May–June 2008 Newsletter

Dear Visitors (if that’s what you call people who drop in unannounced at other people’s websites)

Welcome to my ‘blog’ for May-June 2008. I don’t know why I can’t call it my ‘diary’, which is a perfectly good English word, but the young man who hosts my presence on the world-wide web tells me we have to use this fashionable term for it otherwise we won’t get any ‘hits’.

You’ll know (if you’ve been paying attention) that I am a landlady in Brighton on the south coast of England. These days, with the decline of the traditional British seaside holiday and the availability of cheap flights to hot, insanitary lands in the south, I have come to rely on overseas visitors to make up the great majority of my paying guests.

My terms being half board, naturally I always try to give these guests an authentic taste of Britain. And this includes BISCUITS.
Many of these visitors do not enjoy our natural advantages — I mean, for example, they are not native-born speakers of English and have to struggle to express even rudimentary ideas in our language. It's difficult to imagine, but there you are. We have to do our best to help them cope. And here I come to MY POINT: you will have noticed that a number of varieties of biscuit commonly offered in "assortments" these days carry the NAME of the biscuit impressed or embossed (by stamp or mould) on the baked sugary surface of that biscuit. Hence NICE, and CUSTARD CREAM, to name but two. My lodgers find this kind of linguistic support enormously helpful. Whenever they are taking tea in England and are offered a biscuit they can quickly (and discreetly) glance at the name and look it up in the little bilingual dictionaries they always carry with them. Thus they know what they're getting, and a little more is added to the great fund of cultural knowledge they acquire by staying with a real English family. Moreover, some of these English language learners have to take examinations and it is reassuring to know that should biscuits come up in the Cambridge First Certificate Paper Three: Use of English (for example), they will be well-prepared.

For some years I have been conducting a quiet, 'behind-the-scenes' campaign to get biscuit manufacturers to do more of this 'integral signing'. Why shouldn't overseas consumers also be advised that the round biscuit with the host of little bumps on it that they are about to eat is a LINCOLN CREAM? And surely they could find room between the elegant furrows on a fig roll for the helpful legend: FIG ROLL....

I would be pleased to think that the many visitors to this website would support me in my efforts to put pressure on the biscuit consortia to name (but certainly not shame) their products!

I worry that young Britons today are losing contact with their biscuit heritage (I have heard teenagers say, when asked to identify a biscuit from amongst a teatime assortment, "Dunno. Is it a cookie?")
If nothing else, more integral signing would help keep alive an awareness amongst our own people of their rich biscuit heritage.

"Rich Tea". There's another one, you see.

Best wishes

Joyce Hoover (Mrs)