Every morning, we bring you the Anglophenia British Word of the Day on our Facebook page. If you’ve been following us, you know there’s a plethora of terms to learn. However, with British youth culture generating tons of new words and phrases to grasp, it can be hard to keep up. No need to worry: […]
In 1983, the venerable British pop magazine Smash Hits (sadly no longer with us) published a feature called “The Things People Said,” in which Tom Hibbert pulled together a lexicon of youth slang, across the rocking ’50s, the groovy ’60s, the hippy ’70s and the heavy metal ’80s. For a young fan of pop culture […]
No matter what happens in the referendum over Scottish independence this week, the wit, expressive depth and wisdom of the Scottish people is something to be cherished. They know a thing or two about stoicism in the face of poor fortune, and there’s a clear knack for cutting through airs and graces too. So here […]
It must be annoying to be one of the criminal fraternity and have to keep making up slang terms for your day’s work. Especially when some of the jobs you’ve been involved in stop being lucrative and eventually become retired. Quite apart from anything else, it takes time for a new slang term to percolate […]
Homesickness can do funny things to people. It can create fierce patriotism where once there was just allegiance; it can create an idealized society in the mind, one in which no one is ever cruel or selfish or rude because that’s the society the homesick person wishes to return to; and it can distort language, so […]
One of the most common gripes of the internet era is that language is becoming debased by neologisms and they’re forcing people to abandon the ability to spell with frightening speed. Then there’s the OMG and LOL of Textspeak and all of those strange new punctuation ideas (*shudders*), all of which bring out the apocalyptic […]
Just because it’s Friday and old words are amazing, here’s a list of delightful slang terms that are around 200 years old. Some of them describe acts people simply don’t perform any more, or suggest manners and etiquette that no longer apply, while some are all too familiar and could have been coined last week. […]
We’ve written a fair amount about British slang over the years, but there’s an equally strong pot of lexicographical gold on the other side of the Irish sea from the U.K. and as it’s St. Patrick’s Day, it seems a good time to pay tribute to the glories of Irish slang. Try and work at […]
My mum always called it the gubbins box. Others prefer blabber, or melly, or doobly, or zapper (occasionally veering into Frank, for obvious reasons), or doofer, or twitcher, or podger, or didge, or ponker, or flipper, or doo-flicky or flicker. Whatever your personal preference, it seems there’s no common agreement among Brits as to what you should […]
It’s not enough that Judi Dench is one of Britain’s leading actresses, or that she’s won gazillions of screen and stage awards, or that she’s been knighted. Her brilliance is now being etched into the English language itself. “Dench” is now a widely used British slang term with a meaning close to that of street […]
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