[Jayne Osborn]

Why 'damn' smiley-face thingies, Chris?

When writing with a tongue in one's cheek it's much more apparent with a

I quite like 'em, actually

Jayne

[Rob Stuart]

Racist!cccccc

[Jayne Osborn]

Coming after my post, Rob, it looks as if you mean me -- though I know you don't

[Chris O'Carroll]

Originally Posted by Adrian Fry

This is the weakest competition I have ever seen in the Speccie: Jaspistos will be revolving in his grave. Lucy is going to get 'a twat of tweeters' about a hundred times from various entrants, Bah!

On the other hand, depending on how Lucy allocates the prize money, the per-word rate for winners in this comp could be spectacular, since each entry will consist, essentially, of eight one-word jokes.

Do you reckon that we have to nail all eight to win anything? Or will she pick and choose grains of wheat from our chaff-intensive venereal lists?

[John Whitworth]

Oh, the second I think. Though it is peculiar she hasn't said that.

[Adrian Fry]

Were I judging, I'd want a complete list of corkers for the extra fiver and pick individual contributions from the rest in a bid to bribe everyone into forgetting what a feeble contest it was.

Interesting about the New Statesman version back in the 1930s, though. Were there still charwomen at that date?

[John Whitworth]

Good Lord, Adrian. You must be unsettlingly young. During the war (before my time) there was a popular comedy show called ITMA (It's that man again). One of the characters, Mona Lott, was a charwoman. And when I worked in London in the 1970s we had an old lady called Mrs Hilda Butt who did the cleaning. Was she a charwoman?

Sorry, Mon Lott was someone else. The charwoman was Mrs Mopp.

At some point the word charwoman was replaced by daily woman.

[Graham King]

(Was there not a time when charwomen became known as charladies? Was there ever a male equivalent?)

Do the collective nouns have to be actual nouns or can we - should we - make up words de novo? Does 'coin' here mean innovate the usage or create the word itself?

[Lance Levens]

An acne pit of hackers
a squeal of wags
a schmoozysine of MP's
a croakery of Frenchmen
a barackery of Dems (USA)

[Chris O'Carroll]

Originally Posted by Graham King

Do the collective nouns have to be actual nouns or can we - should we - make up words de novo? Does 'coin' here mean innovate the usage or create the word itself?

It would be quite a feat to manufacture eight new words out of thin air, or whole cloth, or whatever. I doubt that's the sort of coinage Lucy is expecting, although she'd most likely welcome creative examples of it.

She's probably looking for us to repurpose existing words, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the winning "collective nouns" aren't nouns in common parlance -- e.g, "a spic-and-span of charwomen."