28 March 2007

Karzy Little Thing Called Toilet

Since there was an ace gig we were attending near my gaff last night, Martin took the opportunity to continue his ongoing efforts to expand my British slang vocabulary. One can really never have enough ways to say "toilet" so now in addition to referring to it as the bog and the loo, I have come to call it the karzy.

And what an exciting bit of slang it is, with no less than six ways to spell it! From the brilliant slang dictionary at www.peevish.co.uk:

karzy: Noun. A lavatory, toilet. The word lavatory is in itself, a euphemism for a place to wash. From the Italian for house, casa. Numerous alternative spellings include khazi, kharzie, karsey, karzey and kazi.

I, however, have since stopped calling it that and instead am now opting to be Cockney. I've decided that "marsy" rhymes nicely, but means nothing, so I'll shorten it to "mars". This will confuse the squares into thinking that I'm talking about chocolates or the red planet. Only my plates born within the sound of Bow Bells will know otherwise.

Sample usage:

Dave: Where's the mars?
Martin: Just round the corner to the left.

Unfortunately, this changes of the meaning of "a Mars bar" quite a bit, I'm afraid...

A Dictionary of UK Slang and Colloquialisms
The English-to-American Dictionary
Cockney Rhyming Slang

2 comments:

Dave Knapik said...

Cockney rhyming slang is indeed baffling, but not as baffling as the rules of cricket.

One of the slang resources I listed, www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk, has a great explanation of how it works, as well as comprehensive listings of many user-submitted bits of slang. You can even vote on whether a particular expression is classic, modern or rubbish.

Anything I submit to the site is, of course, rubbish.

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