Aberrizadit

Congealed, concertinaed version of "I bet he's had it," meaning he has come to grief. An expression from the English Midlands making you wonder why, if they can do this, the locals don't speak thus all the time, provided there are enough easy glides in the original -- nuffizglintoridge. At this rate, they would be as incomprehensible as the Navajo on field telephones were to the Japanese in World War Two.



barnacle

Once a kind of goose, Branta leucopsis, grew on trees or logs, attached to either by its beak and being born from within a fruit. Or it gestated inside tiny shellfish stuck to timber or rocks by the seashore. By the end of the sixteenth century, the goose had disappeared and the word had removed itself to the shellfish. Not much more is known beyond the original word's being bernak (it gained the suffix -le while the goose was waning), from medieval Latin bernaca. Now officially the white-eyed.



bazaar

Misspelled even in the sixteenth century, as now, this is the Persian word for "market" (bazar), from an Old Persian abecharish, yielding an Italianate early English form bazarro. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, spellings were a free-for-all, the best of all being buzzard. No connexion with bizarre.



Belisha beacon

Glimpses of these can be found in British movies of a certain vintage, such as Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), in which the orange tint has not peeled away and the sturdy column on which it stands is truly perpendicular. These were not to be found on airfields, but on sidewalks, telling pedestrians where it would be safe to cross -- provided they kept their eyes and ears open. Devised, in a spirit of undisguised empathy, these beacons were the brainchild of British politician Leslie Hore-Belisha, and their sudden appearance in 1956 seemed to many a rash of huge roadside lollipops: orange balls on barber poles. Of course, the Belisha beacon presaged the zebra crossing, across which at any time a pedestrian has theoretical right of passage, provided he/she is willing to risk getting killed. All traffic is supposed to stop at the merest sight of a pedestrian on those black and white stripes, even one tentative foot deposited thereon. The American version, more ambiguous, is not enforced by law, at least not in neighborhood familiar to this novelist. Belisha beacons have gone now, but their jaunty temptations abide in memory along with their inventor's exotic name: fine, lost partner to the vanishing red phone kiosk with its A and B buttons and chronic stench of dog.



billingsgate

Some movies set in the seedier parts of London may have unearthed this treasure and set it to work. An old city gate named for forgotten Billing, this happens to be the site of a famous fish market where the language was blue and foul, with fishwives and fishmongers "flyting" at each other in tirades of wallowing obscenity. Thus, billingsgate has become the name for that kind of language, a word diagnostic and with not a trace of envy in it.



brummagem

Of, or belonging to, or mande in Birmingham, England, sometimes said to give offense: this word is a bit of social history. In the seventeenth century, counterfeit groats were coined in Birmingham (a groat was a silver fourpenny piece), and in the nineteenth all kinds of cheap and trashy articles were manufactured there. Thus brummagem came to denote shoddy counterfeit, the upper-case B dropped as noble name declined into accursed generic. Sometimes the word itself truncates into brummy, much as Birmingham itself does into Brum.



busby

Big fluffy hat worn by Guards at Buckingham Palace, actually called bearskins according to Charles Harrington Elster in There's a Word for It. Not in my experience; the leaflet that came with my toy soldiers said there might once have been an officer named Busby. It is more likely that busby, which meant a big bushy wig or the buzz wig associated with Charles Dickens's Sergeant Buzfuz in the Pickwick Papers, began to replace bearskin in the nineteenth century as the name of headgear worn by both hussars and Guards and caused some resentment among purists as being unmilitary and undignified.



chutzpah

When the BBC attempt this one, it sounds like a close relative of chutney. An engaging definition is Leo Rosten's: "Chutzpah is that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan." Or hubris, brash but ingenious presumption, brazen gall.



dead nettle

Pliny the Elder claimed in the first century AD that dead nettle leaves mixed with axle grease were an effecitve remedy for scrofula (TB of the lymph nodes), popularly known as the King's Evil -- it responded to a monarch's touch. Beloved of bumblebees, because they know it will not sting, dead nettle looks like a nettle but has attracted, in England, the sobriquet, archangel, because it first blooms about May 8, once a feast day of the archangel Michael. Its soup is sustaining. Its tea halts diarrhea (the plant contains tannin). It promotes menstruation and looks thoroughly commonplace. Its official specification, however, is a gem: