Another one for the ????

[venta]

Driving back from a bakery-raid with grumblesmurf, he asked if I was familiar with the word chav.

I wasn't - apparently it means approximately the same as pikey. I was just filing this away in my mental Bag Of Words, when it suddenly occurred to me that it's basically the same word as charver.

Charver (spelling optional, I've only ever heard it said) was the insult of choice among some friends back in Darlington about three or four years ago. Again it (or its bizare relative charver-ding) were used in the same way pikey gets (mis)used, to mean anything from "thieving gipsy" to "scruffy little bastard".

Around at the same time was rarfer(-ding), again with the same meaning. I don't think I've heard them since, so they were maybe never particularly common currency.

Any offers, anyone ?

And I think I need a new phrase inventing: what do you call a bunch of people (that's you lot :) to whom you can pose questions, and whose collective brain you can trawl for information ? Something of the search engine, something of the test audience, something of the lab rat. Any ideas ?

Comments

Re:

[venta.livejournal.com]

Nothing wrong as such, just I tend to think that in asking a question on LJ I'm potentially throwing it open to all and sundry rather than just friends.

None of the terms suggested so far has really grabbed me though (I like "lurch engine", but it's not that obvious what I mean by it). As someone pointed out, "Oi, you lot" has been working perfectly well, so I'll probably stick with that.