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Slightly sordid seventies slang speech, said stoatie sibilantly

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11:40 / 08.07.02

Mr Y - absolutely!

I love kiddie swear words. You cannot beat yelling out "poobumwee!" when pissed off. Usually everyone laughs so hard it cheers you up immediately.

Dunno if this is Australian specific - pash. As in snog. Pash was the word in pre-teen years, then it was uncool as a teenager, then it seemed to arrive unscathed at about the age of 21, better than ever. There is something undeniably cool about asking your 27 year old friend if they pashed someone at a party. Although I was quite happy to shift my preference to snog when I moved over here. Might I congratulate your continent on one very fine word.

Just thought of another - dead set!

13:20 / 08.07.02

Not purposefully turning this conversation arsey-intellectually, honest. But I think maybe "pash" - in England, anyhow - was a pre-war word for a crush on someone. Generally if you're at public school.

13:33 / 08.07.02

Does that mean you can have a pash on someone? Mmmmmmm ...

13:49 / 08.07.02

Yeah. people say it in stupid girlie books that I can't remember the name of, all the time.

14:07 / 08.07.02

I remember seeing a shareware game a few years back called Joey Deacon's Speedway Challenge, that was basically Super Sprint with a picture of Joey in the border.

Sax> Our version was "Oi, you, over there! What's it like to have no hair? Does it burn when it gets sunny? What's it like to look so funny?"

There was another one that ended with 'What's it like to be so bald?' but I can't remember the third line.

16:26 / 08.07.02

This thread is disturbingly reminscent of the endless stream of nostalgic clip-shows populated by a whole new sub-category of fame, the 'Renta-VoxPop' Celeb. The premise being, of course, that the ability to remember something, however vaguely, is not just a sign of a moderately functional brain but also counts as a talent. Witness the success of Peter Kay...
Still, did anyone here have an Amstrad computer?

17:45 / 08.07.02

Sax: I would check out that link but I'm worried that the heartstring-jerking 'shoe over the side of the boat' scene will reduce me to non-manly tears...

And our version was:

'Oi, skinhead over there,
What's it like to have no hair?
Is it hot or is it cold?
What's it like to... be bald?'

06:41 / 09.07.02

See, that only works with a Scottish accent, rhyming "cold" and "bald".

12:13 / 02.06.06

Having it off

I came across the phrase today in a book written in the late 60s, and was jolted into the real world for a moment. You just don't hear that phrase any more, do you? Does anyone still use it?

13:28 / 02.06.06

And does the word "kiffed" mean anything to anyone? We used to say it all the time in school - it meant broken or crap or generally wrong, but I think it must be some degenerate local hillbilly word as I've never heard it anywhere else..

The only etymology that springs to mind is "kif-kif" which is arabic slang meaning something along the lines of "cool", "okay", or "it's all the same". Kiffen is also a German verb meaning to get stoned???

unheimlich manoeuvre

13:50 / 02.06.06

Kif (in the Rif) is a type of Hashish, innit.

13:56 / 02.06.06

"Wotcha" as a greeting

"Manners!" meaning something is ace, or skill - that might have been horribly localised though

Mon Oncle Ignatius

14:33 / 02.06.06

"Crypto-fascist!" as an insult.

17:46 / 02.06.06

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

18:42 / 02.06.06

Threads like these just reinforce the idea that, outdated or not, overseas slang is so much more interesting than American slang.

I use "pash" and "having it off." I guess my love of England is rooted somewhere in the past.

18:50 / 02.06.06

"Crypto-fascist!" as an insult.

Is a crypto-fascist a fascist no one understands, or a fascist from the planet Krypton (obviously misspeled), as in "General Zod is a Crypto-fascist"?

All Acting Regiment

18:57 / 02.06.06

I'm a bit embarassed ot say this, but we've actually got a thread on it...

18:57 / 02.06.06

A girl I fancied once described my hair as "crucial". Ahh, the late Eighties.

Great insults long forgotten include:

Pillock
Plank
Dinlow
Pranny
Spazmod

I'd forgotten "wazzock". That's a proper "skillient" one, that is.

All Acting Regiment

18:58 / 02.06.06

I'm going to start incorporating these into my speech.

Mon Oncle Ignatius

19:16 / 02.06.06

Pillock and Pranny could also get combined into the marvellously weird "Prannock" if I remember correctly.

Mon Oncle Ignatius

19:27 / 02.06.06

Is a crypto-fascist a fascist no one understands, or a fascist from the planet Krypton (obviously misspeled), as in "General Zod is a Crypto-fascist"?

More like one who is pretending not to be a fascist in the first place.

Interestingly, if you type http://www.crypto-fascist.org into a web browser, for example, someone seems to have registered, but not used, the term.

OK, enough thread rotting - here's a thread in search of the other (broken?) thread on the subject.

21:30 / 02.06.06

So NONE of you *wankers* gives a toss about "having it off"? Come on, I want to know. When did you last hear anyone use the phrase "having it off" in anger?

Come to that, when did "wanker" first appear? It feels like one of those eternal, never-to-die jobs but I'm sure Shakey never used it.

21:33 / 02.06.06

"Prannock"

Yep.

I fucking love this thread.

Legs, I use pranny and pillock all the time, but wazzock and prannock need to be incorporated.

21:43 / 02.06.06

You need this book if you want recall all those insults you used and many more you wish you hadn't and had forgotten about. Channel 4 have a TV show of it due in July, but they're shying away from the bullying aspect.

05:25 / 03.06.06

I thought that "Mint!" was waaaay past it's sell-by date until I heard it on BB last week. Bless Lisa.

Mon Oncle Ignatius

08:22 / 03.06.06

Come to that, when did "wanker" first appear?

According to Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Historical Slang (a great read, but only goes up to 1914 as the title hints), it's a late c.19 to early c.20 "low" coinage, originally more often spelled whanker.

The same source also lists wanker as meaning a bloater fish, referred to in a public school magazine of 1897.

All Acting Regiment

14:34 / 03.06.06

A lot of them relate to fish and animals, no? Bitch, obviously, but then also I beleive that Thwaite refers to a pregnant trout...

22:16 / 03.06.06

A lot of them relate to fish and animals, no?

Maybe they were all coined by fishermen, farmers, and butchers? Interesting possibility for a anthropoligcal paper.

09:44 / 04.06.06

Me and my droogs were trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the nochy, when we saw this starry ptitsa govoreeting such gloopy old slovos as "wazzock" and "prannock" and suchlike, and we tolchocked that bezoomny baboochka on the gulliver before giving her a bit of the old in-out in-out.

11:40 / 04.06.06

Legba : A lot of them relate to fish and animals, no?

One of the first scholars to take a close look at this particular feature of zoological imagery was the British ethnographer and theorist Edmund Leach. His "Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse," which first appeared in the early 1960s, quickly became a classic within the subfield that interests us here. Leach's main concern in this piece was to understand why only some animals end up associated with linguistic taboos, and why people find it so offensive to be linked to beasts that have this status within their communities. He makes his concern clear by posing the following question about contemporary British culture: "Why should expressions like `you son of a bitch' and `you swine' carry the connotations that they do, when `you son of a kangaroo' or `you polar bear' have no meaning whatever?"

Edmund Leach was my favourite thing in anthropology -that's a link to an academic paper on animal insults that references his work. From a wee BBC site on swearing (puts it better than I could explain it) :

He identified the animals used [as insults] as usually being:

Animals which, in that culture, fall in-between the categories of edibility and non-edibility (e.g. animals that taste nice, but could also be pets)

Animals which, in that culture, are considered 'close' to humans in some way (i.e. are in between humans and animals).

I am not sure how the fish thing fits into that.

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