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Mind your language

How’s your father

9 June 2016

1:00 PM

9 June 2016

1:00 PM

‘Very funny, I don’t think,’ said my husband when I mentioned Harry Tate, although Tate died in 1940 and even my husband wasn’t going to the music hall then. But one of Tate’s catchphrases, How’s your father, has just been put into the Oxford English Dictionary.

What does it mean? Many people nowadays will answer ‘rumpy-pumpy’ or some such low euphemism.

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