What Is This BODGER Thing Anyway?
When I changed the name of my site I had something very definite in mind. As it turns out my choice of words might have gone
right over some reader's heads. Not from any educational deficit on their part but because the word bodger To paraphrase Lennon and McCartney:
I am the bodger
Goo goo g'joob, goo goo goo g'joob is seemingly not as common as I thought. While it
seems as if I've used the word from my earliest days it turns out that most Americans have never heard of it — I've
had more than one person break the news to me that I had misspelled "badger".
For a really well-done explanation of the term try Michael Quinion's international English site.
A look at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives the following definitions which might apply here. My original intention was to use "bodger" as in the definition six and relating to my sometimes hobby of turning wood. Upon consideration I realize that there might be a little more of definition four in me than might be healthy. Not that this sort of "bodger" is all bad — sometimes you just need to be able to turn a gas cooker and a vacuum cleaner into a blast furnace to cast an anchor for the boat which is being built in the attic from bits of an old barn and a wrecked biplane...
- 1) bodge
- A clumsy patch; a botched piece of work.
- 2) bodge
- A measure used in selling oats, etc; app. about half a peck.
- 3) bodge
- [An altered form of BOTCH] 1. To patch or mend clumsily. 2. to bodge up: to put together clumsily; to botch up, to do or make up in a clumsy fashion.
- 4) bodger
- One who 'bodges'; a botcher.
- 5) bodger
- A travelling dealer a pedlar.
- 6) bodger
- dial. in full chair bodger. A local name in Buckinghamshire for a chair-leg turner. Hence (chair-)bodgering, the action or process of chair-leg turning.
This website does not use cookies or javascript and collects no user information.