The weather's been quite reasonable recently, hasn't it?

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

4 November

Yes, a quite usual British piece of padding for - or for avoiding - God knows what, but the weather can only be reasonable (just like a run of luck), and it makes no sense to call it 'unreasonable' weather in this idiom of British English.

Oh, fair enough, we have the verb 'to bury' now, but the pair, 'to disbury', has been lost, and we have to resort to 'to dig up' (or 'to disinter', for specific purposes), but this is not one of those: it never was possible to say the opposite of 'he has reasonable skill as a tennis player'.

This bloody word 'reasonable', being so reasonable that it has no pair, no man on the Clapham omnibus (why Clapham? why should he ever have been going to - or coming from - Clapham) who isn't reasonable. No, we have to go to unpronounceable Wednesbury for unreasonableness, for decisions so unreasonable that no reasonable panel could have made them.

And there's nothing in-between - it's either the officious (a much misused word, outside the courts) man on the omnibus, saying to two people about to make a contract 'I say, what if Z happens?', or this hopeless lot in Wednesbury, making their artless unreasonableness itself a form of art by being so damn'd unreasonable.

Well, I'm not convinced that we should say 'It has been unseasonably / unseasonally warm of late' - I'm going to go right out and accuse the weather of being like that lot in Wednesbury, so unreasonable in attaching terms to the licensing of something like a cinema that they made a name for themselves.

Damn'd unreasonable the weather we've been having, you'll hear me say (avoiding God knows what)!


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