Britain’s incoming prime minister once boasted he could recite from heart the first hundred lines of Homer’s Iliad in ancient Greek. Boris Johnson has long spun political gold from his magniloquent tongue, using what some linguists and observers describe as bombastic language, esoteric vocabulary, occasional
1 / 5FILE PHOTO: Greek minister for culture Melina Mercouri speaks with President of the Oxford Union society Boris Johnson before she addressed the Union on the subject of the Elgin Marbles at the University of OxfordBy Freddie Hayward and Guy Faulconbridge
"Johnson's use of language is often a mixture of unexpected metaphors or turns of phrase, hyperbole, and nostalgia, very often with a particularly British twist," said Philip Seargeant, senior lecturer in applied linguistics at the Open University. A published author, his books include a biography of his hero and British war leader Winston Churchill. He has received 22,917 pounds a month for a weekly column in the Telegraph newspaper."In the public arena he exploits at least the following masks: the rousing orator, the affable conversationalist, and the bumbling amateur," said Paul Chilton, professor emeritus of Linguistics at Lancaster University.
Johnson proposed a"full British Brexit" rather than a"bog roll Brexit," in a reference to toilet paper. In a speech last week to party members during his party leadership campaign, Johnson brandished a kipper fish and pointed to its freezer packaging to ridicule the absurdity of European Union regulation.
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