I'm not 'chuffed' to hear these words show my age

A whole raft of 'slang' words have been declared obsolete, according to new research, but Sam Leith says don't worry... it's only a matter of time before they come back into fashion

- Sam Leith

You know that feeling you get when you read an obituary in the paper of a public figure and it comes as a horrible shock? A shock not because you were surprised by their going, but because you would have sworn blind they had died a decade previously. Who knew him out of ’Allo ’Allo! was still with us, you marvel. Except – oh. There’s probably a German word for this sort of double-take. And it applies, as a sort of special subcategory, to the reaction of anyone north of 40 years old to the recent report on “out-of-date” slang.

Researchers from WordTips (me neither) surveyed 310 different obsolete slang terms as defined in the crowdsourced slang resource UrbanDictionary and counted the numbers of “upvotes” and “downvotes” that each term had accrued from the site’s users.

Among the antiquated expressions that users of the site professed apparent nostalgia for were such epithets as “bugger all”, “sod off”, “pear-shaped”, “chuffed” and “innit”.

The most fondly remembered of all obsolete slang terms was, apparently, that all-purpose not-quite-the-f-word intensifier “bloody”.

All these epithets are staples of my day-to-day vocabulary; and at 50, I’m not exactly of the generation that learned to swear from Biggles and Algy. As a professed “old fart”, I was, you could say, not chuffed – that someone seems to think these much-loved and used words are obsolete. I never got the bloody memo.