Fab, gear…

There has been a lot of amused reports of Prince Charles not realising what the word ‘buff’ currently means. There was a photo of him as a young man in swimming trunks and he was described as buff; it was up to his son, prince William to explain that it meant muscley and fit… Fit… that’s another word, which like buff has a completely different modern meaning.

Buff used to mean either a colour, or to polish, or to be naked, and a buffer was an elderly and old-fashioned, dithery sort of man. Oh, and buffer was also the thing which stopped the trains bumping to stuff, because buffer means to protect. So buff now means many things, but now for young people it means attractive, muscular and cool… Fit now doesn’t just mean athletic or physically strong, it means attractive and interesting… I had moved to teach in a new school in the late 70’s, in a different area where there were a lot of dialect words, so when the students in my class kept asking me whether i thought various male members of staff were ‘fit’, I sort of guessed that they were teasing me, but I went along with it and remarked that Mr So-and-So definitely was because he taught games and P.E…. a lot of amusement ensued!

I tried to avoid using words the kids used, there is nothing worse than an older person trying to be ‘with it’ – another phrase which was young slang but has now been adopted into general use by some older people who don’t realise that by using it they are definitely not ‘with it’. I tried not to take any notice of language the students use, which would go in and out of fashion, some words and phrases staying, some vanishing after a few weeks. I remember in another job, here in the south-west, a lad was late for my lesson because he had been on a ‘phat mission’… I didn’t enquire!

Another good reason for not using teenage slang words is that they can mean different things in different areas; I first came across ‘bobbins’ meaning brilliant, later I heard kids form a different area use it to mean terrible, revolting, awful.

It must always have been the way… when I was at school and the Beatles were changing everything, one of my teachers was totally perplexed when we erupted into gales of laughter when she used the word ‘gear’ – in those days it meant ‘good’, ‘great’… we couldn’t explain it to her because we were so hysterical with mirth!

A few more or less ‘trendy’ words – how many do you know? :