Re: faff (was: English notation)

At 8:31 am -0700 4/8/01, J Matthew Pearson wrote:
[snip]
>
>We have "botch" in North America, though it seems to be mostly confined to set
>expressions like "a botched job" (or "a botch job").  However, over here at
>least, "botch" seems to mean something different from "bodge".  If you botch
>something, you fail to do it properly; a botched job is a blunder, a cock-up.
>By contrast, "bodge" seems to mean something like "to put together on the fly,
>to improvise a quick and dirty solution to a problem".  At least in the
>context
>of Junkyard Wars, "bodge" does not imply a failure, whereas "botch" does.
Yep - _botch_, I think, would always imply that here.  Some people will use
"bodge" in a similar way but, as you say, it does tend to carry the meaning
of "to improvise a quick and dirty solution to a problem" - rather more
like "kludge" in programming.

But the two words were dialect variants and, altho there is an overlap of
meaning, they have come to develop different overtones.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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