Cor

Words make me so happy

I’m a very cheap date when it comes to jokes, because once I find something funny I laugh about it for the rest of time.

I still LOL whenever I remember things my parents said 50 years ago and I have a back catalogue of over forty years of shared jokes with my great friend Victoria (who I shared the haunted house with…) that still make us hysterical every time.

We only need to say a couple of words relating to them and the other immediately gets the reference. It’s so satisfying.

These words include: Boggy. Small lunch. Student directory. Housewife term. None of them would be funny to anyone else if I tried to explain the context, but they are all still hilarious to us.

But even beyond private jokes, there are things that just make me laugh every time. Some of them are single words.

I had one of those moments this morning. I was happily involved in an activity I get to do four times a year, proofreading my dear friend Jo Fairley’s amazing magazine about perfume, called The Scented Letter.

Even if you’re not hysterically interested in scent, it’s absolutely gripping to read. (And a lot of people really are. It was doing this proofread that gave me the idea to write my book about a perfume blogger called The Scent of You.) Here’s a link to have a look at The Scented Letter.

So I was going over the Latest Launches bit when I came across this one about a new scent by Tom Ford, who is without a doubt one of the sexiest men on the planet.

When he used to come on the runway at the end of the Gucci show, back in the 1990s day, in a velvet dinner jacket, holding a highball glass of Scotch, or some other indescribably cool rig out, everyone in the audience ovulated. Even the men.

Add to that any fragrance which has a leather accord in it and a reference to the American West (where Ford is from) and I’m gone… Which was why I found myself writing this word next to the perfume review: Cor.

‘Cor’ makes me laugh. It’s so old fashioned and Carry On Film, yet strangely innocent, I just love it.

There are many words and phrases from Australian argot I feel the same about. Boufhead gets me every time. As does ‘crock’. Which, I should explain to those not familiar, is short for ‘crock of shit’.

So you might get to the Eurostar terminal at London St Pancras, for example, and see the hideous security lines and hear yourself say: What a crock.

In my new book, Would You Rather, which I sent the final proof read of back last week yee haw, there is a whole paragraph that makes me laugh out loud every time I read it – because I got to include some choice Aussie swearing it.

Aussie swearing is pure poetry, with ‘fuck knuckle’ a particular favourite of mine. It’s a noun. An alternative and more affirmative word for a particularly annoying dickhead.

Serbian swearing is also choice and it was one of the things that made me fall in love with my husband.

When we first got together I noticed there was one particular jumble of weird consonants he came out with a lot, in between speaking English, under his breath to me, or over the phone to Serbian pals.

I repeated it back to him one day, as well I could and asked him what it meant – only to see him, literally roll on the floor laughing. I can’t translate it, it’s so filthy, horribly offensive and deeply European.

If you’re familiar with Hemingway, it’s along the lines of his phrase ‘I obscenity in the milk of your mother’, which is how it was conveyed in the 1950s edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls that I read in my teens.

It was years before I realised ‘obscenity’ was standing in for a particularly vulgar term for defecation.

Now I am amused on a daily basis by odds words of Serbian I have picked up which I can use to him, such as ‘govnu’. Which means ‘poo’.

I sent him a text this morning saying ‘Sorry I was a bit of a govnu…’ which was a handy way of making an apology more fun.

‘Doopay’ meaning ‘bum’ is another handy one. As in, ‘Shift your doopay…’

So in these little ways, words make me happy every day of my life. Are there any words which make you happy every time you hear or read them?

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