{"id":17909,"date":"2019-04-16T12:34:14","date_gmt":"2019-04-16T19:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17909"},"modified":"2019-04-16T12:34:14","modified_gmt":"2019-04-16T19:34:14","slug":"herberts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2019\/04\/16\/herberts\/","title":{"rendered":"herberts"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Today\u2019s britishism that threw me for a loop was from a television review<\/a> in the Grauniad<\/cite> wherein Stuart Jeffries refers to two characters as \u201ca couple of modern-day herberts\u201d. What are these herberts<\/i> of which he speaks?\r\n

I gather from an entry on the English Language and Usage Stack Exchange<\/a> that (a) I\u2019m just not going to get full connotations on a website, am I, and (2) there\u2019s a connotation that herbert<\/i> may imply a measure of mainstream conformity, at least in some contexts. I think the Wiktionary entry<\/a> bears that connotation out, although not clearly. In the television show being reviewed, the characters described as herberts<\/i> seem to be the straight men, as it were, the normal folk off of whom the bizarre comic characters can bounce their outrageousness. That makes sense to me, with a sense that a fellow who goes by Herbert<\/i> is probably a bit dull. I can\u2019t call to mind many famous men who went by Herbert<\/i>\u2014There are Herbs (Cain, Alpert, Tarlek) and Berts (Convy, Blyleven, Lahr) but most recent really famous Herbert that I can think of is Hoover.\r\n

On a side note, I would think that the connotations of first-name slang, particularly derogatory slang, would change pretty frequently. I have some vague sense of what is currently meant by Chad<\/i> or Becky<\/i>, although I have more of a sense of what was meant by Toby<\/i> or Molly<\/i> two hundred and fifty years ago. I suppose molly<\/i> is something else now. I don\u2019t know what a toby<\/I> would be these days, or what a becky<\/i> might have been in 1770. I really doubt that whatever Mr. Jeffries is alluding to by herberts<\/i> has anything to do with the American president from almost a century ago, or even with the herberts<\/i> of 1970 that the Stack Exchange site.\r\n\r\n

Thanks,
-Ed.\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suspect that I am, in fact, a herbert, but how can I be sure?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-slang"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17909"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17911,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17909\/revisions\/17911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}