Latest news with #Wobbly
BBC News
04-08-2025
- BBC News
Bikers rally at funeral of Cottenham rider known as 'Wobbly'
More than 100 bikers turned out to pay their respects at the funeral of a 75-year-old motorcyclist killed in a Dean, from Cottenham, Cambridgeshire, died on 18 June when a sports utility vehicle (SUV) collided with his bike in bikers turned out in force to accompany his funeral cortege from Cottenham to Madingley, describing him as "larger than life" and the "life of the party".The driver of the SUV involved in the crash stayed at the scene, was arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving while unfit through drugs and has been bailed. His family has described Mr Dean - known as Wobbly - as "beloved", while music lovers described him as an inspiration who helped found Cottenham Rock Phillips, 32, who runs the Cottenham Club, a social club in the village, said the bikers put on "quite a show" "Wobbly used to run his bike show here and from that came the birth of the Cottenham Rock Club," he said."He was massive - everyone knew him and I don't think there was anyone in the world who had a bad thing to say about him. He was just one of those guys that everyone liked."You'd be surprised with how little hair he had, the amount of head-banging he could achieve."He was a brilliant bloke and I think this had got to be one of the best send-offs anyone could ever wish for." Dawn Geer, 63, a club committee member alongside Mr Dean, the club's president, said she had known him for about 20 years."Wobbly would have loved it - he loved a good party and a rally so he'd be proud that all these people have turned up for him."Biker Sam Harris, 45, from Trumpington, Cambridge, said Mr Dean was "a local legend" who he had known for more than 25 years."A very knowledgeable guy when it came to motorcycles and a really nice bloke as well," he said."Wobbly's bike show was the show to come to. "It's a moving day and a sad day, but also a very special day - the likes of which we haven't seen for quite a while."Christopher Lee, 40, from Arbury, Cambridge, said: "Wobbly was always the life of the party - drinking, dancing, going to rallies - and he had been to a bike show on the night he died."It's sad that we're losing a member of the bike community - but an honour to remember him." Follow Cambridgeshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Irish Times
25-04-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Frightfully unfashionable: Frank McNally on the century-long decline of adverbs
That Casimir Markievicz exhibition (Diary, April 23rd) reminded me in passing how dependent the upper classes of these islands used to be on what grammarians call 'degree adverbs'. Witness a letter, included in the show, in which Eva Gore-Booth congratulates her sister Constance on becoming engaged to the Polish count. 'I can't help being frightfully amused when I think of the bomb bursting,' she writes (the bomb-burst being the reaction when others find out). 'Still, I do hope you'll be awfully happy.' Those two adverbs alone convey the accent of the writer and also hint at a certain attitude to life found only in big houses, preferably Georgian, in the decades before and after 1900. READ MORE But it wasn't confined to adverbs. Adjectives ending in -ly were just as important, especially if they were 'ghastly' or 'beastly'. Here's a paragraph from Molly Keane's Good Behaviour, set in another big house a few years later, that has a bit of both: 'They were sending Richard to South Africa on a safari. It might help him a bit. 'He's taken this whole ghastly business terribly hard, poor boy,' Wobbly wrote.' The 'Wobbly' there sounds like an adjective too, which is a bit confusing. But no. The narrator tells us Wobbly is 'an old friend of Papa'. This way of speaking survived the first World War, unlike many big houses themselves. Or at least 'beastly' and 'ghastly' were still going strong in the mid-20th century novels of Enid Blyton, of which I read too many as a child. But 'awfully' and 'frightfully' were dying out by then, except in books and films evoking the earlier period. Modern literature had started to take a dim view of adverbs in general, a trend that has continued since. In a study of 1,500 books a few years ago, aimed at finding out what gains writers' critical acclaim, data journalist Ben Blatt concluded that a low adverb count was one of the keys. Books with fewer than 50 per 10,000 words had a strong chance of being considered 'great', he found. Although failing this test did not preclude wealth and fame. JK Rowling, for one, is famous for using adverbs of the -ly kind. Her favourites include 'coolly', 'calmly', 'ponderously' and 'snarkily'. But as the adverb-hating Stephen King summed up, snarkily: 'Ms Rowling seems to have never met one she didn't like.' Her overall adverb count, according to Blatt, is 140 per 10,000 words. Ernest Hemingway played a big part in making adverbs and adjectives unfashionable. And yet he used some odd ones himself on occasion, boldly going where no writer had gone before. Here, from For Whom the Bell Tolls, is a typical Hemingway passage, full of short, hard words, sometimes repeated for effect in long, flat sentences, and devoid of all -ly adverbs, with one notorious exception: 'Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes.' Yes, her lips moved 'smally'. (And 'by themselves', whatever that means). There is an adverb nobody else in literature can have used before or since. Not even Donald 'Bigly' Trump would write it, if only because he has no time for diminutives. [ Bigly, Javanka, witch-hunt, sad! The Trump era in 32 words and phrases Opens in new window ] The -ly ending has fallen out of fashion in modern cuisine too. For mysterious reasons, upmarket restaurants will no longer serve 'slowly roasted pork', for example, if they can serve 'slow-roasted pork' instead (although the shorter version probably costs more). But an adverb that is still used a lot, and shouldn't be, gained renewed currency from events in Rome this week. Breaking the news, at least one British tabloid (along with many Twitter users) announced that Pope Francis had 'sadly died'. And yes, I know that grammar and syntax are not the most important things on such an occasion. I also know what each writer meant: that he or she was sad at the news. But the sentence implies that it was the pope who was upset at his own passing, as well he might be, and that in other circumstances he would have died happily. (Mind you, if anyone can die happily, one of the world's foremost believers in the afterlife has a better chance than most of us.) At least the writers here did use the verb 'die', which is often avoided now on social media. The euphemisms 'passed on' or just 'passed' tend to be preferred these days. When the dreaded d-word is used, as it was here, the effect needs to be softened with an adverb, placed however badly.
