Word of the day: fourgy

We haven't had a word of the day for a while, so I thought I would remedy that with 'fourgy' – a portmanteau of 'four' and, um, 'orgy'. I'm sure you can work out what it means.

I came across this word in Douglas Coupland's novel JPod (published 2006, and pictured right), but I doubt whether it has its origins here. IMDb lists the 2005 film Wicked Fourgy of Whorror, for example. I'm not sure I even want to know.

Googling 'fourgy' also throws up the word 'twenty-fourgy', which isn't as exciting as you might imagine – it's actually an orgy of watching TV series 24. I can relate to that.


On another note, this will probably be my last post before Christmas so season's greetings and all that. And now that I have been entrusted with Apus's bulging 'Black Museum' file I need never fear running out of blog material again...

Life outside the engine room

After more than 20 years in the engine room my escape plans are coming to fruition so within a few weeks JD will be labouring on with a new fellow stoker – though I hope to continue submitting noteworthy points from my seaside hideaway.

One of the more precious artefacts I'll be leaving in JD's care is a thick file entitled the black museum, packed with some of the more noteworthy howlers produced by our charges over the past couple of decades. No doubt JD will trawl through them for your delectation, but while the file's on my desk, here are a few examples, picked at random:

• "it will in each case be a question of fact as in each case no two cases will be the same"

• "a street lighting upright" (lamp post?)

• "fire or heat turns this chemical into a lethal gas which causes severe irritation to skin and eyes" (leaving an uncomfortable corpse?)

• "dangerously unsafe vehicles"

• "underground motorway toll tunnels"

• "sloping rear ramps"

• "new and previously unseen problems"

• "facilitates easy mounting"

• "rear entry doors at the back of the vehicle"

• "an unfair bias"

• "a database of information"

• "over the years he's built up his business rapidly"

• "dimensionally precluded" (won't fit?)

• "the judge commented that that was not the only problem that that company had had"

• "a secret police undercover operation"

Headline: Mum left tot in car to booze

Ambiguous headline of the day goes to today's Daily Mirror with:

Mum left tot in car to booze

When I read this I initially thought the tot was left to booze (in the car), when in fact the mum went boozing while the tot was just left.

Nice headline words too: 'tot' and 'booze'. When was the last time you saw the word 'tot' outside a tabloid?

The Mirror's web version of the story

Mr MacMaster and the sun lounger

Surprised by a recent story in free London paper Metro. Here's the relevant bit:

A businessman who was hit on the neck by a sun lounger blown off a pub roof was awarded £1million damages yesterday.

Mr MacMaster was standing outside the Crown in Romford, Essex, when the accident happened on a windy day in October 2002. The neck injury was 'much more severe than one would expect' and left him in chronic pain, the High Court was told.

"Much more severe than one would expect"? He was hit on the neck by a sun lounger blown off a roof; there's not much more severe than 'instant death'.

Incidentally, kudos to Metro for its punning headline: "Pub's ill wind costs it £1m". However the paper's online version of the story includes neither the pun nor the above quote...

Drinking: hazardous to health

Production desk Christmas: 2

Well, having just finished a delightful day of confusion and extra work caused by our charges failing to do their jobs thoroughly (and this, mark you, on an annual product we publish over the Christmas holiday) I can only say that shooting would be too good for them.

Christmas? Bah humbug, says I.

A production desk Christmas

The pre-Christmas period is one of the busiest and most stressful for us on our magazine. Not only do we have a bumper Christmas issue to prepare but we work on the two following issues at the same time (no one wants to come in between Christmas and New Year, after all).

The production desk is a mess of layouts, proofs, plans and charts, and the smallest mistake can lead to much confusion. Earlier today there was a great example of the effect this can have on the best of us when I noticed that our production editor, who is normally a calm, reasonable person, was looking a little harassed.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" I asked him.

"Yes. Line up some journalists against a wall and shoot them for me," he replied, before stalking off.

Glad to see we're all getting into the Christmas spirit...

Independent: Pratchett blooper

Bit of a blooper today in an Independent story on novelist Terry Pratchett. Here's the passage in question – the italics are The Independent's own.

[Pratchett] has written a number of specifically children's books, including Truckers in 1989, which became the first of its kind to appear in British adult fiction bestseller lists.

Two others, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents won the prestigious Carnegie medal for children's fiction in 2001.

I'm not a particular Pratchett fan (unlike Apus) so hadn't heard of the books in question – but winning the Carnegie with two books in one year? That, the strange, unitalicised 'his', and the missing comma after 'Rodents' all rang my subbing alarm bells.

You guessed it: Pratchett actually won the Carnegie with one novel, called The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. Someone – probably a sub – compounded the italicising error by adding 'Two others' to the start of the sentence. And not checking on Amazon.

(At the time of writing this post, the same mistake can be seen (minus italics) on the Independent's online version of the Pratchett story.)

To float a balloon for something

Has anyone come across the expression 'to float a balloon for' something? It appeared in some copy recently and was a new one on me.

Judging by the context, it seems to mean something similar to 'to fly a kite for' something, ie express support (not to be confused with 'go fly a kite', a euphemism for 'go away'). But 'fly a kite for' isn't an expression I would personally use either, and I don't think it is that common.

Googling just gets lots of pages about literal balloons and kites, rather than metaphorical ones. And there's nothing relevant in my Concise OED or limited reference library – time to invest in some new books perhaps?

It's not a flange, it's a congress!

Spotted (not by me, I confess) in an Amazon book review:

In this marvelous book Smuts draws from years of painstaking field research in which she followed around a flange of chacma baboons in the Mateti Game Park in Zimbabwe. Her findings inspired the plot of When Harry Met Sally.

Fair enough, and if the film link's true a nice bit of trivia. But here's another bit of trivia: the collective noun for baboons is a congress. A flange of baboons was invented by scriptwriters on the seminal British TV comedy show Not The Nine O'Clock News for a classic sketch, 'Gerald the Gorilla' (yes, really). A fine case of fiction trying to become fact?

Gerald would have approved.

PS
Isn't the net wondrous – I googled Not The Nine o'Clock News and found a youtube video on the Gerald sketch. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MpbMm0433I