Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 15 April 2006

A Lexicographer writes

issue 15 April 2006

‘Veronica,’ I said when she was taking her Wellingtons off outside the back door and couldn’t run away, ‘what does cotching mean?’ ‘Haven’t the foggiest. I thought you were Mrs Language.’ But cotching is meant to be young person’s slang, and, although Veronica has taken her degree, she still seems a young person to me.

I’d found cotching in the Sun in an article about slang likely to be used by Jade Goody, an ordinary girl from south London who’d once been on Big Brother on television. The Sun said it meant ‘hanging out at a friend’s house to relax’. The short article included plenty more words I’d never heard of, such as moody (‘counterfeit’, with reference to designer goods), dino (‘a small amount of money’), blue (‘mum, or secret’) and gatta (‘petrol’). I wondered if the whole thing was a joke.

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