The musical Sweeny Todd has words and music by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Hugh Wheeler based on the 1973 play Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Christopher Bond.
Sweeny Todd is a story of horror, but nevertheless there's one part of it so absolutely perfect that it lurks near the surface of my mind and emerges, grinning fiendishly, whenever I visit a supermarket.
Shepherd's pie, it whispers, with a small snigger of delight, as I stride past the neat plastic trays of ready meals (and I never dare stop). Shepherd's pie peppered/With actual shepherd...
Horrid, isn't it. Really horrid.
But perfect, all the same.
Word To Use Today: sweeny. Sweeny has been most commonly used as London rhyming slang: Sweeny Todd - Flying Squad. (The Flying Squad were a department of the London Police Force, and hence The Sweeny came to mean the police.) Sweeny is also a disease of the shoulder muscles of horses. In this sense the word is probably from the German Schweine, which means thinness.
Oh! That picture! Creepy!
ReplyDeleteI should not have read the shepherd pie lines!
There'll be no shepherd pie served at our table for a long time!
I don't do horror very well - maybe I'm the pusillanimous pipsqueak! :)
I'm rather the same, Jingles - which is probably why that line has stuck so firmly.
DeleteShepherd's pie is a silly name, anyway. If anyone was going to eat lamb it would be the farmer, wouldn't it, and not the poor man up on the hills.