I’ve just tried out a newly discovered term of abuse on my husband. ‘You’re nothing but a lol‑poop,’ I exclaimed as he sat, or almost lay, like a John Prescott, except with a glass of whisky resting on his stomach instead of a cup of tea.
I’ve just tried out a newly discovered term of abuse on my husband. ‘You’re nothing but a lol‑poop,’ I exclaimed as he sat, or almost lay, like a John Prescott, except with a glass of whisky resting on his stomach instead of a cup of tea.
He only laughed. But I think it might sting some of our ‘new generation’ of ‘front-line’ politicians more, since they prize activity so much. I found the term in Anthony Wood (1632–95), whose entertaining Life and Times I had inexplicably left unread till now. Wood, settling in to a new feud in 1661, with Thomas Clayton, Warden of Merton College, remarked that the fellows ‘knew him well to have been the very lol-poop of the University’.
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