Dot Wordsworth

Queue

When the word came into the language, the habit was thought of as quintessentially French

issue 30 April 2016

The language that President Barack Obama used was evidence of skulduggery, Nigel Farage declared. ‘The UK is gonna be in the back of the queue’ if it leaves the European Union, Mr Obama said, standing next to David Cameron in front of a gilt and stencilled Victorian wall in the Foreign Office. There! Americans say stand in line, Mr Farage suggested, so Mr Obama must be delivering words fed to him by the snake Cameron.

Some reports had Mr Obama saying at the back of the queue, unconsciously adjusting his words to the British English idiom, rather than in the back of it, as though it were an estate car (station wagon).

When did the British learn to queue? It was certainly noted as an English (not British) characteristic by George Mikes, the Hungarian author of How to be an Alien (1946).

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