Faq Part 3
FAQ for newsgroup uk.rec.sheds, version 2&2/7th 1999-11-08 (roughly)
Ride of the Shedheads Theme Tune
Part 3 of 8 : Terminology
"Words?"
Since the original threads and newsgroup got going, we have a few new
terms:
tqt (pronounced 'tat', obviously): top quality tat, ie the sort worthy
of storage in your shed. Also some derived acronyms such as lgt(low
grade tat), lqt(low quality tat), mqt(medium quality tat), and so on.
pshed (pronounced 'shed'): a pseudo-shed, or proto-shed, or even
para-shed. Something that isn't a True Shed but has many shed-like
attributes.
shedoid: While a pshed doesn't look like a shed (from the outside) but
has shedlike attributes, the shedoid looks like one but isn't.
Right Wayne?
sheditation: The preferred in-shed activity. Often involves entomology,
non-linear ratiocination, brunellobibendation, and other
things too worrying to mention in this family newsgroup.
sheddily available: more accurate then 'readily available' for most
sheds. Thanks to jambo@spuddy.mew.co.uk (Ian James Abbott)
Molish, mantle (as in "I'm going outside Dear to mantle my shed") and
teriorate have started being used to mean the construction and erection
of sheds and sheddy artifacts.
mangents: not in your dictionary? Well, if knowing that Ed's are large
and mine are small and toroidal doesn't help, you'll have to go to
DejaNews and try to find the original posts on the subject - should be
easy, as DejaNews is not at all sheddy, and has indexes and everything.
Pete Shaw found on the web some great word definitions that may not be
in your dictionary, but I've viciously trimmed the list:
HAXBY (n.)
Any garden implement found in a potting shed whose exact purpose is
unclear.
COTTERSTOCK (n.)
A piece of wood used to stir paint and thereafter stored uselessly in a
shed in perpetuity. (Hmmmmmm I've got several of these)
LOW EGGBOROUGH (n.)
A quiet little unregarded man in glasses who is building a new kind of
atomic bomb in his garden shed.
NOTTAGE (n.)
Nottage is the collective name for things which you find a use for
immediately after you've thrown them away. For instance, your
greenhouse has been cluttered up for years with a huge piece of
cardboard and great fronds of gardening string. You at last decide to
clear all this stuff out, and you burn it.
Within twenty-four hours you will urgently need to wrap a large parcel,
and suddenly remember that luckily in your greenhouse there is some
cardb...
KELLING (participial vb.)
A person searching for something, who has reached the futile stage of
re-looking in all the places they have looked once already, is said to
be kelling.
HASSOP (n.)
The pocket down the back of an armchair used for storing two-shilling
bits and pieces of Lego.
WOKING (participial vb.)
Standing in the kitchen wondering what you came in here for.
EXETER (n.)
All light household and electrical goods contain a number of vital
components plus at least one exeter. If you've just mended a fuse,
changed a bulb or fixed a blender, the exeter is the small, flat or
round plastic or bakelite piece left over which means you have to undo
everything and start all over again.
The full list can be found at :
http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~nhughes/dna/stories/liff.html
Thanks to Douglas Adams.
The collective noun for a number of sheds is currently undecided: the
Master JD has supported the suggestion 'a dave of sheds' submitted by
David John, due to the surprisingly high percentage of Daves involved in
this newsgroup.
Another suggestion was 'an allotment of sheds' but it's thought it may
be unwise to overload the word allotment. Other ideas include
'decrepitude' and similar words.
"Encryption?"
We use several forms of encryption, either for fun, to hide our true
intent from those outwith The Craft, or to avoid waking up the more
elderly Sheddi with shocking language. The main forms are described
herewith:
ROT13: Certain words are anathema to shedders. Where it's necessary to
use them we tend to use the ROT13 encoding system, which gives rise to:
arj jbex (and its phonetic version jaybecks, as this one is really
nasty) obhtug rnea (note that these two are anagrams of their encoded
form!!!) and many others.
Some words are just nicer in ROT13 - eg. snegvat.
If you don't have ROT13 on your browser, a program for that is at:
http://www.brookings.net/~darinaf/rot13.html
For small stuff, a post-it note can be used by writing on it:
ABCDEFGHIJKLM
NOPQRSTUVWXYZ which can be quite hfrshy
In general, any word which might imply parting with money or "achieving
closure" of some project, or undisarranging things, may cause a shedder
distress and should be avoided, either by ROTting, or using the old
favourite, creative circumlocution, or our other encryption system,
Bcrypt: this consists of simply swapping each pair of letters, and
although it hardly needs software to do, having been developed from
everyday typing errors, Brian Skinner has a program that will do it
for you, at http://www.brisk.demon.co.uk/tp2.zip
Also, of late, the any-old-anagram and "funetics" systems have been
becoming more and more popular.
The use of acronyms is endemic: most of them are resonably obvious if
you've read the group for a while, and often they're explained in the
footnotes anyway: we like footnotes. The common Usenet acronyms such
iirc, hth, hand, afaik, and so on, are explained at
http://www.usenet.org.uk/usenet-information.html#BTW but we have our
own as well....
We use several versions of WOCAx [Who Of Course Are x] which was
originally used with x=B on soc.culture.british to describe the
Serapu {R13}.
We also use a lot of SWx and HWx for She Who and He Who - you can
usually fill in the x from context or past usage. BA is Brown Ale. PP
is Pork Pie. wwp is 'wireless with pictures', also known as the
'farseeing machine' in the creative circumlocution system, or the
etelivisno in Bcrpyt.
You may also notice "oomeX", where X may be any of several body parts.
Read it as a noun derived from the statement "ooooo, me X!"