Mind your language
Dot Wordsworth investigates slang
During the martyrdom by the press of Dr Rowan Williams, the Sun carried as its front-page splash headline ‘Bash the bishop’. I was surprised that a sentence of which the demotic meaning must have been familiar to the supposedly ill-educated readers of that paper was completely unknown to a brilliant and highly educated friend of mine engaged in periodical journalism.
There are two unreliable but useful lexicons of improper slang easily available on the internet. One is ‘Roger’s Profanisaurus’, based on the foul-mouthed inventiveness of a character (Roger Melly, the Man on the Telly) in Viz, the amusing comic for childish adults. It gives as synonyms for bash the bishop: burp the worm or bank with Barclays. The latter phrase derives from barclays as a rhyming-slang equivalent of J. Arthur Rank.
Another website, constructed on the same co-operative but not always accurate principle as Wikipedia, is ‘Urban Dictionary’. Among the synonyms that it lists for bash the bishop are: buffing the banana; holding your sausage hostage; Jackin’ the Beanstalk; rounding up the tadpoles; applying the hand brake; choking Kojak; teasing the weasel; tickling the pickle. Definitions are rated by users of ‘Urban Dictionary’ and this list of synonyms received 1668 thumbs up and 114 thumbs down.
‘Urban Dictionary’ contributors generally provide examples of usage, and these can be feebly literal or, upon occasion, more subtly amusing. So for josseling, another synonym for bash the bishop, one contributor posted: ‘He is upstairs having a jossel, would you like to leave a message?’
‘Urban Dictionary’, which has been going since 1999, boasts more than 300,000 entries, though many of them are multiple definitions of the same terms, often rejected by peer review. It is susceptible to nonce-words, neologisms and hapax legomena. Its moderators attempt to prevent contributors from logging their friends’ names as synonyms for filthy terms.
‘Urban Dictionary’ features a selected word of the day. One recent example was UDI, meaning ‘unidentified drinking injury’ — a bruise or breakage sustained during a period of alcoholic anaesthesia or amnesia. The suggested example of usage was: ‘I’m pretty sure I broke a finger playing cards last night. wtf.’ If you don’t know what wtf means, online dictionaries are not for you.
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Malcolm Redfellow
February 22nd, 2008 10:35amDot, you surprise us that you take Urban Dictionary at all seriously. However, "bash" is worth more effort. I found it curious that the OED has its first meaning in the sense of "dismay, abash". The usual contemporary use, implying some form of violence, is described as "mainly Northern". Only in the First Supplement does "bashing" ("striking so as to dint") get a citation from 1731. John Algeo ("Fifty Years among the New Words", CUP, 1991) is commenting on "bashing" as late as Winter 1987: "The combining form -bashing in the sense 'malicious, unprovoked attack on' has been voguish on both sides of the Atlantic for some time". Algeo than locates "queer-bashing" and its trans-Atlantic variant "fag-bashing~" from 1972 and "yuppy-bashing" from the 1987 moment of all things Yuppy. As for matters episcopal, Algeo is silent. However, what was John Florio about, in 1611, defining "fungo" first as "any kind of toad-stoole of mushrome" and then "that firy round in a burning candle called the bishop"? I can assure Dot that, among less epicene youth, "mushroom" has other connotations.
Carol L. Douglas
February 28th, 2008 2:26amWhile I usually enjoy your column, I must confess that this one makes no sense whatsover. "Bash" and WTF seem to be the only expressions that read the same on either side of the Atlantic.