Playing With Dictionaries

A recent post on Elizabeth Slaughter’s blog Saved By Words reminded me how in the days before teenagers spent most of their time watching Love Island and YouTube videos we played with dictionaries. We used to thumb through looking for rude and amusing words.

It got off to a good start at Junior School where I swear we had a dictionary containing “trump: a small explosion between the legs”. I’m afraid I have been unable to find any confirmatory evidence of it.

Others we later became fans of include:

         cunette: a trench at the bottom of a ditch
         fustigate: to beat with a stick
         fustilug: a fat and untidy person
         steatopygia: excessive fatness of the buttocks

Oh how witty to call someone a fustilug with steatopygia or to threaten to fustigate them. Never would it have occurred to Oscar Wilde himself to refer to someone as a stupid cunette.

Or were we just being sanguinarily crepuscular?

Where were you?

Sunday, 20th July 1969

To add to all the other bloggers today, I had just hitch-hiked back from Hornsea.

I had been at work almost a year but most of my friends were still in education, either at university or waiting for ‘A’ level results hoping to go. I envied them. One was spending summer at his family’s caravan in Hornsea (see Hornsea Pottery), so on Saturday seven of us set off on scooters to look for him.

We found him where we knew we would, in the Marine Hotel. Later we sat around talking with some lads from Liverpool until two in the morning. On Sunday we got up early and built a driftwood fire on the beach. Most of the others then went off to Bridlington but I had to go to work on Monday, so hitch-hiked back on my own. If the ride there on the back of a scooter had been uncomfortable, part of the ride back at high speed on the pillion of a motorbike was terrifying (no compulsory crash helmets in those days). I also remember walking between lifts through the snobby and exclusive village of Walkington shortly before a police car drew up to investigate reports of a vagrant in the village.

I then saw the BBC coverage of the landing which consisted of little more than James Burke and the ever-excitable Patrick Moore talking over the audio feed from mission control. I did not stay up into the small hours to see the moon walk because I had to be up for the early train to Leeds. In the morning there was just time to see a few images of Armstrong and Aldrin “jumping around on the moon” as my mother put it, before I had to leave. On Monday I was not back to my digs from work in time for blast off so only saw it later on the news. None of the images were very clear anyway, except in the imagination. 

As for other “Where were you?” questions my answers are: (i) watching Take Your Pick on Friday, 22nd November 1963, when a news flash caused me to rush to the kitchen to tell Mum; (ii) walking from Manchester Victoria to U.M.I.S.T. on the morning of Tuesday, 9th December 1980, when I saw a newsstand headline; and (iii) checking the Teletext news headlines on the morning of Sunday, 31st August 1997, when I rushed downstairs to tell my wife and son. Not that I cared much about that last one. Should I remember any others?