Wags In The OED And Amii Grove On Jermaine Pennant’s Duty
NEWS in the Star that ‘Wag’ has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary.
The OED aims to be descriptive, not prescriptive, and strives to remove the authors own prejudices from its tome.
Anorak readers will recall how Dr Johnson offered: “Excise: a hateful tax levied upon commodities” and “Oats: a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people.”
You may also recall the Anorak Lexicon (which will return again soon) marking mention of words such as Bovey (orangey stain), the Kilroy-Silk (ditto) and the Bext (a text message to one’s PA.)
Of course to describe a Wag is to see a Wag and for education purposes the Sun focuses on Amii Grove.
Amii has the prescribed superfluous vowels in her name. She also has assisted blonde hair, a tight sweater and the epithet “Page 3 stunner”.
Amii’s footballer is/was Jermaine Pennant, the diminutive Liverpool winger. He lives in a mansion. It has CCTV. And Amii is shocked at what she is looking at.
“Sure enough,” says she, “the tape showed a pretty brunette walking into our bedroom with Jermaine. I could see the moment they turned the light off – and burst into tears.”
The OED will applaud the Sun’s syntax. A lack of that dash and readers may suppose Jermaine and his lover turned off the lights and began to sob. But with the gift of grammar we can see that it was Amii doing the crying.
And she has suffered for her love.
“He spends up to six hours a night playing Call of Duty 3,” says she. We have no idea what she is talking about, but are buoyed to learn that in this foul-mouthed age, Amii can not bring herself to say the word toilet in public and resorts to euphemism instead.
“He would sit down at 9pm and lay out crisps and fizzy drinks in a circle around him so he wouldn’t have to move for the next six hours,” says Amii. “He would stay up till 3am even before matches, wearing a head-set so he could talk to friends about who he was going to kill next.”
Insightful, indeed. And good news as Amii introduces her man to Scrabble. She tells us he became an “addict”.
And now that “Wag” is an official word, the footballer can get some more points…
Posted: 20th, September 2007 | In: Back pages Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
