Before I forget, I was cheered by the letter from Keith Aitken in last week’s issue noting another sense for tube (Mind your language, 7 October). ‘What are ye on about, ya tube?’ people shout as an insult in western Scotland, he says. He derives the term from the idea of their digestive functions dominating their lives, like tube-worms: just one big alimentary canal. I fear, though, that the origin lies in another bodily part. As Joyce wrote in Ulysses: ‘I suppose the people gave him that nickname [Mr de Kock] going about with his tube from one woman to another.’ Yes, tube in this slang sense means nothing other than ‘cock’, ‘prick’ or ‘wiener’.
Until I read the letter, my mind had been turning on matters of pronunciation, for halfway through an item on Australian flu on Today, my husband asked: ‘Did you hear that?’
I did.
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