Category Archives: five words

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Five words from … The Trespasser, by Tana French

Welcome to the third installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! Up now is Tana French’s The Trespasser, a crime thriller that’s chock-full of excellent Irish slang.

His accent has got stronger. I put on the Thicko Skanger act too, now and then, but I do it for suspects, not for my own squad. Sometimes Steve makes me want to puke.

Thicko Skanger, skanger, or scanger seems to be the Irish slang equivalent of the British chav, a disparaging term for a young, presumably uneducated person with a brash sense of style and manner. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says thicko is a shortening of thickhead, a stupid person.

Breslin’s planning on working a long shift, for a bog-standard case.

Something bog-standard is something ordinary, basic, or unexceptional. The OED says the origin is uncertain but cites the theory that it’s an alteration of box-standard, an old term for the hollow column or standard for a machine, with bog meaning a lavatory or toilet. 

That was the gaffer getting all up in our grille.

A gaffer is a boss or foreman. According to the OED, the term was “applied originally by country people to an elderly man or one whose position entitled him to respect,” and might be a contraction of the word godfather. The same sense carried over to gaffer meaning the head electrician on a movie or TV set.

From the outside, my gaff looks a lot like Aislinn Murray’s.

Gaff in this context means a house, building, or home. Other meanings include a fair and a public place for cheap entertainment.

We’d be banjaxed anyway.

Meaning ruined, stymied, or confounded, banjaxed is a fun Irish slang term with an unknown origin. The OED’s earliest citation is from the 1939 novel, At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien: “Here is his black heart sitting there as large as life in the middle of the pulp of his banjaxed corpse.”

Bonus terms

Because The Trespasser is full so much great slang, we had to include some bonus terms:

  • bent adjective Corrupt, venal. Bent cops exist. Fewer in real life than on the telly, but they’re out there.
  • scut work noun Trivial and tedious tasks. For a second I think Breslin’s gonna tell me to stick my scut work, but instead he says, “Why not,” although there’s a twist to his mouth. 
  • naff adjective Unstylish or cliched. One of the reasons I don’t trust O’Kelly is because of his office. It’s full of naff crap.
  • kip noun Sleep. Go get some kip. Ye look even worse than this morning.
  • skint adjective Poor, broke. But they’re both skint as well.
  • spa noun An idiot or clumsy person. You spa, you. Come on and get this case meeting done.
  • bolshie adjective A leftist; short for Bolshevik. I say, just bolshie enough, “Because I didn’t want to.”
  • bickied adjective Drunk. He was always so bickied he kept forgetting he’d already tried and got nowhere.

Check out our first two installments of “Five words from” right here: Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson and The Peripheral by William Gibson.

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Five words from … Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Welcome to the second installment of “Five words from …” our new feature highlighting interesting words from interesting books! Up next is Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson.

It was an interrelated process of disaggregation, which one night Aram named codevolution.

In Aurora, codevolution is used to describe a process where the evolution of lifeforms begins to diverge, rather than co-evolving as an ecosystem.

Even naming it was a problem, as some called it the cryptoendolith, others the fast prion, others the pathogen, and others simply the bug, or the thing, or the stuff, or the alien, or the whatever.

The word cryptoendolith is formed from roots meaning ‘hidden’, ‘inside’, and ‘stone’.

In the course of this study we found analyses suggesting that the bad feelings engendered in a subaltern population by imperial colonialism and subjugation typically lasted for a thousand years after the actual crimes ceased.

The word ‘subaltern‘ in this context means “marginalized and oppressed by the dominant culture, especially in a colonial context”.

Apparently dreams are very often surreal; oneiric, meaning “dreamlike,” has connotations of strangeness often startling to the dreamer.

The word ‘oneiric‘ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘dream’.

Criminally negligent narcissists, child endangerers, child abusers, religious maniacs, and kleptoparasites, meaning they stole from their own descendants.

Kleptoparasitism is “the parasitic theft of captured prey, nest material, etc. from animals of the same or another species.”

The people from the stations out around Jupiter and Saturn have made up that name for it: they come back from space to Earth to get a dose of bacteria or whatnot, their sabbatical they call it, come back to get sick in order to stay well, but it’s a tough thing for them, and they often come down with what they call earthshock, and sometimes die of it.

Earthshock is a blend of earth and shock, and isn’t actually a thing yet, although space travel itself has a number of serious physical effects.

Did we miss any other great words in Aurora? Feel free to point them out in the comments!

Got a book you’d like see given the “five words from” treatment? Nominate it through this form!

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Five words from … The Peripheral, by William Gibson

Welcome to “Five words from …” our new feature highlighting interesting words from interesting books! Up first is The Peripheral, by William Gibson.

Netherton was relieved that she hadn’t yet called the display a shewstone.

A shewstone (often spelled show-stone) is an archaic term for “a polished quartz crystal serving as a magic mirror in certain incantations”.

Your peripheral is a tetrachromat.

A tetrachromat is “a person capable of identifying four primary colors, rather than three”.

It was androgenic, he said, and she knew from Ciencia Loca and National Geographic that that meant because of people.

The word androgenic is usually used in the sense “related to the male hormone androgen” but here is used closer to the sense of anthropogenic, “caused by humans”.

She wore a more ornate reticule than usual, covered in mourning beads and hung with a sterling affair he knew to be a chatelaine, the organizer for a set of Victorian ladies’ household accessories.

Chatelaine is defined in context here. A reticule (bonus word) is “a bag, originally of network, but later of any formation or material, carried by women in the hand or upon the arm, and answering the purpose of a pocket.”

An anthropomorph, really, to be disanthromorphized.

The word anthropomorph can be used to mean “an element in decorative art, derived from the human form” but here is used in the sense of “something endowed with human qualities”.

Did we miss any other great words in The Peripheral? Feel free to point them out in the comments!

Got a book you’d like see given the “five words from” treatment? Nominate it through this form!