Wordwatch - No 239
A special issue of The Guardian's G2 supplement today has pictures of 'sculptures' by Sarah Lucas, whoever she might be.
I am particularly outraged by an upturned bucket with the words 'SUCK MY NOB' painted on the base.
Disgraceful.
The correct spelling is 'KNOB'.
A 'NOB' is an upper-class person.
This kind of offensive illiteracy has no place in a family newspaper.
posted by Willie Lupin @ 5:25 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
I am no lover of the upper classes, but I cannot support your discrimination against them. If someone has a nob who needs sucking, I see no harm in it, so far as it does not harm anyone else. And if the nob wants his knob sucked, then I do not wish to be influential in the procedure in any capacity.
To be fair, I made this exact mistake earlier this year.
The spelling, not the sucking.
By some superhuman effort, I managed not to do any knob gags in that post and left it to my commenters. But, without wishing to amplify the discrimination, it's easy to see how a 'knob' and a 'nob' could be confused.
james, I think I saw that spelling in your blog but was too polite to say anything. In any case, it's a bit pedantic to quibble about the spelling of a colloquialism, unless you're using it as a subject to blog about. Your average chav writing on a toilet wall has probably never heard the term 'nob' in its proper usage just as he would never know that 'ass' is an American spelling.
Not that I'm comparing you to a chav or implying that you write on toilet walls (although even writers of your distinction have to start somewhere).
Oh dear, I wish I'd never started this.
So how is it spelt in cribbage when you get 'one for his k/nob'? I could make a case for either as it's awarded for a jack, who is a male at the top end of the playing card social scale.
So how is it spelt in cribbage when you get 'one for his k/nob'? I could make a case for either as it's awarded for a jack, who is a male at the top end of the playing card social scale.
Can't help on that, cello. I have no knowledge of cribbage or any similar games. And I don't suppose those expressions are ever written down.
That particular expression was written down in (of all places) Lord of the Flies (closing moments of Chapter 4) and was spelt without a K.
And William Golding must have known what he was talking about because he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, even if it did have ‘Property of G. Greene, Esq.’ written on the bottom.
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