Re: faff (was: English notation)
| From: | Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, July 4, 2001, 17:55 |
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At 9:42 pm -0500 3/7/01, David Stokes wrote:
>While the subject of British verbs unknown in the US has come up, I can
>take the oppurtunity to get a solution to another mystery.
>
>My wife and I are fans of the show "Junkyard Wars" / "Scrapheap Challange"
>(I think thats waht it is called over there). On the show they use the
>word "Bodge" frequently. This word was not in my lexicon before the show.
>
verb transitive or intransitive: to patch or mend clumsily; to put together
unskilfully; to bungle
noun: a clumsy patch
It's a doublet of "botch", both being from Middle English _bocchen_ "to
bungle"; but AFAIK the etymology of the Middle English verb is unknown.
Oddly, tho IME both _botch_ and _bodge_ seem to be used with similar
frequency, a person who patches things up in a clumsy way seems to be
almost invariably a _bodger_. I don't recall hearing _botcher_ used.
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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