My Hovercraft is full of eels!

I was having a conversation with one of my long time friends Jerrie, the other week and remembered a funny discussion we had while we were both a trade show in the UK some 15 years ago!!. She was learning to ‘sign’ and I (and others) were feeding Jerrie phrases to ‘test’ her ‘signing’ ability.

For some reason this phrase came up (I suppose we had been talking about Monty Python etc. which is where it comes from) and apparently (there were other ‘signers’ present) her ‘translation’ turned out to be correct. We all had a laugh and moved onto other subjects.

What’s the point of this? I had really not thought about the phrase for a long time (it’s not one that you see in any of the Monty Python re-runs – too much of those Lumberjacks’ & the Norwegian Blue!!) until it came up in last weeks conversation and as I could not remember what Monty Python sketch it was in. So, as one does these days, I turned to Internet and to my amazement there it was as the fifth hit on page one of the Google results; “The Hungarian Phrase Book”.

What I also find amazing is that there are another 40,400 results for that phrase! I’m not going to look through all of those, but one I found very ‘interesting’ was a translation of the phrase into a number of different languages, very handy if you need to communicate this to non-English speaking people as I am sure Monty Python has been seen by a huge amount of the world population over the years. The site also has a number of other translations for other handy phrases (Happy New Year/Xmas etc., worth a look and worth making a bookmark.