A tale of two neologisms

Son of Apus (who coincidentally plies his trade at a computer adjacent to JD's Engine Room) recently celebrated his quarter century, so it must be some 15 years ago that I heard him using the word 'fasety' for 'aggressive in a non-violent way'. Friends and colleagues I tried it on had not heard of it and it might well have been no more than a short-lived expression used by schoolkids in our neighbourhood.

Now a pal down here at the seaside has come up with another neologism, courtesy of his 14-year-old son who, upon beating his dad at a computer game, gleefully exclaimed: 'I owned you!'. When questioned, the lad confirmed that 'own' means 'beat' and, just like my son all those years ago, was surprised his dad didn't know the word.

Just another local fashion, or has anyone out there encountered this usage?

'Pokey' as in strong or alcoholic

I realised recently that sometimes I use the word 'pokey' to describe a beer (or other alcoholic drink) that is especially strong-tasting or alcoholic.

The thing is, I don't know when and where I picked up this word. My brother doesn't use it; my girlfriend, who grew up not too far from the town where I went to university, doesn't either. They both seemed surprised when I used 'pokey' in conversation to describe a particular beer, although they understood my intended meaning from the context of the sentence.

I would suspect that this usage of 'pokey' was unique to me, except that I've found on the internet a few instances of other people also using the word to mean strong or alcoholic. One poster on a British discussion board refers to Singha as having been "a very full flavoured pokey beer", for example.

So my question is: do you use 'pokey' to mean (or are you familiar with it being used to mean) strong and/or alcoholic? If so, can you shed some light on its usage?


NB 'Pokey' is also more commonly used to mean small or cramped, which means I could drink a pokey beer in a pokey pub... Oh, and it's worth mentioning that 'pokey' could easily be spelt 'poky'.

Please maintain the cleansiness of the toilets

Here's another photo taken by Clutchslip, this time in France:



(As you may have guessed, I'm away this weekend – normal service will be resumed tomorrow. And for the record, I really like the word 'cleansiness'.)

Police seize nipple clamps in council offices

Clutchslip has very kindly sent us the following photo. He says: "Seen in Horsham – I'd love to know the original story."




I've had a quick look on the West Sussex County Times (Horsham Today) website but to no avail...

And are there any other shots of 'personalised' newspaper billboards out there?

Yao Guai Bear!

I've been playing the game Fallout 3 on my Xbox 360 for a while now, and I've recently started encountering a deadly bear-like creature called the Yao Guai. Here's one:


That's a strange name, I thought - but as the game's back story involves a war between China and America, I assumed 'Yao Guai' either meant something in Chinese or was chosen as a meaningless 'Chinese-sounding' name.

It wasn't until a couple of days later, when I was thinking about the likely pronunciation of 'Yao Guai', that I realised the name was probably a humorous reference to the much friendlier Yogi Bear. Oh, the wit of those game developers!

By the way, my Xbox 360 gamer tag is jdlondon, if anyone wants to add me as a friend.

You say 'teat', I say 'peat'...

Recently I was subbing a news story about a major drugs bust, in which 684kg of cocaine was discovered on a truck headed from Spain to England. The raw copy contained the following paragraph:

The drugs were found in plastic bags packed around cash registers and under piles of teat. A regional customs spokesman says: “It’s the biggest haul of cocaine ever seized in mainland France.”

I asked the writer of the story what 'teat' was. She said it was like soil. I asked her if she meant 'peat'. She said, no, 'teat'. She then looked up 'teat' in the dictionary just to check. It turned out she had meant 'peat'.

If 'teat' had made it into press, we would have both looked like tits.

Headlines: 'Blears jumps ship as Labour sinks'

Today's thelondonpaper has an interesting front page headline:

Blears jumps ship as Labour sinks

This is, of course, referring to Hazel Blears' resignation as communities secretary.

However I've always thought that someone who 'jumps ship' doesn't just leave one ship but joins another (metaphorically speaking).

To an extent, the Cambridge Idioms Dictionary (2nd Edition) agrees with me, saying:

if you jump ship, you leave a job or activity suddenly before it is finished, especially to go and work for someone else

So before reading the full story, I took thelondonpaper's headline to mean that Blears had jumped one ship (the Labour Party) to join another (probably the Conservative Party). I was, obviously, wrong.

And if you consider the literal meaning of 'to jump ship' - "to leave a ship without permission while it is temporarily in a port in the middle of a trip" (Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms) - there's no reason to involve a second 'ship'.

So why do I feel like it was a bad choice of headline?

Headines: 'Pilot recycling scheme under way'

A colleague of mine, Sue, has pointed out this great BBC News headline:



"What do you do with recycled pilots, I wonder?" Sue asks.

Which reminds me of that old saying: "Old pilots never die, they just go to a higher plane..."

Style guide changes

Where I work, we recently agreed a few minor changes to our style guide. We're now using:

• cashflow instead of the Oxford English Dictionary's 'cash flow'

• seatbelt instead of the OED's 'seat belt' or our previous 'seat-belt'

• T-shirt instead of our previous 'teeshirt'

So we're moving away from the OED when it comes to compound nouns. At least we're now in agreement with the dictionary over 'T-shirt'.