laboratory game - three word suggestions

[mkenuk]

re the laboratory 7-by-many game.

1. Very surprised that ballboy (and presumably ballgirl if it ever appeared ) got 'sorry, not known'.
COD ('in which we trust') shows it as a single word. Surely deserves to be 'common'?

2. I'm not quite so surprised that bootboy got the thumbs down, although COD again shows it as a single word and does not define it as Brit.
What is surprising is that bootboy (aka hooliganus moronicus) is a sub-species of the genus yobbo which is defined as Brit, although it is classed as common!

3. What is wrong with blobby? Again it's in COD as a derivative from 'blob'

Is there a Brit over the age of 30 who is unfamiliar with Mr Blobby?

[les303]

I tried ballboy & bootboy , i just assumed that they were rejected because they were two separate words.
But then i also tried batboy which was accepted as rare?
And after all that, i failed to find tallboy which was of course, quite correctly accepted as common.

Blobby just does not sound right to me ( although i do admit to having tried to play it ) so i was surprised to see that it is in fact listed in the COD as a derivative from 'blob'.
I think that the fact that there was a television character with the same name has little relevance.
So i reckon that if blobby were to be accepted, then it should be classified as rare.

[Morbius]

Ballboys and ballgirls tend to be referred to as ballkids these days.  So, all three should be added to the Chi lexicon (assuming Alan determines that they are acceptable as single words).

[mkenuk]

So i reckon that if blobby were to be accepted, then it should be classified as rare.

I don't mind, really, as long as the word is accepted.

The TV clown, Mr Blobby, far less sadistic and dangerous than some recent transatlantic clowns, was still considered 'scary' by a lot of young kids, apparently. His name, as you say, is irrelevant. However it did derive from a real word.

[Alan W]

There were a few suggestions in this topic. Firstly I'll deal with bootboy.

The online Oxford, UK English version, gives two definitions:

1  informal A rowdy or violent youth typically having close-cropped hair and wearing heavy boots.
2  historical A boy employed to clean boots and shoes.

The online Merriam-Webster has just the boot-cleaning sense, while Wiktionary has just the violent youth sense.

The expression is often written as two words or hyphenated. The word seems to be used mainly in Britain and Ireland, but it is not completely unknown in the US. The Midtown Bootboys, formed in the 1990s, are described as a "White power band from Tulsa, OK".

I'll add bootboy as a rare word.

[Alan W]

Blobby is, as you say, MK, listed by Oxford dictionaries as a derived word from blob. Wiktionary also lists it, and provides a couple of usage examples. One is from The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis, a Narnia book:

There were long, pointed noses, and long, soft noses like small trunks, and great blobby noses.

Another author who used the word was P.G. Wodehouse, in the opening paragraph of his article "Photographers and Me":

I look in my glass, dear reader, and what do I see? Nothing so frightfully hot, believe me. The face is slablike, the ears are large and fastened on at right-angles. Above the eyebrows comes a stagnant sea of bald forehead, stretching away into the distance with nothing to relieve it but a few wisps of lonely hair. The nose is blobby, the eyes dull, like those of a fish not in the best of health. A face, in short, taking it for all in all, which should be reserved for the gaze of my nearest and dearest who, through long habit, have got used to it and can see through to the pure white soul beneath. At any rate, a face not to be scattered about at random and come upon suddenly by nervous people and invalids.

It is not only noses that can be blobby. An article in the Canberra Times last month wrote about the criteria for being considered a planet:

The second rule is that the planet must be large enough to be spherical, due to its own gravity. This means it has to be heavy enough to form a ball and not be some kind of strange blobby potato shape.

Blobby will be allowed from now on, as a rare word.

[Alan W]

Ball boy, as two words, is in quite a few dictionaries. Of the online dictionaries I looked at, Collins and Wiktionary gave the one-word ballboy as a variant spelling. Oddly enough, the online Oxford shows only the two-word form, although every one of the dozen or so usage examples given has it as a single word.

News reports retrieved via the News on the Web corpus use both ball boy and ballboy, though the former is more frequently used.

Ballboy will be allowed in future, but given that it's a less frequently used variant form, I won't make it common.

It turns out that ballgirl is already accepted in Chi.

Ballkid seems to be used mainly in Australia and New Zealand:



It is listed in the Macquarie Dictionary, as a single word. I'll add it as a rare word also.

[mkenuk]

Thanks Alan.