h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Using my French-English dictionary (see, I knew it would come in useful again), I have made the following discovery:

"Char" - charriot
"a" - with
"banc" - Bench.

Since buses have many benches we do the French a disfavour () by not calling it a charaubancs.

Of course, the nearest current French word is "Charabia" which means gobbledygook.

O God - don't talk to me about that. You wouldn't BELIEVE the amount of English words the Germans use which no monolingual English person would understand. I think I'll write an entry on that, too - I've always maintained there were enough of them to fill a book. The embarrassing part is, the Germans don't realise they're not English English words, but only German English words, and they use them when speaking English, thus speaking charabia.

It was I, I admit it! Spelt it charabang - permissable in my idiolect and"(joc)" in Cambridge. (We've already had the derivation, Dunx. Perhaps you were out of the country, but it's going to make indexing difficult for TC)
Charabia could well be the next nonce. Do we put an s on for the plural, and thus gain more Scrabble points?
This brought Charivari into my head. Want a stab at that one?
PS I would have thought a little girl's blouse would be even more wimpish than a biggun

Big, in the phrase "big girls blouse" does not refer to the size of the blouse but rather the magnitude of the blousiness of person being called a blouse. Like "you big eejit".

Love the coffee link! Would be worrying, were it not for the fact that cappuccino is the healthy version of coffee.

I'm a bit lost with all this chara... stuff. Is there an American equivalent?

I think Charivari plays for Spurs, which would explain the big girls blouses reference. Goodness knows who Cappuccino plays for!

Chelsea probably.

I think he's in the Chelsea squad with Charabia.
I presume to assume that a great big girl's blouse is blousier than a mere girls blouse.Is 'blousy' an Americanism?

Interesting one, I always spell it with a 'w' and take it to mean 'overblown', or 'overdone'. But a blowsy barmaid has something to do with her blouse, as well as her hair/make-up etc., so maybe blousey is better.

Aha - a closet Liverpool fan?

Anyway - the nearest US equivalent to the supposedly British English word Charabanc would be greyhound .. as in an old type of bus.

However, there seems to have been a great deal of interference in this thread by French words (I blame the common market myself) because Charavia is, of course, the French word for din or racket.
I suggest an equivalend to the "Academie Francais" to stop this happening again. This could be called the British Anglophone Language Learning School and if we go to the innevitable acronym we can see that I have managed to get a dog and balls into this thread again

TC, where are you? Didn't we agree that referring to the original subject of this thread was a red card offence? How many matches does he get sent off for? (ie how many words is he not allowed to comment on?)

Ah yes, but since we are not on the same thread anymore logically, then going back to the original subject is going even further off thread!

Well he might have got away with it (we were talking football) had he not mentioned the initial thread subject.

Are you shure at that, Trillian's child? Each time I had the impression germans use german invented english words, I was wrong. These two languages have many things in common, as they have the same roots. I would like to see some examples please .

I plead the fifth...
*clams up*

Clam up,I can understand - simple metaphor. But why should the inability to run a whelk stall stand for particular incompetence?
Why do you winkle information out of somebody? Cling on like a limpet is fairly obvious,but why is material said to cockle up if the machine stitching isn't perfect?

Could you elaborate on the whelk stall thing there W

Shrimp brain was a popular cuss, at least in my neighborhood. Nowadays it's usually used to describe other (small) parts of the (male) anatomy.

Are you sure at that, Trillian's child? Each time I had the impression germans use german invented english words, I was wrong. These two languages have many things in common, as they have the same roots. I would like to see some examples please .

Winkle - it is very difficult to get a winkle out of its shell to eat it, it is a fiddly job. Hence winkling information out of someone.

Cockle shells have a shape which is exactly the same as if you tighten up a thread too much in cloth, causing a wave-like creasing in the cloth. This explains cockling up, although I never heard the phrase before.

I still don't know what you mean by an inability to manage a whelk stall. What phrase is this?