PSTOIC

Remember him? He’s almost recovered from attempting to make pubboard sit up and beg…”

Oh my oh my… a couple of nights ago, was I not surprised, sorry wrong term, FLABBERGASTED, see a familiar face on ABC. Yes, it was none other than our very own DECLAN CURRY doing a live Satellite link from the BBC studios in London to the ABC studios in the US. The program, part of ABC’s night news, was a weekly link-up with Britain just like every other sunday night.

Declan, Version 2001 vs. Version 1991: 1. he has lost his accent to some extent, although he still sounds like something is stuck in his throat.
2. he has lost some hair
3. he has lost his glasses – oh yes, this is the new look funky Declan
4. he still wears really really, I mean REALLY dull ties
5. he has gained a bit of humour ! No really, he has !
6. he still wants to direct *everything* in the studio.
proof: the camera was not properly white-balanced so he looked as though he was just out of a grave. Actually, he probably was, never mind…
Just thought you might want to know… O.

Comment

• Update February 2003.
  Declan now appears regularly on the BBC1 morning news programme. He appears to be the business news expert.RW
• Here’s the link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/audiovideo/programmes/bbc_news_24/business_presenters/newsid_1323000/1323751.stm

The stoic guy from the valentine’s day video, David, I can’t remember his surname. I think it was Dave Williams. Anyway, didn’t have a chance to chat ’cause we were both in meetings, but if it is Dave Williams then he works for Razorfish which is just downstairs from us !! ha ha Thought you’d find that amusing 🙂 I would’ve mailed the bodgers but felt guilty at not actually knowing his name for sure …

Later that same day… We just had a fire drill and I bumped into David outside …
he actually works in Milan for Razorfish and is only here for a few days so you should talk to him before he goes away . I told him you’d mail …( [email protected] ) ps: He hasn’t changed in 10yrs ! Ledda

Comment

• With the almost total discombobulation of Razorfish, Dave has moved on.  He now works for babel[] as a technologist.

This term was once common around the furniture-making town of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, between London and Oxford …. But that leaves us with another sense, the more common one (at least in Britain and Australia) of an incompetent mender of things, which Americans and some British people may prefer to see spelled botcher….Yet another sense of bodger is hinted at by a line in the Flanders and Swann song that mentioned the rhinoceros having a “bodger on his bonce”.
Read the full history of a word that means so much to the STOIC members…

This term was once common around the furniture-making town of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, between London and Oxford (so much so that the local football team, Wycombe Wanderers, is nicknamed The Bodgers). Bodgers were highly skilled itinerant wood-turners, who worked in the beech woods on the chalk hills of the Chilterns. They cut timber and converted it into chair legs by turning it on a pole lathe, an ancient and very simple tool that uses the spring of a bent sapling to help run it. Their equipment was so easy to move and set up that it was easier to go to the timber and work it there than to transport it to a workshop. The completed chair legs were sold to furniture factories to be married with other chair parts made in the workshop. The word only appears at the end of the nineteenth century. There may be a link – through the idea of a itinerant person – with a much older sense of the word, for a travelling merchant or chapman. The Oxford English Dictionary finds examples of this meaning from the eighteenth century, but there’s a much earlier one from Holinshed’s Chronicles of 1577 (a major source for Shakespeare) in which William Harrison rails against bodgers who bought up supplies of wheat to sell abroad, leaving nothing for local people to make their bread with. But that leaves us with another sense, the more common one (at least in Britain and Australia) of an incompetent mender of things, which Americans and some British people may prefer to see spelled botcher. In both spellings this comes from the Middle English bocchen, which had a sense of repairing or patching. It could be significant that in medieval times it was a neutral term that had no associations with doing a job badly. It’s possible that this old sense of the word survived in dialect or local usage, and evolved into the furniture bodger, while its meaning in the standard language changed. Yet another sense of bodger is hinted at by a line in the Flanders and Swann song that mentioned the rhinoceros having a “bodger on his bonce”. Many people have written to say that they know a bodger as a pointed instrument for various purposes. For example Doug Dew wrote: “From my childhood in Surrey, I have a vague memory of the use of the word bodger to mean a blunt stick or tool used to make holes in the ground for seeds”. Alan Harrison added: “Bodge is certainly in use in Black Country dialect for poking or making a hole. I have heard my father use bodger of an instrument used to make holes, as for example when making an extra hole in a belt when the wearer has gained or lost weight”. Tony Chadwick, Professor of French at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, remembers the late Dr George Storey, co-editor of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, applying bodger to one of those pointed sticks for picking up litter. Others have mentioned that it is the usual name for the tool used by scaffolders, which has a spanner/wrench at one end and a point at the other. It seems extremely likely that this is a variant of podger, recorded from the nineteenth century in various engineering contexts. Indeed, several subscribers wrote to say that they knew of pointed instruments under this name. It is said to derived from podge or pudge for something short, fat or thick-set.

Last Friday, the PSTOIC get together took place near Trafalger square. The pub bit was fine, but what happened at Garfunkels? Perhaps it was the Wicked Witch from the East who took our order, or maybe the open door to the ‘kitchens’, but something wasn’t right. As students, we had several STOIC dinners at various Garfunkels, including a memorable food fight – the food was never anything special, but it served the purpose, and no-one complained. Last Friday, it was crap! Have our palates grown too sophisticated and discriminatory to enjoy plain English cooking? Or did the staff at the restaurant just not give a damn?
I suspect the latter.
See you all soon,

Rex