Word: stengah
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...labels can mislead. In his new autobiographical Ways of Escape, Graham Greene writes: "I had an idea before I went to Malaya, an idea picked up from an unsympathetic press, of a group of men, the harsh overseers of great capitalist enterprises, intransigent, unconstructive exploiters of native labor, drinking stengah after stengah in the local club, probably in the Somerset Maugham manner making love to each other's wives. But before I had stayed long in Malaya I learned that there was no such thing as 'the planter'-there was only X or Y." But did such...
Your review wallah has gone and pulled a howler. When one has knocked about the federated Malay States for donkeys' years, as one has, one learns that "stengah" means a small whisky and water, nothing more, nothing less. Any chappie askin' for a "gin stengah" at the Yellow Dog in K.L. would be hooted off the verandah before you could say knife...
Jeeves, another gin stengah. A treasure, Jeeves is. Been with the club since the flood. Where was I? Ah, yes. Books. Haven't read but one since Oxbridge. Burke's Peerage. Breeders' guide to British nobility. Smashing heraldry: gules argent, lions rampant, bars sinister, all that drill. Snob's bible, they call it-the envious ones. For those of us who can trace our lineage back to Ethelred the Unready, it's-well, it's sort of a-er -bible. Meaning no disrespect, padre. Since the Empire's gone to the demnition bowwows...
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