Читать книгу The Complete Fab Confessions of Georgia Nicolson: Books 1-10 - Louise Rennison - Страница 20

airing cupboard • This is a cupboard over the top of the hot-water heater in a house. It is used for keeping towels and sheets warm on cold winter nights. Er, at least that’s what it’s used for in normal people’s houses.

“Agadoo” • The worst song ever written. It won the Eurovision Song Contest, which is a competition for the worst songs ever written. That is all I have to say. Oh, and grown-ups think it is a “laugh” to sing it when they are drunk. It isn’t. (It goes “Aga doo doo doo, Aga doo doo doo” for twenty hours.)

agony aunt • A woman in a magazine who gives you advice if you are a sad person with no one else to talk to. For instance, Jas might write, “Dear Agony Aunt, My friend Georgia is so much better-looking, cleverer and all-round more brilliant that I feel inadequate. What should I do?” And the agony aunt would write back, “Kill yourself.” (Not really, that last bit is a joke.)

bangers • Firecrackers. Fireworks that just explode with a big bang. That’s it. No pretty whooshing or stars or rocketing up into the sky. Bangers just bang. Boy fireworks. Boys are truly weird.

Borstal • A sort of young person’s prison for naughty boys.

catsuit • An all-in-one suit thing with trousers and a zipper up the front. Usually evening wear. It is supposed to be sexy, and perhaps it is, but try getting out of one quickly if you have to pay an emergency lavatory call. Like a grown-up version of a romper suit.

Crazy Colour • Hair colour that you paint on your hair and that can be washed out. (Crazy because it is blue or purple or red or green.)

deely bopper • Like antenna things with tiny balls on the end that you wear on your head. Popular with five-year-olds.

Denise Van Outen • She is a blonde on TV who is a bit on the breasty side. Boys seem to like her, although I can’t see the attraction myself as I am not (probably) a lesbian.

dole • What unemployed people get (i.e. money) to stop them starving to death. Welfare.

double cool with knobs • “Double” and “with knobs” are instead of saying “very” or “very, very, very, very”. You’d feel silly saying, “He was very, very, very, very, very cool.” Also everyone would fall asleep before you finished your sentence. So “double cool with knobs” is altogether snappier.

duffing up • Duffing up is the female equivalent of beating up. It is not so violent and usually involves a lot of pushing, with the occasional pinch.

first former • Kids of about eleven who have just started “big” school. They have shiny innocent faces – very tempting to slap.

fringe • Goofy short bit of hair that comes down to your eyebrows. Some one told me that American-type people call them “bangs”, but this is so ridiculously strange that it’s not worth thinking about. Some people can look very stylish with a fringe (i.e. me) while others look goofy (Jas). The Beatles started it (apparently). One of them had a German girlfriend and she cut their hair with a pudding bowl, and the rest is history.

Froggie and geoggers · Froggie is short for French; geoggers is short for geography. Ditto blodge (biology) and lunck (lunch).

full-frontal snogging • Kissing with all the trimmings: lip to lip, open mouth, tongues… everything. (Apart from dribble, which is never acceptable.)

gorgey • Gorgeous. Like fabby (fabulous) and marvy (marvellous).

“have the painters in” • An expression to indicate that a girl is… er… having her… you know what. Oh, come on, you do know. Having her… er… well, to put it plainly… her… well, that “the red flag is flying”, that her “little friend has come to visit”. Period. Menstruation. Woman trouble. Trouble at the mill. I can’t go on with this; it is making me tired.

hols • Vacation. In olden days when bishops wanted a day off, they decided to have a Holy Day or, as it has become, a Hol-i-day. Shortened to hols for obvious reasons. (Life is too short to use long words.) Apart from the fact that Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s wife, designed dresses with long sleeves because she had a sixth finger growing out of her little finger, this is the only thing I remember from history class.

“how’s your father” • A boy’s… er… penis (or penid as I thought it was until I was eleven). Well, you wanted to know.

jimjams • Pyjamas. Also pygmies or jammies.

joggerbums • Trousers that you jog in. Jogging trousers.

jumping-jacks • A hellish combination. This is about ten bangers all tied together. When a jumping-jack is lit, not only does it bang A LOT, but it leaps all over the place and chases you about. Banging. Boys think it is hilarious to light them and chuck them into a group of girls. As I have said, boys are weird.

naff • unbearably and embarrassingly out of fashion and nerdy. Naff things are: parents dancing to “modern” music, blue eyeshadow, blokes who wear socks with sandals, pigtails… You know what I mean.

nuddy-pants • Quite literally nude-coloured pants. And you know what nude-coloured pants are? They are no pants. So if you are in your nuddy-pants you are in your no pants (i.e. you are naked).

O-levels • “Ordinary” level exams that perfectly nice teenagers were made to take when they were about fifteen. Now called GCSEs. These exams are of course sadistically timed for the summer months by teachers, etc., who have no life and therefore want to spoil it for everyone else.

one-four-one • The code you dial before a number if you don’t want the person you are calling to be able to trace your number. Like a secrecy code.

Paloma • Paloma is a perfume made up by Paloma Picasso, who is the daughter of the famous artist Picasso. Her dad used to paint people with eyes on their cheeks – he invented this. It is not bad art, apparently, but “abstract”. Anyone could say that about anything that was really crap. They could say, “No, you are mistaken, this is not a really bad drawing of a cow that looks more like a monkey, it is abstract art.” But perhaps I am cynical.

po-faced • a po is a sort of basin thing that goes under your bed, like a bedpan. In the old days very poor people would use a po instead of a lavatory. Then they poured the contents of the po out on to the streets on to innocent passersby. Ergo, “po-faced” means someone who has a face like a lavatory bowl.

poxy • From Olde Englishe. “The pox” was crumbly horrible spots that Olde Englishe people got from not having proper lavatories. Or maybe it was rats. I can’t remember. Anyway, hence the expression “poxy”, meaning horrible.

prat • A gormless oik. You make a prat of yourself by mistakenly putting both legs down one knicker leg or by playing air guitar at pop concerts.

PVC jacket • PVC is that shiny wet-look material that whatshername in The Avengers used to wear about a million years ago. PVC has come back into fashion again, but some things never will. Culottes, for instance, will never be fashionable again; they never were, apart from with Swiss people. I rest my case fashionwise.

Reeves and Mortimer • Reeves and Mortimer are a comedy double act. They are very mad indeed. But I like them.

romper-suit • All-in-one garment that some sadist designed for children. The legs and body and arms are all joined together, which makes it impossible to get on or off. (And in Libby’s case, if she has an accidental poo attack in one, you can imagine the result.)

runner • An escape. Hence the saying, “to do a runner”. To run away.

sandwich spread • Stuff in a jar that looks like throw-up that you spread on bread.

shirty • Flustered and twitchy and coming on all pompous.

stroppy • Stroppy is a very useful expression and is the state between having a nervy b (nervous breakdown) and a tantrum. For instance, you would get stroppy or “throw a strop” if your mum did not let you borrow her Chanel handbag, for no reason other than she says you would lose it. You would not quite have a nervy b because it is after all just a handbag. However, you are perfectly entitled to get stroppy if you can’t have what you want.

swiz • An unfair thing. Another girl gets a boy you like, that is a swiz. One of your friends gets to pierce her navel and your boring vati won’t let you. This is an obvious double swiz.

tosser • A special kind of prat.

TTFN • Ta ta for now. Ta ta means “goodbye”. I think this is a World War II expression like “Chocks away” and “Luftwaffe at 5 o’clock”, but so much of life is a mystery to me, I can’t be absolutely sure on this one.

wally • See “prat”. A wally additionally has no clothes sense.

wet • Drippy, useless, nervy. Lindsay.

whelk • A horrible shellfish thing that only the truly mad (like my granded, for instance) eat. They are unbelievably slimy and mucuslike.