MOBILE MUTATIONS 

When people switched to predictive text, they discovered the phenomenon of the phone’s software coming up with the wrong word; most famously ‘book’ for ‘cool’ (so teenagers started describing their hipper friends as ‘book’). Other textonyms with some service providers include:

lips for kiss , shag for rich, poisoned for Smirnoff 

“do you want to in out some time” for “do you want to go out some time”

Has anyone come across any others ?

CHARACTERS

In my research I’ve discovered some fascinating people, from the parnel, a priest’s mistress, through the applesquire, the male servant of a prostitute, to the screever, a writer of begging letters. If the first two of these are now largely historical, the third certainly isn’t, nor is the slapsauce, a person who enjoys eating fine food or the chafferer, the salesman who enjoys talking while making a sale. Most of us know a blatteroon , a person who will not stop talking, not to mention a wallydrag, a worthless, slovenly person, and even a shot-clog, a drinking companion, only tolerated because he pays for the drinks.

English slang from outside Britain

English slang from outside Britain offers us everything from a waterboy (US police) a boxer who can be bribed or coerced into losing, to a shubie (Australian), someone who buys surfing gear and clothing but doesn’t actually surf.  In Canada, a cougar is an older woman on the prowl for a younger man, while in the US a quirkyalone is someone who doesn’t fall in love easily, but waits for the right person to come along.

Does anyone know others in this vein ?

Office Jargon

The workplace seems to conjure up so many images of which some are easier to grasp than others:

seagull manager – a manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits all over everything, and then leaves
swallow the frog – to tackle the hardest task possible
push the peanut – to progress an arduous and delicate task forward

Have you come across any new ones?

Lincolnshire Sounds

In Lincolnshire, the sounds of horses’ hoofs were onomatopoeically described as butter and eggs, butter and eggs for a horse at a canter. If the animal happened to be a clicker, that is, it caught its front hoofs on its rear ones when it was running, there were extra beats in the rhythm and it went hammer and pinchers, hammer and pinchers. A horse at a gallop went pen and ink, pen and ink.

Have you come across any similar expressions from your own county dialect?