Spectator competition: a plate of corbynara with your lucasaid, anyone? (plus: a reply from his coy mistress)

The late Sir Keith Joseph once gave a speech 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, albeit entertaining 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 was tickled by 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. Webster’s govial (with a courteous but firmly resolute style). In general, the most successful coinages bore some sort of resemblance to an existing word, giving them a ring of instant plausibility.