Modern Vespa

The beholder must have liked it. I like parts of it.

Watching the end of the U.S. Amateur Championship they referred to the kid that won as "Britisher" Matthew Fitzpatrick.??? Isn't that kind of an obsolete reference that was probably only used by Americans? He said it a few times.

i like the parts of it that are underneath all of the chrome.

thank you ashbrook for a very pleasant tour of leafy south london this afternoon, complete with hand signals

Odd. But it did remind me of childhood days happily watching hours of old war movies with dodgy accents, as in 'Ha, Britisher, for you ze war is over'

One of the many advantages of owning a BV is that you can't retro-fy it and you don't get mistaken for a mod.

I'm not sure why it aggravates me so much. It's probably got something to do with trying to age something which is essentially modern.
It's as if you're trying to smash some history into it to generate some nostalgia it doesn't deserve.
It's not a towel rack or a Cadillac so leave the chrome at home eh ?


Bill X

It's not a towel rack or a Cadillac so leave the chrome at home eh ?

Bill X

The mortally wounded Britisher looks up with a pained smile and says "For you too mate" while dangling the pulled pin of a hand grenade from his finger. A momentary cut to the surprised Jerry's face. Scene ends with an explosion.

Love those but it is a little odd that an American sports broadcaster was using terms like that. Maybe an old war movie fan too.

Oh I don't doubt that they work, I just think they make the delicious lines of a GTS look cluttered.

Ah, we had the same education Sticky

Lots of the online dictionaries describe it as an American term..

noun
informal
(in North America and old-fashioned British English) a native or inhabitant of Britain.

And as for after market pipes unless your engine is tuned to the bollocks they don't do a lot except fail at the header and make a lot of noise.
If you're going to go fast why advertise it to the boys in blue ? plus you're up against the rev limiter so you won't really go much/any faster.
I'm convinced that any minor performance increase is mainly due to the weight saving rather than the gas flow when attached to standard engine.

Don't be.

This is why I don't buy them.

Granted standard pipes rust as soon as they come out the crate but I kinda like the original look.

Bill X

You guys are doing it wrong. It's an adjective, not a noun.

So the man was more britisher because of his adamant adherence to traditional Vespa modifications and keeping them in time than some of his countryman.

You guys are doing it wrong. It's an adjective, not a noun.

Gotten Himmel.

B X

There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech -- not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary -- six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam -- that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses, making pens with pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it -- AFTER WHICH COMES THE VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb -- merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out -- the writer shovels in "HABEN SIND GEWESEN GEHABT HAVEN GEWORDEN SEIN," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the flourish to a man's signature -- not necessary, but pretty. German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand on your head -- so as to reverse the construction -- but I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.

Some German words are so long that they have a perspective. Observe these examples:
Freundschaftsbezeigungen.
Dilettantenaufdringlichkeiten.
Stadtverordnetenversammlungen.
These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper at any time and see them marching majestically across the page -- and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music, too. They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a great interest in these curiosities. Whenever I come across a good one, I stuff it and put it in my museum. In this way I have made quite a valuable collection. When I get duplicates, I exchange with other collectors, and thus increase the variety of my stock. Here rare some specimens which I lately bought at an auction sale of the effects of a bankrupt bric-a-brac hunter:
Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen.
Alterthumswissenschaften.
Kinderbewahrungsanstalten.
Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen.
Wiedererstellungbestrebungen.
Waffenstillstandsunterhandlungen.
Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes stretching across the printed page, it adorns and ennobles that literary landscape -- but at the same time it is a great distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way; he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it, or tunnel through it. So he resorts to the dictionary for help, but there is no help there. The dictionary must draw the line somewhere -- so it leaves this sort of words out. And it is right, because these long things are hardly legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words, and the inventor of them ought to have been killed. They are compound words with the hyphens left out. The various words used in building them are in the dictionary, but in a very scattered condition; so you can hunt the materials out, one by one, and get at the meaning at last, but it is a tedious and harassing business. I have tried this process upon some of the above examples. "Freundshaftsbezeigungen" seems to be "Friendshipdemonstrations," which is only a foolish and clumsy way of saying "demonstrations of friendship." "Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen" seems to be "Independencedeclarations," which is no improvement upon "Declarations of Independence," so far as I can see. "Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen" seems to be "General-statesrepresentativesmeetings," as nearly as I can get at it -- a mere rhythmical, gushy euphuism for "meetings of the legislature," I judge. We used to have a good deal of this sort of crime in our Have you read it?, but it has gone out now. We used to speak of a things as a "never-to-be-forgotten" circumstance, instead of cramping it into the simple and sufficient word "memorable" and then going calmly about our business as if nothing had happened. In those days we were not content to embalm the thing and bury it decently, we wanted to build a monument over it.

I love the way German runs words together, like Leathertrousers and Blackforestcherrycake. At school we were taught that the longest German word in common everyday use (as opposed to legal and medical words) is Kraftfahrzeugreparaturwerkstatten, or a garage as it is known in English.

Seriously... the time spent reading the entire essay would not be considered wasted.

The compound words were suposed to be a thing of the past with the German orthography reform of 1996 (Rechtschreibreform) but as you can see from the title they just can't help it.