James Young presents the latest competition
In Competition No 2558 you were invited to submit entries to Dr Johnson for inclusion in a 21st-century supplement to his dictionary.
At first the Doctor feared that too many of you were confining your definitions to the five examples he gave of the sort of thing he wanted. In the event he awarded first prize of £30 to the entrant who best defined these five examples — Brian Murdoch, albeit a Scotchman. The runners-up are Bill Greenwell and Basil Ransome-Davies, who win £20 each, while the other contributors get £5 for each definition used.
asbo a certification, notarised by a Justice, confirmatory of the fact that the bearer is a roisterer, scallywag, lummock or jailbird, though he be not in jail; possession of which is reckoned a mark of distinction amongst those justly called scapegallows.
blog an electronically medium whereby initiates convey uninteresting personal intimacies to the uninterested commonality.
chav a low person of either sex, a would-be buck, whose means exceed his manners, now-a-days frequently resident in the County of Essex.
whadeva a formulaic response signifying ‘what you will’ betokening complete indifference on the part of the utterer to diction, phonology, pronunciation, and to the person of the interlocutor.
innit a punctuative phatic interjection having no meaning whatsoever, capable of appendance to any sentence by young persons of no breeding in the southern parts of England. It has no connexion with the word now current to designate the Esquimaux.
Brian Murdoch
arsed used in negative passive constructions as a synonym for ‘bothered’ (viz. ‘am I bovvered?’), indicating that the speaker is in an idle or apathetic frame of mind, loth to expend energy, e.g. ‘I’m supposed to be at work today, but I can’t be arsed.’
metrosexual an affluent urban male with all the cartoon attributes of a vain and narcissistic heterosexual woman (keenly concerned with fashion, grooming, diets, expensive toiletries, etc.) except that of being sexually interested in other men.
muthafucka 1. person (esp. a person you have differences with or do not like the look of) 2. phatic utterance equivalent to ‘dear me’; ‘well, well’, ‘that’s life’, etc.
thong vestigial underwear designed to avoid female discomfort or embarrassment by smoothing the line of a dress (viz. ‘VPL’) and subsequently canonised as an iconic accessory in the repertoire of lingerie eroticism.
yeah, right dismissive conversational response expressing an offhand blend of disagreement (vulgar irony) and contemptuous indifference, as in ‘Gordon Brown will win people round, you’ll see’. ‘Yeah, right.’ Rare example of a double affirmative constituting a negative.
Basil Ransome-Davies
bung a fanciful quantity of currency or goods of a high value, to reward, using surreption, an intermediary for purchasing an item or service.
fo sho the affirmative, offered to interrogatories as to the quality or availability or character of a particular event or person.
mint of exceptional particularity, beyond normal expectation, and capable of causing considerable concitation.
jack to pilfer; to appropriate; to alter the condition of the ownership of any item by its peccable transference from one person to another.
random pertaining to an event, or an account of it, possessing a gaiety both unusual and pleasing to such intellect as has been formed in the cerebrum of an impressionable young person.
yoof a term of singular disparagement used by those beyond the age of parental responsibility, of those in the succeeding generation with obscure cultural aspirations.
Bill Greenwell
bling applied surface scintillation which demonstrates that character traits can be not even as deep as beauty.
Michael Brereton
cool fashionable, stylish, attractive and desirable, much as Malvolio believed himself to be when attired in yellow stockings, cross-gartered. — William Shakespeare, ‘Twelfth Night’.
Alan Millard
credit crunch a term used by journalists to describe the apparent hardship faced by individuals who cannot distinguish between luxury and necessity.
Celeste Francis
diss to belittle or show disrespect to something or someone as in the song, ‘Goe and catche a falling starre’, where the poet ‘disses’ the fair sex by declaring ‘No where lives a woman true, and fair.’ — John Donne
AM
feminism the celebration of that in women which is not feminine. William Danes-Volkov
iPod an apparatus connected to the ears which enables the user to avoid polite interaction with other members of society
CF
like an all-purpose ellipsis or verbal prosthetic and conventional surrogate for several parts of speech in the informal discourse of adolescents. In the exchange ‘she was, like, “you treat this house like a hotel” and I was, like, ‘whatever’” only the second ‘like’ is a preposition.
G.M. Davis
minger a descriptive applied to those, especially to young females by young males, whose appearance fails to approach the ideal of physical beauty promulgated by an array of celebrity-tracking pictorial magazines.
GMD
mobile a contrivance employed instead of megaphone or microphone for amplification of the voice in hostelries and public conveyances.
MB
Net, a reticulum of digital information, so densely packed as to have few interstitial vacuities.
Virginia Price Evans
petrolhead a species of car driver renowned for his love of speed, indifference to nature, vulgar machismo, immature humour, clichéd complaints about what he calls ‘political correctness’ and the loud smug, insensitive personality of any saloon-bar bore. GMD
rap a low form of music said to have originated in the western Indies; hence rapping: the utterance of a ridiculous monologue to the accompaniment of a tuneless cacophony.
Sid Field
rehab an activity of travelling minstrels, opium-eaters and the bibulous between stints on the stage.
John Griffiths-Colby
roadie a woman possessed of no moral virtues in pursuit of peripatetic common musicians and desirous of their manly propensities.
SF
txtng a message without vowels from the semi-literate to the semi-literate.
D.A. Prince
wag an acronymous designation of jilts and sluts who attach themselves to sporting men of repute.
Barry Baldwin
Wiki an electronic repository of knowledge emerging from pooled misconceptions and half-truths of web-users.
MB
No 2561: De haut en bas
‘The gentleman in Whitehall knows better…’ You are invited to continue in verse or prose for a maximum of 16 lines or 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2561’ by 4 September or email jamesy@greenbee.net (no attachments, please).
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