> George only has the new administration to thank
But George has been under the Earth for the longest time hasn't he? He couldn't be thankful for anything any more. Off to Wikipedia I go, yup since 1950 from tuberculosis.
But a section on the article mentions the his homophobia, and so I read that because I find it surprising that it's mentioned when it was the norm at the time and seems like some kind of revisionism.
That then leads to a segue on phrasing Orwell used in 1984 to describe the "nancy left" or "pansies", and the presence in the Chestnut Tree (at the end of the book) gay men.
Then another segue to David Bowie and his last album which contains "Girl Loves Me" as it references the Chestnut Tree and contains polari... and this morning on BBC 6 Music I had heard a long forgotten Morrissey track that was on an album called Bona Drag, and when I put the album on over breakfast I listened to the opening track "Piccadilly Palare" and some of the same strange phrases were present as in the Bowie track, and now I also recognise them from having read 1984 (except Orwell was using the slang phrases pejoratively).
A further segue as I remembered that Lucky Lisp from the same album has references also to polari, and on the Orwell wikipedia page there was a mention of the Chestnut Tree scene again, and how Orwell included a lisp for the "Nancy" characteristics which he identifies in detail and with "some disgust".
And this leads to the most fascinating Wiki discovery of the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_lisp . The tested hypothesis being that sexual orientation of men can be determined from how gay men phonate their s's distinctively to the degree that measurements of guesses were accurate beyond a rate that could be chance.
The rabbit hole goes deep when one strays onto Wikipedia.