13th July 2011

It takes one to know one, he said with a self satisfied look on his face, as we were having lunch.

A blagger.

He was one, and we were having lunch to de-brief after a meeting with a possible collaborator who was making his own pitch for the contract we were trying to win.

To be a blagger, from the french 'blageur', means, according to my online dictionary, 'to talk through your hat' or according to another definition to joke.

Apparently in the Caribbean it simply means chatting on the corner, no doubt with the usual tendency to exaggeration when men get together.

On the whole my lunch guest seemed to think that being a blagger was OK really, it defined him in his own world view as a somewhat dashing, rogue of a chap, someone who could talk the birds out of the trees.

Blaggers can be enviable characters because their golden tongues can win them your votes, the girl or indeed as in my case, the contract that we needed to win because jobs depended on it.

Now we need a new word for blagging because the word has been corrupted, now it means nasty, underhanded business, the means by which the private and the personal can be discovered and then ventilated in the media.

So words acquire their new meanings and definitions change.

Take hacking for example.

He hacked his mobile phone to pieces may have meant that he chopped it up with a Machete?

The intrepid explorer my have hacked his way through the thick undergrowth making a new path in order to find his way out of the jungle.

Or it could be used to describe someone who has made a good job of something: s/he hacked it or conversely s/he couldn't hack it.

Now the metaphor has made the transition from the jungle to the media.

Although, intriguingly it was there already because, of course a hack refers to a journalist who produces dull, tedious and boring copy.

But not anymore.

Can't hack it now means your secrets are as safe as your forest.

What will be the next new word to be plucked from the dark recesses of the lexicon brushed off and giving a whole new meaning?

Serendipity?

Tendentious?

I think it will be 'googled'.

How did you find this dark and secret information which was never meant to see the light of day?

I googled it officer.

A likely story!