes, which had existed many centuries before in (especially British) oral tradition.
The most glaring things PragerU has said is that leftish millennials (like me) are ruining high culture. That some universities have replaced the portrait of Shakespeare in their hallowed halls with that of a black lesbian poet (NOTA BENE: "Shakespeare" has a proper name here, while the "black lesbian poet" remains unnamed, only identified by identity markers!). That visual art has gone from excellence, beauty, and the sublime to scatological and sexual themes: URINE AND FAECES (as Dennis Prager puts it). As examples, he criticizes artworks like a fresh banana duck-taped to a wall, or a golden toilet, in which museum visitors could relieve themselves and flush it (but readymades from Dadaism and Surrealism could also fit Prager's critique: Duchamp's urinal fountain; his L.H.O.O.Q. --elle a chaud au cul, she has a hot bottom, ie she is turned on-- a Mona Lisa card on which he drew a moustache, a goatee, and glasses; and Merde d'Artiste --Artist's Shit--, which was sold in tiny pots at huge expense, and happened to be the faeces of author Piero Manzoni).
I think that at least music (urban music, like reggaeton and trap) and TV, especially reality shows and superhero films, have gotten FAR worse in the present day; but I have nothing negative to say about readymades, no matter how scatological or erotic they might be. I am proud of being a literary geek (especially when it comes to fantasy and historical fiction) and a connoiseuse of opera and of fine art, and a queer (aroace) person but I don't think the evergreen classics are going away anytime, and anyone can enjoy them - I enjoy works that, like Othello (the Shakespeare and Verdi versions), Les Misérables (the book, the 2012 film, the BBC miniseries, and the stage musical), and the Wizarding World (as a book, on stage and screen), that spark conversations about identity, otherness, and related issues. I am also worried that this snuffbumble (about Shakespeare, about Columbus, about gender, about race, etc). will spread through Gen Alpha and the subsequent generations; that we will become Fascist... and both Othello and Sesame Street, both women going to university and gays and lesbians getting married, will be punished by death penalty.
De Prageris fanaticibus,
libera nos, Domine!
PS. The Book-Club video calls Shakespeare working-class, but he was more like lower-middle-class (petit bourgeois; his dad was not only a master glover, but also the F-ing Mayor of Stratford). If he didn't go to university, and only had a primary education, it was only because universities were closed off to commoners, and nearly all uni students in the Renaissance were lordlings - no chance that a mayor's son from the provinces would have an Oxbridge education, but still, though he knew "little Latin and less Greek," he knew some French as well (just read or watch the Henriad!). He was lower-middle-class, petit bourgeois, but he at least had read some books and had a primary education.
This reminds me of Menocchio (Domenico Scandella) in The Cheese and the Worms, who also was lower-middle-class / petit bourgeois (a master miller), lived during the Renaissance, and had a primary education and read his own books, aside from those he borrowed from the local priest / librarian. Menocchio loved to read, and among his reads were the Quran in Italian, the Travels of Sir John de Mandeville (a British noble who travelled through Asia and the East) in Italian, The Dream of Caravia (a satirical poem), Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Golden Legend (lives of the saints), the Decameron, and lunaries (calendars with the phases of the Moon, the life cycles of plants, etc.). The title comes from his cosmovision; influenced by his reads, he rejected the Creation account in the Book of Genesis and had his own creation account, influenced by Ovid in particular:
"All the elements (water, fire, earth, and air) were jumbled together in a chaotic mixture, until finally they coagulated and took their proper places, like curds becoming a cheese; in that cosmic cheese, something like worms / maggots arose spontaneously (in the Renaissance, before Francesco Redi, people thought that maggots generated spontaneously in cheese or rotting flesh - the fly eggs could not be seen by the naked eye), and these maggots became, depending of their degree of development, animals, people, angels, or G*d. G*d was the biggest and most developed maggot, and he was created at the same time at all the other living things."
Menocchio also claimed that Jesus was fully a human, that he had not died to redeem our sins, that Mary was not a Virgin, and that the Pope had no heavenly power, among other things that angered the Catholic Church.
This cosmovision was seen as heresy by the Inquisition, and Menocchio and his family had to move from town to town until, finally, since he didn't retract from his beliefs, he was burned at the stake. If he were illiterate, he maybe would have never come up with his own cosmovision. The Menocchio case illustrates the results of literacy among the Renaissance middle classes, just like that of Shakespeare itself.
Ginzburg argues that Menocchio's beliefs and actions, like those of Shakespeare, were made possible by the advent of print in Europe and by the Protestant Reformation. The printing revolution made books accessible to both Menocchio and Shakespeare, which facilitated the interaction between the oral/popular culture in which the petit-bourgeois were rooted and the literary/highbrow culture of the books, and gave them the words to express their own ideas. Observing that considerable differences exist between Menocchio's references to the books he read and the actual content of those works, Ginzburg argues that Menocchio did not merely adopt ideas that he read in books but rather used elements from those works to articulate his own ideas. The same can be said about the Bard of Avon.
