Club Dynamics changing

[jadlem]

if your interested in the origins of the word, take a look at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A753527

[Greenman]

Things are still changing,we usually have coffee at the break,quite often black as no one has brought milk,with dark chocolate digestives. This week the juniors took over and we got a choice, coffee, black/white ,sugar ,mocha, chocolate,caramel chocolate,or tea! The downside was that all the chocolate digetives had disapeared.We are expecting cherry bakewells and fairie cakes next week.

[Rik]

Originally Posted by Furface

"Naff" was far from invented for Porridge. It was originally from the gay patois called (I think) "Polari", a mixture of various languages and slangs used by homosexuals to communicate about their lifestyle in the days when it was illegal. Lots of words have passed over now into common usage. The most famous user of "naff" was HRH Princess Anne, who was heard to tell people to "naff off". I should imagine that the Porridge writers used it as an apparently innocuous synonym for **** or even ****.

Hmmm, a quick google around highlights that the actual origins are unclear (I even saw suggestions that it came from a. a mediaeval Scottish word, b. a northern English dialect, c. was a corruption of "naif"...). The OED seems to list the first documented occurrence as in a "Round the Horne" script. Oh well, another myth shattered...

I rather like the "Firefly" approach - most of their swearing was done in chinese. I ought to get a friend to translate some of it...

[Furface]

Originally Posted by Rik

The OED seems to list the first documented occurrence as in a "Round the Horne" script. Oh well, another myth shattered...

The "Round the Horne" connection is Polari again. Two "camp" characters ("Hello, I'm Julian, and this is my friend, Sandy") carried out their dialogue in the lingo, so, to those who knew, it was amazing it was broadcast, while, to the rest of us, it was harmless babble a la Stanley Unwin.
Isn't Archery a wonderfully complex sport!

[Trunkles]

The Balderdash and Piffle programme suggested it was short for Not Available For F***ing

[Rik]

Originally Posted by Trunkles

The Balderdash and Piffle programme suggested it was short for Not Available For F***ing

I suspect that's probably a backronym... Though I guess it could always have Millitary origins (like SNAFU and NORWICH).

[Dave]

Originally Posted by Rik

I suspect that's probably a backronym... Though I guess it could always have Millitary origins (like SNAFU and NORWICH).

I quite like the military acronym FUBAR, which I use quite regularly when shooting....

[Tarkwin]

Originally Posted by Rik

I suspect that's probably a backronym... Though I guess it could always have Millitary origins (like SNAFU and NORWICH).

please enlighten me

T.

[Rik]

Originally Posted by tarkwin

please enlighten me

T.

Wikipedia says:

The backronym is a phenomenon in which the short word exists first and a phrase is constructed which the backronym supposedly came from. There are both official (and generally serious), as well as unofficial (and often humorous) backronyms.

Well known examples are SOS (doesn't stand for anything - just a convenient distress code in morse, but is widely labelled as "Save Our Souls"), DVD (which got munged from "digital video disk" to "digital versatile disk") and, of course, NASA ("Needs Another Seven Astronauts").