Off: Help w/ British Terms

[Eric Siegerman]

On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 10:36:16PM -0000, Jill Strobridge wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "DRider" <Hawkwind at ATTBI.COM>
> > punter
> the definition in this case is probably the one where 'punt' means to
> stake against the bank or to back a horse - so 'punter' is a
> professional gambler.  It's apparently derived from French 'ponter'.
> How the modern usage of punter to mean the audience of a rock band has
> evolved I have no idea - but I guess an element of gambling is
> involved - buy a ticket and who knows what you will get!

Perhaps racetrack workers generalized it to refer to all their
paying customers, not just the pros; and the term then got
further generalized to other sorts of entertainments.

> > bugger
> interesting one this!  The origin is from Latin - probably early
> medieval - apparently 'a Bulgarian heretic, believed capable of any
> crime'.   Hence it came to represent 'one guilty of bestiality and
> unnatural vice'.

That being, of course, the worst crime they could dream of...

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics at telepres.com
|  |  /
A distributed system is one on which I cannot get any work done,
because a machine I have never heard of has crashed.
        - Leslie Lamport