Quizzes for a trivia text maniac

Jan 27 2008 by Alan Ross, Magic 1170

OCCASIONALLY on the Text Trivia Tease on the breakfast show, I come up with a subject that rumbles around for a while.

I went off for a fortnight’s holiday over the festive season, having asked a certain question on my last show before the break.

It was about a piece of antique slang long since fallen by the wayside on our great word highway.

When I got back, I answered the phone to a listener who’d been asking his mates at work and down the pub what a “mushroom faker” was.

He’d not heard the answer and it was driving him mad. This can be infuriating. I do put the answer up on our website, but this particular chap didn’t have internet access.

This week we ploughed the same furrow and came up with “Pudding Spoiler”.

It turns out this featured in an episode of TV’s The Little House on the Prairie so quite a few people knew what it was . . . slang for a long-winded vicar.

Preaching at ridiculous length, a Pudding Spoiler would go on for so long that when at last his poor congregation were released for what was left of Sunday, they’d return home to find the pudding that had been steaming on the stove completely blackened and burned.

Makes you wonder just what slang phrases we use today are destined to be tomorrow’s oddities.

I’d like to nominate “24/7,” “text maniac,” and “coffin dodger” for the chop for starters.

Time has also made a lot of the “groovy” words from the 1960s seem antique, fab though they were at the time. “Swinging” or “dodgy”? You’ll have your own candidates that either make you smile or scowl.

And “mushroom faker”? That’s slang for a traveller who, on the lookout to make some quick cash, would collect damaged umbrellas found discarded in the street, repair them enough to make them just serviceable, and then flog them door to door.

A sort of Arthur Daley of bumbershoots.