Mind your language | 23 February 2008

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.