Friday, September 02, 2005

Join the snoutcasts

When some lists of new words appear, it's interesting to see how many of them you've come across before and what kind of context they're used in, but sometimes lists appear and you have to assume that a group of workshy advertising executives have just sat themselves round a table at lunch, opened a few bottles of over-priced Canary Wharf Rioja and made up as many silly words as they could think of, in an attempt to market some non-descript company to the media. And (after a lengthy preamble...) that's what this article seems to be like.

Today's BBC website carries a feature on "Office Talk". Apparently office workers who have a crafty cigarette out the front of the building are "snoutcasts", while those who sip on a furtive coffee when they should be chained to their desks are "sneakaccinos". Hmm....

Whether you believe the provenance (or even existence!) of these words or not, there's always a bit of fun to be had dissecting them and looking at their etymologies. What's "snoutcast" derived from? Seems to be a blend of "outcast" and "snout" (East End/Cockney/Prison slang for tobacco). "Goodjobist" seems to be a rather clumsy morphological construction, chucking on an "-ist" suffix to the phrase "good job". Anyway, I'll leave the rest for you to work out...

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA3 - Spoken Language (power, identity, occupation etc.)

Black British English vs MLE

The latest episode of Lexis is out and it features an interview with Ife Thompson about lots of issues connected to Black British English, i...