Glottal stops

There are times when reading the gaps tell us more than reading between the lines.

The glottal stop in speech is used by people when they know what they are saying is a lie, as if believing it cannot be quoted or on record. Ed Balls is a prime user. He says, Suddenly found ou'. He was in government for years; he left the pensions time bomb as a land mine to those who come after him. The phrase was in common parlance. It was no surprise to anyone that public sector pensions are unaffordable and would have to be reformed but the highly educated and highly paid Mr Balls tries to offset all rebuke with a glottal stop.
Tony Blair used that trick on many occasions to offset a lie as if missing out the Ts was enough to make it a casual comment that could not stand up in court or public enquiry. When promising that a second tranche of best performing teachers should get more pay he hoped the teachers would not hold him to it because he used the glottal stop. They did. But his government only part funded the extra pay to the detriment of all state schools with higher performing teachers. He told us with a chuckle that Gordon Brown was the best Chancellor this country ever had, a sentence littered with glottal stops, dropped Ts and H’s littering the floor at his feet. And yet the sentence that included the 45 minutes claim was all pronounced correctly.
One wonders if these trained and experienced speakers actually practice the glottal stop in front of the mirror ready for when they feel the need to let a lie slip from their lips.

Of cucumbers

My neighbour decided to cut back the cluster of cherry laurels out side his house. What started out as a ring of cute bushes in now over twenty feet high. Through the window I glanced over at him sweeping it with an electric hedge trimmer. The sound stopped. He looked at the trimmer. He reached back and pulled the cable out of the bushes and examined the cut end. He went into the house and came out later to start again, cable fixed with yet another join.
I asked if was trying to do topiary, what shape was he looking to end up with? An elephant?
No. A cucumber.
Why a cucumber?
He said he had in mind the big green building in London, a cucumber.
You mean the Gherkin?
That is a gherkin, but this one will not look pickled. This one will be a cucumber.