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UGLY (CARIBBEAN COMMUNITIES across the UK)
Like duffy, obzocky is a Caribbean word which has passed from Britain’s Caribbean (in this case Trinidadian) community into wider British use. Richard Allsopp’s Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage gives it the following definition: ‘(of furniture, clothes, colours, etc.) Misshapen, ill-fitting, very odd-looking … (of person) ungainly and badly dressed (especially of women) fat and wearing conspicuously ill-chosen colours …’ Also like duffy, obzocky means ‘ugly’ and derives from a West African language (there is a possible root in the Yoruba word obo, meaning ‘a monkey’ and also ‘to break wind’, thus implying a connection with the Guyanan term monkey-fart which means ‘absolute nonsense’).
Apart from that, duffy and obzocky are fundamentally different, and they demonstrate the division between older and newer words for ugly. The two words arise from the two largest Caribbean communities in the country, and in different cities. Whereas duffy is Jamaican and Liverpudlian, obzocky is taken from Trinidadian Creole in London (in the Caribbean itself, it is found in a number of the islands of the Lesser Antilles). Whereas duffy is concerned with sexual attractiveness, obzocky is not concerned with that at all. It is closer in meaning to awkward or ungainly, and has a sense of things looking just not quite right. People can be obzocky, but so can buildings, cars, animals – almost anything, in fact.
See THE MIRROR CRACKED, and also BUTTERS, DUFFY, FUSTY, LAIDLY, MINGING, MUNTER, RANK, SKANK
an outsider (Yorkshire)
a pasty or pie (Cornwall)
No holiday to the South-West is complete, of course, without a packed lunch including a pasty, or oggy. Originally a Cornish oggy was a pasty half-filled with meat and vegetables and half with fruit such as apples. The term is probably an alteration of the Cornish word hoggan, meaning a ‘pastry or pie’, perhaps linked with a much older Welsh term chwiogen, a delicious-sounding muffin or simnel-cake. The first citation of oggies in the OED comes from the 1948 Dictionary of Forces’ Slang, but the word is still going strong. The Daily Telegraph reported fairly recently that ‘the battle could begin between the Big Mac and the West Country oggie … The pasty has long been a staple for seafarers in Plymouth.’ It is said that each ship in harbour receives a daily delivery of hot oggies.
The chant ‘Oggy! Oggy! Oggy!’, to which the traditional response is ‘Oi! Oi! Oi!’, often heard at sporting events and also the chorus of a Cornish folk song, is most likely also related to the pasty. One popular theory is that the wives of tin-miners and pasty-sellers supposedly shouted ‘Oggy! Oggy! Oggy!’ to announce the arrival of hot food; the response from any hungry miner or labourer would be ‘Oi! Oi! Oi!’.
See also CLANGER, CROGGY, HOGGAN
gloomy, cheerless; out of sorts (Scotland and Ireland)
For the Scots and the Irish oorie fits many situations in which the overall feeling is one of gloom or low spirits. Sadly, its origin is unknown, although the Scottish National Dictionary speculates that there may be a connection with the verb owl, which means ‘being muddle-headed even while appearing wise like the owl’.
ordinary (UK-wide but particularly Devon and the South-West)
It is hard to believe that so, dare one say, ordinary a word as ornery might once have been regarded as so ‘shocking’ a term that it should ‘never pass the lips of anyone’. However, this was so, according to the late Allan Walker Read, a lexicologist who found it as one of nineteenth-century America’s coarse synonyms for the word lewd. On the whole, however, ornery has been anything but sexual, with meanings including ‘of poor quality’, ‘commonplace’, ‘coarse’, ‘unpleasant’, ‘illiterate’, ‘mean’ and ‘cantankerous’. Its derivative orneriness describes feeling tired or vaguely unwell.
armpit (Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man and north of England)
Nowadays, the term armpit for that hollow under our arm goes almost unchallenged in southern England and in the North-East, while armhole enjoys currency in the North-West and much of the East Midlands and Norfolk, extending sporadically as far south as Buckinghamshire and Essex. But, oblivious to both pits and holes, Scotland and the very north of England have had oxter as their standard term since the fifteenth century, and the word is also found in Ireland and on the Isle of Man.
Oxter is first recorded in the Borders in the early fifteenth century and is of Germanic, and perhaps specifically Scandinavian, origin. By the end of the sixteenth century, it can found as standard in Scots texts of all kinds – literary, historical, legal, scientific. Eminent Scottish or Irish writers who used the word include Swift, Sir Walter Scott, James Joyce and James Kelman.
A verb to oxter also developed with a number of meanings, such as ‘to support under the arms’, ‘to put one’s arm around’ and ‘to carry under the arms’. It is first recorded in Burns’s poem ‘Meg o’ the Mill’, in which a drunken priest is ‘oxter’d’ to the altar to perform a ceremony. The following example from 2000 suggests that the nature of society may have changed more over the past two centuries than the nature of the word: ‘She had to be oxtered out of the city-centre-style bar while the night was extremely young.’