Just Words

Driving back through the snow and sleet this afternoon, and listening to radio bloke I heard Mark Kermode say "I downcast my Pod load". It sounded odd and weird and funny when I heard it, with a faintly sexual flavour to it. Or is that just me? Anyway having tea a few hours later (what you lot in the South of England would no doubt refer to as dinner) the Munch began to put the word dude into all his sentences. I asked him if he knew what it meant. He sort of shrugged and then turned pale and shaky when I suggested that he looked it up in the dictionary. The munch does not do dictionaries, they are a "waste of time and boring", apparently. "There's no need to get the dictionary out dad", said the Weasel helpfully, "it means camels testicles." I managed to retain the mouthful I was chewing, but Mrs BW spluttered and almost choked on the water she had been drinking. "Um I don't think so" I said. But she was adamant and claimed that she had been told that that was what it meant by a teacher at school. I was about to make a disparaging comment about her teachers but realised just in time that Mrs BW had once been a teacher and though she is glad to be an ex teacher she is still fiercely defensive about her profession. Eventually after some argument and a lot of unhelpful comments from the Munch about the nature and size of camels testicles we agreed that we should refer to the dictionary. As far as the connection between the word dude and camels testicles were concerned the dictionary had nothing to say on the matter. But it gave a helpful explanation of the derivation and usage of the word dude. She was silent for a moment. "Okay then, what does bugger mean Dad?" I began to wish we hadn't started this. "look it up in the dictionary" I suggested. So she did. "What does sodomite mean, Dad?" It was going to be a long tea.