In Competition No. 2914 — which was inspired by a speech given by the late Sir Keith Joseph in which he said that the government was trying to ‘Bennboozle’ the country — you were asked to submit coinages inspired by today’s politicians, supplying full dictionary definitions and illustrative examples of their use.
As is often the case with this sort of competition, many of you were thinking along similar lines. Charles Curran, Barry Baldwin and R.M. Goddard all coined harmanise though with varying definitions, and kendalliance and corbynate also cropped up several times.
I liked Basil Ransome-Davies’s faragiste (a chancer or failed opportunist, one who does not live up to his own publicity); D.A. Prince’s decameron (a fictional tale spun to an admiring and uncritical audience) and dorriesible (ludicrous, as in ‘there is nothing more dorriesible than a grown woman voluntarily eating bushtucker on television’); and W.J.
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