Tales of Rad: 6 Excellent But Dying Words

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Tales of Rad. The only internet column series that's more than 20% suicide note by volume.

For some people, language is just a means to trick idiots into sex. But to a select few, it's a fascinating palette of social and political history, radical creativity, furtive rebellion and a gateway to the kind of sex edified people have where you don't scream blasphemies at the vinegar strokes but swap palindromes or numbers that can be be expressed as the sum of two cubes or whatever it is geniuses believe in instead of stupid.

Amazing as it might seem though, people used to make fun of me for my logophilic tendencies. Granted it was mostly my fault for admitting I read Oxford Collins recreationally and using words like 'logophilic' and 'tendencies' but I 'digress'.

Maybe this is something you've encountered as well. Maybe you're one of these strange deviants too. Here's an easy test: Say you're just talking and someone queries what a particular word you used meant and you responded:

"Well, just use the Latin/Greek and work it out."

That means you're a ponce. It's just empirical law. Absolutely anyone who overheard you say that knows beyond reasonable doubt that you're the ponciest ponce to ever ponce past a ponceing parlour in all purple pantaloons. Perpetuating precocious pronunciations. Parapraxis, prolapse, penis, pardon my puerility.

Let me spell it out for you: Words make me rock hard. Here are some of my favourites that don't begin with 'P': Burgundy, lacquer, cataclysm and glub. Anyway, this whole thing was meant to be about words and phrases that've decayed in some way. Losing some of the hilarious, savage or just generically badass connotations or uses that much of our gentle generation might be unaware of. The piteous plebeians. Sorry.

The Excellent: Breech

Firearm terminology has always been a hilarious minefield of inadvertent euphemisms but there's always been something intrinsically sexual about guns anyway. What with the jamming of cylindrical objects into chambers, choke boring and accidental misfires not to mention all the pump action, but the term 'breech' has suffered more than most. Admittedly, it does have a lot to do with buttholes. By which I mean it means and connotes only that.

During day-to-day life, its arguably pretty unlikely you'd come across a phrase like 'breech-loading rifle' if you're not into weirdly specific war movies, but if you're part of 'everyone' then you've come across the word 'breeches' in stuff like Game of Thrones. If you didn't know any better you'd spell it 'britches' or more likely, "b...r - words R fur fags LOL" but that's how its spelt and it just means 'trousers'. Or any kind of material that covers the arse and thighs. Because butts, remember. Stop me if I'm going too fast.

Not all that exciting, I grant you. But 'breech''s association with the butt area led to its adoption by gun makers. And in that context, 'breech-loading weapon' doesn't just denote one of the most powerfully erotic, tripartite phrases I know, but a gun where the bullet or shell is inserted in the rear of the main barrel. And if 'inserting' anything in the 'rear' isn't cool, then absolutely all modern culture has been lying to me as long as I've lived.

The Lame Alternative Used Today: Pants

Weirdly, almost all firearms today actually are 'breech-loading', in the sense that the alternative is jamming the missile or whatever down the other end of the barrel, or 'muzzle' if you want to get technical. But now we're balls-deep in paranoid gun-nut technicalities so let's back up. Sure, no-one knows what 'breech' means any which way these days, so let's pick the trouser department.

I didn't come here today to complain about Americans' misuse of my language, but I am here, so might as well. You have a word for underpants. It's underpants. Has the operative word right in there. Trousers are the things that go on top. I mean, you had the choice of breeches, trousers, drawers (one of the progenitors of trousers anyway) and you settled on 'pants'? It descended from 'pantaloons', the only thing less tough than the 19th century dandies and French that we associate them with.

The Excellent: Breach

If you don't mind, I'd like to do a wee quick word association. Ok? I say 'wall', you say Facebook. I know you do. Because, chances are, you're part of everyone. Also, I can hear you through your speakers. Just kidding. I'm hiding in your wall space.

But walls weren't always a place for both attention and regular whores to pollute the social and cultural landscapes; They used to be the only thing standing between you and an entire army of ornery Viking cocks. But we've long since forgotten the golden age of the violent, protracted siege, to the chagrin of historians and people with a fondness for awesome alike. Because when you can drop a thousand white phosphorous bombs on someone you don't like at the flick of a button, it kind of renders ladders and balls a bit obsolete.

That being said, I feel I'm in something of a minority as a penis-ed history graduate in that I had zero interest in military-flavoured history. Because it doesn't matter how much you love the opening of Gladiator, believe me when I say that reading a twice-translated recounting or wild extrapolation from a single rusty arrowhead you dug up in a field, will in no way ever live up to the trouser-tightening elegance of that scene. Seriously. You have no idea how boring war really is, even when it did involve massive balls.

But would the world really be a worse place today if we had a bit more boiling pitch and battering rams and a few less dickheads with delusions of eloquence? Certainly, because I'm not advocating more wars when the ones we already have are so boring. What I am saying is that a breach in Jerusalem's forty-foot walls is something to goddamn post about.

The Lame Alternative Used Today: Hull Breach In Sector 7, Captain!

Science-fiction so utterly commandeered the word 'breach' that I'm not even allowed to use it if it violates the prime directive.

Historiography used to be jam-bloody-packed with the word 'breach' in relation to this or that walled city falling to a flood of mighty warriors with swords but today, its nothing but an inconvenience to star travellers. Damn, I miss you, sieges.

[NB: If you were really wondering how differentiated 'breech' and 'breach' really are, the former is Old English by way of our friends the Dutch, and the latter is just French. Interesting, eh? Wait, I'm sure I mean the other thing. Not.]

The Excellent: Grog

I was reminded of how much fun the word 'grog' is recently during my time with the exemplary, if a tad dumb, Arkham Creed love-child, Uruk-hai genocide Shadow of Mordor. Which, as a side note, if you have ten hours to spare and feel you don't have enough gratuitous decapitations in your life, you should absolutely play.

Now it's history time, mate; Whether you like it or not.

Our story begins with a presumably hard-drinking, hard-dicking gentleman by the name of Edward Vernon. 'Cause you know the ladies love a sailo-oh.

Oh. Oh dear.

Well that's kind of ruined the whole thing I was going with. So anyway this guy came up with the idea of watering rum with lemon or lime juice, making it go further and staving off scurvy as a bonus. And he used to wear coats made of grogram, a sort of cord. So there you go.

The Lame Alternative Used Today: Bacardi, ho!

I don't want to be contentious, but Bacardi is for pussies and never won't be. Because we all know that real men drink dark and ideally spiced rum while thinking aloud in George Takei's voice about manly things. Like hull breaches, Captain.

Some might say I have an unreasonable image of manhood, but some have never seen me grinding alone to Spandau Ballet's Gold with a thousand times more enthusiasm than I just burned you with, said Bacardi-drinking pussies. So some can shut their fucking mouths.

The Excellent: Eviscerate/Decimate

These two are slightly anomalous in that you're likely to encounter them pretty often, but almost always incorrectly. People know enough to assume that they're both bad, even violent things you'd prefer not happen to you, but not enough to appreciate that they actually have very specific meanings. If you know them, feel free to skip down, clever clogs.

Let's start with evisceration.

It's about as literal words get, structurally. It's pure Latin with the 'e' prefix denoting a negative, in this case 'removal' and 'viscera' means all your squishy stomach parts. So its disembowelment. Specifically and only. Arguably, that's the worst thing ever but decimation manages to be worse somehow.

Bad writers or historians will use 'decimation' synonymously with annihilation or destruction particularly when talking about losing armies or the effect of a televised appearance from Carrie Fisher on a nation's erections.

I'm almost sorry. Good luck with the next one!

In reality, or at least, tedious word nerd land, we're Latin again: Because 'decimation' is a Roman military punishment. When a unit deserted or mutinied and was subjected to it, the group was divided into groups of ten and each drew lots. Not to spoil the ending, but the unlucky man who drew poorly was then executed, usually clubbed to death by the other nine men in his unit. And if you happened to have associated brutal martial punishments with these lads, bear in special mind that the practice of decimation was banned. And anything that could turn the stomachs of people who ate stuffed dormice whole is probably worth avoiding.

So that's decimation. Reducing, sometimes (such as one awesome Dr Who special that totally got it) entire populations by a factor of ten. And you thought maths was evil at school just because trigonometry made you cry.

The Lame Alternative Used Today: Devastate

Devastate is a pretty rad alternative as words go, but entirely inadequate compared to these two, uniquely spectacular and horrifying words.

The Excellent: Snollygoster 

Somewhere up there, it clearly says 'dying' not dead words but I'm not one to live by your irrelevant rules, daddy-o, even when they're mine. So snollygoster. A word with the modern cultural usage and significance of a hand-cranked Betamax 8-track player in Sanskrit.

In America's own heartland of Pennsylvania, the settled Germans had themselves a local legend about 'snallygaster', (presumably 'schnell' and 'geist', which would make it a 'quick' 'ghost' if you're not super hot on Kraut-Spiel), some kind of vague monster that preyed on their children and poultry. So, and I'm just guessing here, maybe a wolf? Christ, even a fox could manage that.

Anyway, over the years, that stupid myth gave us the word 'snollygoster', which had transmuted from vague monster but probably just a fox into 'a shrewd person unbound by principle', especially, a politician. Which would then itself fade into obsolescence.

"Boo-hoo" you might say.
"And fuck you" I would say right back: this is a rich, hilarious word that quite neatly sums up a lot of what makes politicians so distasteful. 'Schnell' they may be (teams of writers and PR agents guiding their every word notwithstanding) but you can't argue that politicians aren't like ghosts. They're tissue-thin veneers of marketable wholesomeness stretched over empty dullards. Watching an interview with a British politician is like watching someone throw a cricket ball through closed curtains. There's nothing there to hit.

They're ineffectual, is my point. And also that 'snollygoster' is a word we need now more than ever.

The Lame Alternative Used Today: Spin Doctor or Filibuster (maybe)

I considered using Peter Capaldi, foul-mouthed extraordinaire from Ianucci's bullseye political satire, The Thick of It as the face of 'spin doctor', but then I remembered that he is completely fucking rad which is why you were just looking at Pinnochio. But either way, both those supposed synonyms are way off if we're being honest.

A spin doctor is someone like Malcolm Tucker, a shadowy figure behind the scenes, puppet-strings a-jangling. And a filibuster, though fabulous, is too specific. Neither really come close as an alternative to 'snollygoster' and I'm assuming that we're not going with my own suggestion of 'frothing, bug-eyed, self-delusional' so I guess we have a solid conclusion here for once: Our language is storied, beautiful and hilarious and sometimes, like nature, the less fit fall behind. And just like that walking soup mix, the giant tortoise, or sweaty dude in a costume the giant panda, 'snollygoster' is an endangered rarity totally worth saving. So take care of it, pillock.