‘Bare? Extra? What does it all mean?’ asked my husband, sounding like George Smiley in the middle of a particularly puzzling tangle of disinformation.
My husband had just been reading about the Harris Academy in Upper Norwood (south London), which has banned its pupils (or students as they all seem to have become) from using a list of words including coz, ain’t, like, innit, yeah (at the end of a sentence) and basically (at the beginning). Those, he could agree, were annoying in the wrong context, but he couldn’t see why bare and extra should be singled out.
As Veronica was able to explain to her father, bare is a popular term for ‘very’ or ‘a lot of’, and extra is used to mean ‘excessive, uncalled-for’, thus: ‘SSE gave Cameron bare grief but the behaviour of British Gas was extra.’
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