William Barnes, that remarkable Dorset schoolmaster turned rector, with his buckled shoes and knee-breeches, and eccentric ideas on the English language, wrote a poem on milking time:
I come along where wide-horn’d cows,
’Ithin a nook, a-screen’d by boughs,
Did stan’ an’ flip the white-hoop’d païls
Wi’ heäiry tufts o’ swingèn taïls.
The milking time in which MPs have now been detected has already spawned two words, one of them being flip. It is quite distant in meaning from the action of Barnes’s cows’ tails.
In the 17th century, 200 years before Barnes’s time, flip had appeared from nowhere as an alternative to fillip, meaning ‘a flick with finger and thumb’. In the context of MPs’ expenses, flip means ‘to switch the designation of main and secondary home’ for financial gain (only the second home qualifying for those lovely allowances).
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