Politician, ex-codebreaker Baroness Trumpington dies at 96

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. Lady Trumpington, Code Breaker and Irreverent Politician, Dies at 96

I was about to start a new thread, when a search turned up this existing thread. I'm already using up my free New York Times articles.

Hat tip, Twitter:

Speaking of this new translation of "The Encyclopedia of Gestures," some desultory comments about "V sign" in the culture and in our dictionaries.

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Here is the entry for the V sign in "The Encyclopedia of Gestures," which gives both the "victory" version and the "intended to cause offense" version.

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This insult made the news this week in obits for Lady Trumpington, who famously flashed the gesture in Parliament.

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It's a bit odd that the illustration at the entry for "v sign" in Webster's Third (1961) is the "offensive" version.

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For the Eighth Collegiate (1973), the palm was turned around.

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Lady Trumpington, Code Breaker and Irreverent Politician, Dies at 96



Lady Trumpington with the Yeomen of the Guard in the House of Lords in 2005. She embarked on a political career late in life that made her a celebrity in Britain.
Andrew Parsons/Press Association, via Associated Press

By Palko Karasz
Nov. 27, 2018

LONDON — Lady Trumpington, who worked on the top-secret Bletchley Park code-breaking operation during World War II and later embarked on a political career that made her a celebrity in Britain in her 90s, died on Monday. She was 96. ... Her death was confirmed on Twitter by her son, Adam Barker. He did not say where she died.

https://twitter.com/adamant138

Lady Trumpington — as Jean Alys Campbell-Harris — worked as a cipher clerk, typing intercepted messages from the German Navy, at Bletchley Park, the wartime British decoding facility where Alan Turing helped crack Germany’s Enigma code. ... Bletchley Park’s achievements, kept secret for decades after the war, were made widely known by the films “Enigma” (2001) and “The Imitation Game” (2014), and, in 2017, by the posthumous pardon of Mr. Turing, who had been prosecuted after the war for homosexuality.

Lady Trumpington was appointed to the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British Parliament, in 1980. She held a series of government positions from 1985 to 1997, leaving her last ministerial post at age 75.

Her time in the limelight began in 2011, when, at 89, she made a two-fingered gesture of contempt to a fellow peer, Lord King, a former Conservative defense secretary, after he had referred to her age during a televised debate in the House of Lords. (The particular V-sign she used is regarded as an insult in Britain.) ... “His family say he is famous now,” she said about the episode.
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