Dot Wordsworth

Olympic family

issue 04 August 2012

The people who occasionally drive in the empty Olympic lanes and are entitled to sit in the seats left empty at Olympic events are called the Olympic family. It seems to me unwise to have attached such a name to this already creepy notion. Even the UK Border Agency has special procedures for an ‘Olympic or Paralympic Games family member visitor’.

Since the world is addicted to gangster films, everyone knows that Mafia gangs call themselves ‘the family’. In The Luciano Story (1954), ‘The inside facts on the greatest criminal conspiracy in history and the mastermind behind it – Lucky Luciano’, Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten explained that ‘to Mafiosi, it was never the club or our mob or anything but the family.’

In 1812, in his New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language, written, it is said, in prison at Newcastle on the way to transportation, James Hardy Vaux explained family as ‘thieves, sharpers and all others who get their living upon the cross’.

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