‘What?’ said my husband, coherently, thrashing with his stick at a blackboard on the pavement. It said: ‘Quarter chicken with two regular sides, £5.90.’ This was no geometrical chicken.
‘What?’ said my husband, coherently, thrashing with his stick at a blackboard on the pavement. It said: ‘Quarter chicken with two regular sides, £5.90.’ This was no geometrical chicken. Here sides simply meant ‘vegetables’, a usage grabbed from America by restaurateurs, because it often enables them to charge separately for meat and two veg.
Side is a word that leads a double life, at once fashionable and subterranean. When I was a girl I pondered what could be meant by: ‘He has absolutely no side.’ Must he be very thin? It never, in those days when much language was modelled by boys’ public schools, seemed to refer to girls.
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