Friday-night bird: the one that always gets away, intent on evading the flocks of weekend twitchers.#3395•
sandbagger: a runner who deliberately holds back in order to seem slower or more tired at the beginning of a run, only to pass everyone later on.#3396•
Chapter 2
iron maiden: one who dispels the myth that women shouldn't lift.#3296•
black art: the collection of mostly improvised techniques developed for a particular application. When they are so arcane they can only have been developed by a wizard, they are known as deep magic, and when they require an intimate knowledge of a particular system, they are known as heavy wizardry.#3362•
foo: a sample name for absolutely anything, especially temporary scratch files that can be deleted. These are markers of individual hackers and programmers, or of particular countries, ranging from fred and barney in Britain, to blarg and wibble in New Zealand.#3351•
moby: large, complex or impressive. Also used as a title of address that conveys admiration or respect to a competent hacker. The allusion is to the whale in Moby Dick.#3335•
angry fruit salad: a flashy visual-interface design that uses too many colours; a reference to the unnaturally lurid colours found in tinned fruit salad.#3285•
Chapter 3
on the cotton: the shortest distance between two points, as straight as a thread of cotton between the starting and finishing points on a map. If the route you took is close to the straight line, it's described as being 'on the cotton'.#3394•
Code Bravo: Security alert.
7500: hijack situation.
7600: a radio failure.
7700: general emergency.#3392•
Chapter 4
Waiting for you here, Godot – one of the oldest theatrical jokes, chalked upon many a backstage door. It contains an essential truth about actors: they wait. Not just in the wings, but for any work at all.#3347•
fluffer: a person employed to prepare or warm up an audience for another act. The term was borrowed from the porn industry where a fluffer ensures the actor is 'ready' to perform.
spouter: an amateur actor.
stick: a wooden actor.
skin act: an animal impersonator.
rhubarber: an extra, who repeats the word 'rhubarb' to imitate background chatter.
scenery-chewer: an actor who performs in an exaggerated, hammy manner.
twirlies: the chorus dancers.
oyster part: an actor who appears or speaks only once, in the manner of an oyster that opens up just one time.
Come back Tuesday: said by a director to an unwanted actor as a way of fobbing them off.
star-queller: a supporting actor who performs so badly that he or she undoes all the good work put in by the leads.#3383•
step on a line: when an actor inadvertently speaks over another. To step on a laugh is to throw away a laugh line through bad timing.#3376•
Mr Sands: theatrical code to warn theatre employees of a fire without frightening the audience. 'Mr Sands is in the foyer' means that fire has broken out there.#3369•
the ghost walks: 'It's payday'. The expression is said to be a reference to a nineteenth-century theatre company who hadn't been paid for over a month, prompting the player of Hamlet to refuse to come on stage until all salaries were met.#3342•
As with their theatrical counterparts, the TV and film actor can experience large chunks of unemployment. As the old joke goes, actors don't look out of the window in the morning, because they'd have nothing to do in the afternoon. For them, 'fake it until you make it' may be a truism, but it's also true.
Their language is consequently sprinkled with the glitter of Hollywood, full of sumptuous Yiddish chutzpah and phraseology such as meshugaas for craziness (in Hollywood, everything is meshugaas) or bupkis (nothing, nada, and hence heard a lot).
Conversation between actors will probably include the lines I'm on a pencil (translation: 'I might have a job'), I'm on a heavy pencil ('I'm down to the last two') and Are you busy? (subtext: 'Let me gauge my success based on what you're doing').#3325•
Lord Privy Seal: the unnecessary over-illustration of an idea to the audience. Amateur film-makers tend to illustrate every significant word in the dialogue by cutting to a picture of it. The Lord Privy Seal is an antiquated title in Britain's heraldic tradition: the joke implies that a novice or poor film director will illustrate it by cutting to a picture of a lord, followed by a privy, followed by a seal.#3293•
Chapter 5
The lexicon of scoring in darts is probably the best-known aspect of the sport. Clever, colourful, and frequently irreverent, much of it is echoed in the bingo hall (and the bedroom – where else but darts would a rubber, the final game of a match, be called the prophylactic?). Much of the lingo comes from London's East End and its home-grown rhyming slang.
Thus a Big Ben is a 10, beehives a double 5, chopsticks a 6, dinky doo a 22, old hens a double 10, and two whores a double 4.
Bedrooms crop up again in bed and breakfast: 26 from three darts, based on the standard price of B&B in England in the early twentieth century: namely two shillings and sixpence.
The bull, meanwhile, is variously known as the bugbutton, bunghole (referring to the bunghole of a beer barrel, said to have been used in early darts matches), cherry, dosser, middle, and tit.#3336•
Tread carefully with these ones …
Adolf Hitler: two shots in the bunker.
Arthur Scargill: good strike, bad result.
O.J. Simpson: got away with it.
Glenn Miller: made it over the water.
Cuban: where the ball stops just short of dropping into the 'cup', and so 'needs one more revolution'.
Kate Moss: a shot that's a bit thin.
Jean-Marie Le Pen: a ball that goes too far to the right#3300•
parking the bus: now one of the biggest footballing tropes, used when all eleven players get behind the ball to defend the goal.
cheese sandwich: a creative player who isn't anchored to any particular position; a riff on the idea of a 'free role' (roll).#3356•
the false nine: the tactic of deploying a centre-forward in a very deep position.#3377•
Roy of the Rovers stuff: anything that corresponds to a footballing fairytale, e.g. a minnow defeats a top team in a club competition, or a strike comes back from injury to score against the team who sold him or her because he or she wasn't good enough.#3373•
Chapter 6
bloodsucker: a member of the medical team that takes blood samples.
bonehead: an orthopaedist, otherwise known as an orthopod.
cock doc: a urologist or sexual disease doctor, also nicknamed pecker checker.
fanny mechanic: a gynaecologist.
Freud squad: the psychiatrists.
gasser: an anaesthetist.
Lancelot: one who drains abscesses (known in the US as a Pokemon).
NFB: Normal For Banbury.
rear admiral: a proctologist.
shadow gazer: a radiologist.
sieve: a doctor who admits almost every patient they see.
bones and groans: the general ward.
pit: the emergency room.
scrape and staple: the burns unit.
stream team: the urology department.
ECU: Eternal Care Unit, i.e. heaven.
Ward X: the morgue.#3316•
Death by any other name
Unsurprisingly, death goes by many names when undertakers are alone. This is where gallows humour abounds.
bag it: to die.
boxed: placed in a coffin; dead. To be boxed on the table is to die during surgery in a hospital.
deep six: a burial at sea; a probable reference to the fact that sea interments must take place in depths of six fathoms of water or more.
glue factory: death. The allusion is to old horses whose hooves were often rendered into glue after death.
cremains: a much-derided blend of 'cremated remains'.
O-sign: when a patient shows the 'O-sign' they are well and truly dead, probably with their mouth hanging open to form an 'O'. The Q-sign has the same idea, but this time the tongue is also hanging out.
thirty: dead. Said to come from the journalistic practice of appending the number 30 on articles to signify the end of the piece.#3323•
Chapter 8
No matter what the calibre of the agent, however, euphemism will always find a home (unlike their audience), and that home is usually the glossy particulars that beckon online or that are handed out to house-hunters with a flourish.#3345•
The journalist and language blogger Steven Poole offers a nifty description of estate-agent lingo. He refers to their 'strangulated syntax, peculiar vocabulary, and breathtaking insouciance', one that dances 'on a rhetorical knife-edge between salesmanship and fraudulence'. It's an irony perhaps that the US term for the 'housemonger' is 'realtor', a word whose very first meaning was 'having a basis in reality; true and honest'.#3367•
Lifting up fig leaves
Full of character: hasn't been renovated since the 1950s, or alternatively, falling down.
Imposing: stark and scary-looking.
Bijou: no bigger than a postage stamp. Compact means a postage stamp cut in two.
Convenient for: within loud earshot of a motorway/airport/railway station.
In need of modernization: has narrowly escaped demolition.
Viewing essential: we can't get a nice photo of the outside.
Original features: beams full of woodworm; fireplaces may be crumbling.
Priced to sell: we really want to take this off our books.
Charming: hard to find any other adjectives to suit.
Range of storage: no matching cupboards and shelves.
Conservation area: forget all hopes of home improvement, including a washing line.
Popular area: particularly with the police.
Up and coming area: don't venture out at night just yet.
Partial sea view: if you stand on top of a wardrobe.
Garden flat: damp and definitely dark.
Light and airy: has large, draughty windows.
Ideal investment: you wouldn't dream of living there yourself, but desperate tenants will rent it.
Potential: expect at least a year of building work.
Purpose-built residential development: large housing estate.
Easy-to-maintain: so tiny you can get a Hoover round it in five minutes.
No onward chain: the previous elderly tenant has died and the house probably needs a lot of renovation.
In our opinion: you can't sue us if it's not true.#3321•
There is a particular kind of phraseology in estate-agent-speak, one with flourishes and embellishments that are all part of linguistic inflation. Benefits from, for example, is a formula usually reserved for the entirely predictable, such as a bath in a bathroom, or an oven in the kitchen. Nouns are frequently turned into adjectives for added grandeur – houses are fourbedroomed, beautifully-gardened or impressively-fronted.
Archaically formal language helps too: whereby is frequently chosen above 'where', for example, as in 'walk into the dining room, whereby you'll be met with a delightful view'.
Similarly, comprises is used interchangeably with 'consists of', simply because it sounds fancier and enhances the linguistic decor.#3312•
Chapter 10
How to make No sound like Yes
According to one editor, the essence of publishing is the ability to say many nos as nicely as possible. Accordingly, the language of the turndown letter has turned into a gentle art form with its own euphemistic code:
strong = wrong-headed.
literary sensibilities = pointlessly polysyllabic.
regretfully = with enormous relief.
fascinating = rather on the long side.
expert = know-it-all.
needs a more powerful platform = no one has ever heard of you.#3353•