Snog This Bloke (Form An Orderly Queue)

We interrupt the monstrously self-indulgent Dive retrospective to respond to a comment from Maria that almost made me miss my train this morning.

After yesterday's bout of splattery logorrhoea, Maria wrote:

"I love your blog because I always come away with new little phrases to shock my family.

And, since you are going on about words, I have run across a few in my Harry Potter readings to my daughter that I find interesting and maybe you could enlighten me?

The term "bloke" for a man? Where does that come from?

A queue? That is a line?

Snogging? Is that like what we Amuricans call "sucking face"? Because I think snogging sounds just a little more risque and sloppy.

Harry and his bloke friends (when they aren't snogging or in a queue) often use the word "reckon" when they speak to each other. As in "I reckon we should tell them we are running late..."

Now, reckon, as Americans use it is kind of a redneck slang....

So, care to enlighten this wee widget of a woman? Or we could just go right to the snogging...

But..even the word "snogging" just comes out of me with a raised eyebrow. Makes me feel so royally and haughtily naughty.

As if I were not feeling a sense of normalcy and calm....

(Sorry, it just slipped...I HAD to say it.)"

Hee hee. I can forgive "normalcy" when used with such delicious sarcasm, Maria.

Hokay …
So at ten to five this morning when I checked my comments, this one sent me hurtling downstairs (still moist from the shower, ladies … ick!) to rifle my OED for the derivation of the word "bloke".

The OED, by the way (for the benefit of my dear readers in the colonies) is the Oxford English Dictionary; the definitive repository of English (as opposed to American English, for which you have the esteemed Mister Noah Webster).

Digression time:
I have a great deal of respect for old Noah. He made an admirable attempt to render the horrifically complex and arcane juggernaut that is the English language more easily comprehensible to children and to the huddled masses of non-English speaking immigrants yearning to be free.

Inevitably he was forced to simplify spellings and - here's the bit that always makes me shudder - to standardise (or standardize as he would have it) suffixes.
It is this last which has just obliged Blogger to put a red line under the correct spelling and leave Webster's abomination unscathed and my teeth gnashing.
This simplification and standardisation of suffixes - as ranted about in yesterday's polemic - has deprived Americans of a great part of the essential beauty and poetry of the English language as well as the ability to look at a word and to surmise from its Greek, Latin, French, Norse or Germanic - or other - structure, its underlying meaning.
And "color" (sorry, I had to shudder again) is not a word; it is a spelling mistake.

While I hate to appear pompous and patronising (HA! You know I LOVE IT! … and that's "patronising", NOT "patronizing", he patronised), I feel that these days, Webster's simplified spellings should be confined to teaching young children and non-English speaking immigrants, and that - once they have achieved a decent grasp of the basics - they should then advance to the correct spellings and meanings (much as Japanese children - and Japanese students such as myself - are first taught using the phonetic alphabets of ひらがな and カタカナ before moving on to the complex and beautiful Kanji which show the true meanings and concepts of what is being written).

An unfortunate consequence of US "Websterisms" (Websterizmz?") is the natural tendency of the English to speak slowly and clearly to those who use the simplified spellings, and sometimes to draw them little pictures, too.
Sassy's going to slap me around the head with her Masters Degree for that one but regrettably it is true; we do tend to equate simplified spelling with simple minds.

Getting back to Maria's comment, I am so glad she reads Harry Potter with Liv; introducing children to books is probably the best thing anyone could possibly do for them.
And whilst I've never read the Potter books I confess to enjoying the movies, if only for the delicious sight of so many Brit thesps gleefully hamming it up.
Rowling is smart enough to use subliminal linguistic messages in the naming of her characters, such as Draco Malfoy … "Draco" being Greek for "dragon" and also having the meaning "harsh and cruel" from the "draconian" laws laid down by the aptly named Draco in Greece around 620BC, and "Mal" from the French for "bad".

Tolkien was the master of this, being a professor of Middle English and a scholar of Middle and Old English, Saxon, Norse and Icelandic, enabling him to use the same subliminal messages in a far more complex and subtle way.
Of course, subsequent "fantasy" writers, lacking his linguistic facility have made a mockery of this art. Thankfully we have Douglas Adams to deflate them and he parodied their ignorance so brilliantly in the Hitch-hiker books where we discover that the Earth was created by an old bearded man with the splendid monicker of Slartibartfast.

So …
"Bloke"
Originally from the "Shelta", which the OED tells me is an ancient and secret language used by Irish and Welsh tinkers and Gypsies, based on altered Irish and Gaelic words.
Basically it has come to mean an ordinary, decent working man.
If you're not working class, you're not a "proper bloke"; you're a git and a tosser (excuse me, I'm a proudly proletarian Marxist and class warrior).
"Blokey" and "bloke-ish" are also used to describe typically working class behaviour, such as watching football and drinking beer and swearing.

"Snogging" is indeed "sucking face" as you so piquantly put it, Maria.
Considered slightly derogatory: nice people kiss; slags and teenagers snog.
It is very much Harry Potter's age group - the chlamydia generation - who use the word, binge-drinking themselves into a stupor before glomming on to one another's faces and jamming tongues down throats with all the subtlety of the "face hugger" out of the Alien movies.
People our age (yikes) should stick to kissing.
I was raised in a more innocent age of crap sci-fi movies like "Amazon Women On The Moon" where a crew of middle-aged men would land on a planet populated solely by unfeasibly pretty nineteen-year-old girls with huge blonde hair, silver micro-skirts and boobs like Sabrina (you remember her? The fifties starlet who looked like she'd been shot in the back with a couple of guided missiles), who said such things as "Tell me more about this Earth custom you call "kissing"" … So much nicer than snogging.

"Reckon" is from tallying up; deducing numbers, and has come to mean roughly the same as "estimate" or "guess", I reckon.

And "Queue" is indeed a line, Maria.
From the Latin "cauda" (tail), via the French usage as a plait of hair.
Queueing is an essentially English pastime. If we're not queueing for something, then we are moaning about the weather or taking tea with the Queen.

This has been a public service announcement on behalf of patronising Brits.