Idiosyncratic Terms a la Monty Python

Groom: We want to buy a bed, please.

Mr. Lambert: Oh, certainly. I’ll get someone to attend to you.  Mr. Verity!

Mr. Verity: Can I help you, sir?

Groom: Ah, yes. We’d like to buy a bed … a double bed … about fifty pounds?

Verity: Oh, no, I’m afraid not, sir. Our cheapest bed is eight hundred pounds, sir.

Groom: Eight hundred pounds!

Lambert: Perhaps I should have explained: Mr. Verity does tend to exaggerate; so, every figure he gives you will be ten times too high. Otherwise he’s perfectly all right.

Groom: Oh, I see. So your cheapest bed then is eighty pounds?

Verity: Eight hundred pounds, yes, sir.

Groom: And how wide is it?

Verity: The width is sixty feet wide.

Groom: (Politely whispering to his wife) Six foot wide. And the length?

Verity: The length is … Lambert, what is the length of the Comfydown Majorette?

Lambert: Two foot long.

Groom: Two foot long?

Verity: Ah, yes, you have to remember, of course, to multiply everything Mr. Lambert says by three.  It’s nothing he can help, you understand.  Apart from that he’s perfectly all right.

Groom: I see….

Verity: But, it does mean that when he says a bed is two foot wide, it is in fact sixty foot wide.

Groom: Oh, yes, I see.

Verity: And that’s not counting the mattress.

Groom: Oh, how much is that?

Verity: Mr. Lambert will be able to help you there. Lambert, will you show these twenty good people the dog kennels, please?

Lambert: Certainly.

Groom: Dog kennels? No, no, no, mattresses, mattresses!

Verity: Oh, no, no. You have to say dog kennel to Mr. Lambert because, if you say mattress, he puts a bag over his head. I should have explained. Apart from that he’s really all right….

from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Season 1, Episode 8 (“Full Frontal Nudity”), air date: Dec. 7, 1969.

[Keith A. Rowley]