I take it personally that a word I practically saw being born is now unrecognised by people almost old enough to be the Chancellor. I am in any case suspicious of the recent survey that found a good proportion of people aged 18 to 30 do not know the meaning of sozzled, cad, henceforth, swot or disco. Do these people live in silos?
Some research company surveyed 2,000 young adults and fed the results to newspapers, which reported them last week, giving it publicity. Sozzled was unknown to 40 per cent of respondents and even disco to 17 per cent. But the one that shocked me was bonk.
As I mentioned here a couple of years ago, the minting of the word in the late 1980s delighted Peregrine Worsthorne, once editor of the Sunday Telegraph, who died this week.
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