A jammy dodger!

Wise Words: biscuit

"What's your favourite biscuit?"

If you've ever been to the UK, you'll know that this question is very important. We British drink a lot tea. We get excited about cups of tea. If ever there's an awkward moment, we'll suggest putting the kettle on. We also like a biscuit with our tea. One famous commerical for Rich Tea Biscuits summed up our love for tea and biscuits perfectly with its slogan: "A drink's too wet without one".

Brown should have know this question was more important than any other. It really takes the biscuit that he didn't.

The media is having fun with Brown over this. It's even been reported in China. It's a chance for his enemies to criticize Brown yet again — and a chance for me to look at some of the language in the reactions.

biscuitgate

Mumsnet has set up a forum devoted to "Biscuitgate". As you probably know, ever since the Watergate scandal brought down US President Richard Nixon, Anglo-Saxons have loved adding the suffix "-gate" to anything that has a whiff of a political scandal about it. If it's a "gate", someone must be doing something wrong.

dunking

PM gets a dunking. The British love to dunk their biscuits into a cup of tea before eating them. There's an art to dunking biscuits: too short and the biscuits stay hard; too long and the biscuits end up a disgusting mush at the bottom of the mug. If you dunk a person in water, you do it as a kind of punishment. There's an art to dunking people: too short and the punishment has no effect; too long and the person ends up at the bottom of the pool.

crumbs

PM left to pick up the crumbs. If you say you're trying to return your life to normal after a disaster, you might use the idiom "pick up the pieces". For humorous effect, Times Online changes "pieces" to "crumbs". These are the little pieces that have fallen off a biscuit.

barrel

PM is scraping the barrel. Again from Times Online, this idiom is used to show that desperate measures are being taken. We are usually reduced to "scraping the bottom of the barrel" if all the best people, best resources or best ideas have already been used.

Chocolate

In the end, almost 24 hours after the question was orginally asked (12 times), Brown posted a reply on Twitter. Although he admitted to eating chocolate biscuits, he still wouldn't put a name to his favourite biscuit.

Whatever biscuit he had chosen, somebody wouldn't have liked it. Here are two he could have picked.

Hobnobs

Hobnobs are biscuits made of oats. Used as a verb, to "hobnob" means to socialize with people who are of a higher social status than you are.

Jammie dodger

A jammie dodger is a shortbread biscuit filled with jam. In the UK, if you think someone is lucky (or even unfairly lucky) you can say that person is "jammy". A dodger is a person who gets up to dishonest tricks.

No wonder Brown didn't choose hobnobs or jammie dodgers.