It is many years since I wrote a short, sad article called “Living in the Ukay.” I complained about the growing use of these syllables to describe my homeland. (It is not the land of my birth, as I was born in the vanished British Empire, on the island of Malta in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, which now rejects me, as I was a colonialist baby with no rights.) It was on January 18, 2010 that I asked my trifling number of readers:
When did this country turn into the Ukay? I grew up in Britain, and quite a lot of people my age grew up in England. I favored Britain because my earliest memories were of Scotland, and I have always had a great fondness for that country and its people, and quite see why they are annoyed when their special character is forgotten.
It was the British Army, the British constitution, the British climate, the British way of doing things. I seldom if ever heard anyone mention the “Ukay.” Northern Ireland may not constitutionally be part of Great Britain (its semi-detached status was a mistake, in my view, which has cost us all dear), but the whole point of it was that it remained British. And I think you would have to be hyper-sensitive to object to calling these islands the British Isles.
I think, in fact, that it is such hypersensitivity that brought about this change, which I began to notice in the early 1990s.
As so often, I had thought this was quite an acute point, but the response was not even muted, and I moved on to other matters. Only now do I discover that, as so often, I was so far ahead of events that my prophetic abilities are an actual disadvantage. My usage, differently spelled, has become a sort of cult, with its own entry in Wiktionary, thus:
the yookay: (UK politics, derogatory) The United Kingdom, as having been impacted by perceived failures in multicultural policy