Re: faff (was: English notation)

Raymond Brown wrote:

> 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.
I nice example of the maxim from language acquisition:  Language abhors synonyms.

Matt.

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