OK, that’s a good explanation which I can accept.

The Maltese working-class picked ‘Tessie’ up from the British working-class men stationed in Malta, and carried on using it for a couple of generations thereafter. But face it, it’s died out in Malta too. Malta’s Tessies are all aged over 60.

‘Chullie’ was picked up in exactly the same way, and became the equivalent of ‘Hey Joe’, used as the name for everyman. It comes from the way British military personnel stationed in Malta used to call men whose name they didn’t know ‘Charlie’. In British English, except with certain heavy regional accents, the R is silent, so Maltese people heard ‘Hey Chahlie’, couldn’t pronounce the vowel sound accurately, and turned it into ‘Chullie’.

That’s also how the British English ‘schooner’ became the Maltese ‘skuna’ – the Maltese ‘a’ serving as an approximation of the final ‘er’ sound in English.

Britain sells far more to other EU member states than other EU member states sell to Britain. It therefore follows that, in matters of trade if nothing else, Britain needs the EU far more than the EU needs Britain.

Britain needs to sell; other EU member states can buy elsewhere.

What quandary – Malta is not cut off from British culture at all. You know what names are used in Britain. If you find somebody called Tessie there, she is probably aged 65+ and is a Maltese woman from a certain background who married a sailor she met down the docks in the 1960s.

I only quoted Wikipedia, because I still had doubts. Now I’m in a quandary.

Tess and Tessie as diminutives of Theresa had died out in Britain by the Edwardian era.

That’s because they don’t speak English – so when they come across something they think is clever or novel, they make fools of themselves by parroting it like idiots.

Another problem is that many Maltese adults are emotionally and intellectually retarded (this is a statement of fact, not opinion), so their taunts are childish and generally involve first names as though they are still in the primary school playground – Simple Simon being a case in point.

Simon Busuttil is anything but simple, so it should be obvious that a taunt like that is pointless. And if he really were simple, then it would be deeply offensive (but then if he were simple, he wouldn’t be party leader).

I’m not one of those who think Maltese people are more ignorant now than they were before. They are quite obviously less ignorant (the situation was terrible three decades ago). But social media and internet comments boards have put their ignorance on display and brought it to a wider audience. Previously, you would have had to meet these morons and talk to them to find out how damned stupid and uneducated they are.

I cringe every time I see the words “simple Simon”.

Incidentally (and I’m going off on a tangent here), it seems to be habit of many Maltese to pick on a particular word or phrase which they’ve heard, and repeat it ad infinitum.

A few years ago everyone started using the word “massive” (as if it were some new term – they probably hadn’t heard it before so were almost impressed by it). Lately we’ve had “bitter” and “wake up and smell the coffee”.

I also sometimes come across strange made-up words in Maltese which are repeated non-stop by a certain class of people on Facebook. One of them in “mawx”, and I cannot for the life of me understand what it means.

Tessie is a Maltese name. Nobody in Britain uses it.