Word: britishism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...know better than the Opies, a British husband-and-wife team whose previous exegesis of juvenile literature produced the authoritative Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (TIME, Sept. 24, 1951). This time the Opies left the library to listen on school grounds. For eight years they hunted rhymes, rites and riddles among 5,000 children at 70 schools throughout the British Isles. Delighted to teach adults something, children unbuttoned their lips...
...does all this survive? Most British schools have a new generation every six years; play-yard lingo ought to be highly perishable. Yet the Opies found little girls skipping to "Little fatty doctor, how's your wife?/ Very well, thank you, she's all right," a chant that goes back at least 130 years. Measured in school time, it has had more than 20 generations of wear. Children find it as fresh as ever...
Adults plant a child's garden of verse. Juvenile satire nourishes it. What British children did to The Ballad of Davy Crockett in 1956 should make Walt Disney shudder. Not a vestige remained of the 17 official verses. New versions ranged from "Born on a table top in Joe's café,/ The dirtiest place in the U.S.A." to "Born on a rooftop in Battersea/ Joined the Teds when he was only three...
Died. Lupino Lane, 67, Briton who produced, directed and starred in Me and My Girl, the show that introduced the Lambeth Walk (and ran at London's Victoria Palace for 1,646 performances beginning in 1937), member of one of the best-known families of the British stage; following a heart attack; in London...
...embarkation ports of England. There is the gore and gallantry of the assault troops slashing their way onto Omaha and Utah beaches through the underbrush of mines, barbed wire, antitank and antipersonnel devices, while being Jashed by bullets, mortar and artillery fire from the German Atlantic Wall. As one British marine classically understated it when his outfit was dumped 50 yards offshore and forced to swim through a hail of machine-gun fire: "Perhaps we're intruding. This seems to be a private beach...