Hotcake

22 May 2010

Going like hotcakes. I had to sday that, because it's the only surviving instance where the term "hotcakes" can still be used. Would you walk into a bakery and ask about their range of hotcakes? Would you annouce to your friends that they should bring hotcakes to the dinner party?

There clearly *are* still hotcakes out there. It's not as though hotcakes died out after a giant scone crashed into the earth causing a billion tons of crumbs to be flung into the atmosphere and denied cakes the hotness necessary to survive as a popular confection. Or the incursion of cold cakes hasn't driven them north, so only a few remain scratching a living in cake shops in the Inner Hebrides. We just don't call them hotcakes. I suppose it's like birds and dinosaurs. Except, y'know, with flour as well as eggs.

All of which makes we wonder about the insistence of the British to cling to their little saying. There's just something nicely balanced about the phrase "going like hotcakes", something also inoffensive and pleasant. Even if we don't call anything a hotcake anymore, we can still imagine eating one and having a nice smile as we munch it. "Going like undervalued public ututily shares under Mrs Thatcher" just wouldn't have the same ring to it.

In so many ways.