A new series of Balderdash and Piffle has recently begun. Babyfather and I greeted the original with enthusiasm – it’s a lovely idea which makes an edifying change from the mindless vacuousness which absolutely no one is forcing us to watch every day. Genuinely interesting, it picks up on social, cultural, and economic history as viewers write in trying to give pre-datings for citations of words in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The new series has been less well received in our household. For a start, the presenter, Victoria Coren, had begun edging her way onto the shortlist for the list of “personalities” of whom my tolerance is very low. Also on this list (reasons in parentheses) are June Sarpong (that voice), Keira Knightly (the whole smug package), and Aishleyne from last year’s Big Brother (she looks like her breath smells of onions – the list of her other offences would not fit in the space of one blog). (And excuse the excessive use of brackets, but yes, I am aware that all of my pet-hates are women, but I don’t think, as Babyfather seems to, that this necessarily means anything.)
Victoria (Vicky as she likes to call herself) presented such a simpering, self-satisfied persona to the cameras that it began to seriously erode the pleasure the programme gave me. The mock-flirtatious smiles, coupled with an accent which I imagine Victoria herself (I will not use a diminutive for her) believes to be cut-glass, became too much for me and I began hoping that she would be cut down to size by the guardians of the OED to whom she submitted her weekly findings. Stern and academic, they presented a nice foil to her capricious flippancy, and a couple of cutting words from them would surely have stemmed the stream of her twittering.
In addition to this, our Friday night schedule was already full, and with Ugly Betty, Peep Show (now finished – and thank goodness, with the “watching through the gaps between my fingers” horror that some of the episodes accomplished), Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, Eastenders, and more recently the double whammy of Big Brother plus eviction show, our sky plus was already creaking through over use. So something had to go and it was B&P.
That notwithstanding, it is to the idea behind the programme that I owe this blog entry. For I have coined a new word of which I am proud, and I want it recorded here for posterity.
Last week Babyfather and I were having one of the wondering conversations which we have of an evening, and the word forelock was mentioned by one of us. We discussed its origin and I wondered if fetlock was so named because it’s a piece of hair above a foot. (It is, I’ve just checked.) So forelock is hair on a forehead, fetlock is hair on a foot. So far so simple. But I began pondering other possible variants, and came up with the coinage knoblocks. It may not look like much at first, but say it aloud a couple of times. Allow the second syllable to roll off your tongue and enjoy its comedy potential.
I’ve written a possible dictionary entry:
Knoblocks pronounciation ‘näb-”läk NOUN. The locks of hair which grow on the pubic bone above the genitalia. Originally coined for use with reference to a man’s anatomy, it became used for both male and female pudenda when the person who coined the word consigned mingelocks to the dustbin of etymological history.
I’ve timestamped this entry. We first discussed it last Thursday 31 May. And maybe when it’s in the OED or the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, or wherever it will first be honoured, this little blog entry will help ensure that Victoria Coren doesn’t get her knoblock nets in a twist.