the Listener isn't gobby!

My son greeted me when he got home today with 'Mum, you have to tell me what these words mean!' He had been reading an article in the Listener, and had come across the following words which he didn't recognise. He is a uni student and was a bit shocked that he didn't know some of the vocabulary.

The words he got stuck on were

• opprobrium
• pomeranium
• whole furore
• Orpington hens
• gobby dilettante

Most of them he had been able to guess from the context but opprobrium we had to look up in a dictionary just to check that we were right. Two other words that my son commented on were 'histrionics' and 'bilge'. He said that he really liked those words. I asked him how come he knew the meaning of those two words but not some of the others - he said 'I guess I just absorbed those words somewhere along the line'.

And the word that I didn't know of them all? 'Gobby'- which is a slang word meaning loud-mouthed and offensive. So that's my new vocab for this week, courtesy of the Listener.

NB. The 'Listener' is a NZ magazine that comes out every week. As well as having feature articles and regular columnists, it lists all the TV and radio programmes available in NZ for each week.