New Words Quiz - Autumn 2016: Answers
Created | Updated Nov 21, 2016
New Words Quiz - Autumn 2016: Answers
If you happened upon this page by accident, it won’t make a lot of sense. Take the quiz first!
If you arrived here from the quiz, then here are the answers, with some superfluous commentary.
- a) chav
An Ah Beng is, in Singaporean and Malaysian English, ‘a young man of a type characterized by the wearing of fashionable or designer clothing and by behaviour considered brash and loutish’. An Asian Eminem, in other words. Or is it Justin Bieber? I can never remember which is which.
- c) martial art
In Philippine English this time, arnis is ‘any of various forms of self-defence and martial arts traditionally practised in the Philippines, characterized by the use of sticks, bladed weapons, and bare hands in combat’. And you thought they were such friendly people, didn’t you?
- a) boiled egg delicacy
From the same part of the world, a balut is ‘A fertilized duck's egg boiled and eaten in the shell while still warm’. In 1960, an article in New Scientist identified them as an excellent source of protein and calcium.
- d) toilet
Canadians and some Americans will readily identify a biffy as a toilet. In Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel The adventures of Augie March he writes, “I had to go to the biffy to take a leak”. Ok, so it’s not one of his best-known quotes.
- d) stupid
Another word from the Malay peninsula (are you spotting a theme to this season’s dictionary updates?) bodoh means ‘stupid’ or ‘a stupid person’. A reference in the Pall Mall Gazette of 1873 states “A Malay confesses himself ‘bodoh’ or ignorant unless he can write Malay”.
- d) heroin
Over to Mexico, now, for chiva, which is one of a thousand words for heroin. This one was first recorded in court testimony in California in 1964: “Defendant then inquired ‘You looking for some chiva?’” Clearly nobody at that time would have known what it meant.
- d) to steal
In Australian wartime slang, to clifty is to steal. The origin isn’t clear - it could be from the Greek (klepto-), or the Arabic kalifa (of a face, to redden, signifying shame) - both being places where the Anzacs were posted.
- c) cumulative sum in statistics
No complex derivation here, a cusum is a cumulative sum, a method used in the statistics of quality control. It’s also been developed for use in the field of forensic linguistics, a discipline for identifying the author of written text in criminal proceedings. Me, I just read the name on the front cover of the book. No wonder lawyers’ fees are so high.
- c) Indian film soundtrack music
Back to Asia, filmi geet is Bollywood film music, typically a blend of traditional Indian classical and folk music and Western pop. Geet or git is a Hindi word for ‘song’. Not only did India adopt the Western pop music style, they also took our penchant for miming the songs.
- d) weaver bird
A fody is a type of weaver bird, inhabiting the islands of the Indian Ocean. In Gerald Durrell’s 1977 book Golden Bats & Pink Pigeons he describes the “Scarlet and black Fodys perched like guardsmen in the heath or flying like scraps of fire across the road”. Maybe Willem will draw one for us - does he do requests?
- d) zip line
Willem will surely know all about the foefie slide: a South African zip wire, generally strung between two tall trees. Passengers hang on to a short section of pipe. Foefie is Afrikaans for ‘stunt’ or ‘trick’.
- a) grandmother
The Kinks song Lola was about a transvestite, but the dictionary definition is of a grandmother in the Philippines. If you only ever learn one word of Tagalog, then make it this.
- b) guitar noise
Coined, reportedly, by US music critic Robert Christgau, skronk is the discordant, distorted racket that passes for electric guitar music these days, or to put it another way, around which the modern music industry revolves.
- c) Italian sauce
In Italian cookery, sugo is a liquidy sauce of meat or tomatoes that your pasta dish may come with. It literally means ‘juice’.
- c) having one's head forced down a flushing toilet as a prank
It sounds like something David Cameron got up to at Eton College, but in fact the swirlie student prank — ”a group of guys dragging victim into john, sticking head in toilet, and flushing” — is American.
- d) teleport device
It’s the stuff of science fiction, literally. Doctor Who fans may be familiar with this sentence from The Five Doctors by Terrance Dicks, describing a matter transmitter device: “The Castellan nodded to the transmat booth in the corner. ‘We have a power-boosted, open-ended transmat beam’”.
- a) anonymous criminal suspect
I once wrote a guide entry on the word UNSUB, describing it as the best way to drop out of an angry messageboard conversation, but the dictionary definition is of a police term, referring to the ‘unknown subject’ of a criminal investigation. “The unsub was either a transient serial killer or perhaps some recently released mental patient” — that sort of thing.
- b) failure
It seems a bit late to get an obsolete Old English term into the dictionary, but at least it’s there now. Wantruke, appearing only in the phrase withouten wantruke (without fail), was discovered in a document dated 1225.
- b) carer
Footballer Yaya Toure was famously and mercilessly ridiculed in 2014 for complaining on Twitter that his club forgot to make him a birthday cake. The dictionary definition of yaya, however, is of a live-in carer or nanny in the Philippines. Now you know two Tagalog words.
- b) aphrodisiac
We end our linguistic world tour in Cameroon, Africa. Deriving from Bantu, yohimbe is the tree Pausinystalia johimbe or the aphrodisiac compound extracted from its bitter-tasting bark. It’s available in tablet form from all good Nigerian spammers.
I know what you’re thinking: “That’s 20 minutes I’ll never get back”.
