Joey Essex is a celebrity who appeared in the ‘scripted reality’ programme The Only Way is Essex, named not after him but the well-known county. He is 24, born in Southwark, and his main attractions are good looks, cheerfulness and stupidity. He claims never to have learnt to tell the time or to blow his nose.
Now he has published a book called Being Reem. Reem is one of the slang words he has popularised. On a chat show he seemed not to remember what they all meant, but that might have been part of the act. Indeed I wonder if he is not having a laugh on us with the title of his book.
To Joey Essex, reem means ‘brilliant, good, cool, fashionable’. Could reem really derive from ream? Reaming in the 17th century meant ‘opening a seam in a ship to facilitate caulking’.
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