spoof

I picked this because it was one of the Wordle words this week, and my dad said, I quote, ‘Dodgy word IMAO’, although that might have been because he only got a five. Either way, I thought I’d find out if it is, as he says, ‘dodgy’.

When we say something’s a spoof, we usually mean it’s a parody or a send-up – an imitation that exaggerates the original for laughs. We usually use it to describe stuff on TV like films and sketches – think ‘The Office’, ‘Airplane!’ and my favourite film evs, ‘Shaun of the Dead’.

But the original spoof started life on stage, not screen.

Arthur Roberts, who looks a bit scary, TBH

In the 1880s, an English music-hall comedian by the name of Arthur Roberts created a parlour game which he named ‘Spoof’. No one knows exactly why he called it that, but it was probably just a nonsense word he thought sounded funny and playful. Spoof was a guessing and bluffing game involving hiding coins in one hand and then guessing how many each person had. The aim was to bluff confidently while keeping a straight face (and according to ChatGPT, people still play a version of it in pubs, although I can’t say I’ve ever seen that).

Arthur Roberts went on to turn his game into a music-hall routine which became very popular. And because the game involved tricking people while remaining poker-faced, audiences started using the word ‘spoof’ to describe any kind of trick or hoax. It wasn’t long before it appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary – in 1889 – and only a few short years later it went global, appearing in an article in the Evening Star in New Zealand in 1896. From there it stuck, later moving from ‘hoax’ to ‘comedy imitation’ in the 20th century as writers and performers began using it to describe send-ups and parodies.

So there you go. No complicated root or Latin etymology – just a Victorian comedian having a bit of a laugh with a silly game, and somehow coming up with a word that would stick around for 140 years. Does that count as dodgy? Depends on your point of view, I suppose.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the modern-day version for faking an identity online, that appeared in the 1970s – so it’s still the same old bluff, but just with fancier tech.

ihi

This is the noise Michael Jackson used to make in most of his songs. I jest, of course. This is in fact a really lovely Māori word that doesn’t have an equivalent in English. It describes that feeling you get from an amazing performance that gives you goosebumps. Here’s a quote from Māori Language Commission chief executive Ngahiwi Apanui on the meaning of ‘ihi’:

‘It's a combination of something spiritual and something physical … It's the kind of x-factor the performer has ... it’s hitting you in the heart and the hair is standing up on the back of your neck and you’re thinking, “wow, this is amazing”.’

‘Ihi’ is often accompanied by ‘wehi’, which describes the impact that ihi has on someone.

Another awesome Māori word that doesn’t have an English equivalent is pōhēhē, a person who wrongly assumes they know something and then continues to insist that they’re right. I think we all know a pōhēhē.

The Māori language is called ‘te reo’, which simply means ‘the language’. It became one of New Zealand’s three official languages in 1987 (the others being English and NZ sign language). Originally there was no written version of it, until European settlers came along. These days the Māori alphabet is made up of 15 letters, two of which are digraphs (which is a fancy way of saying there are two pairs of letters for one sound). Oh, and that little line over the ‘a’ of Māori is called a ‘macron’ (nothing to do with the French president), which tells you it should be pronounced as a long vowel.

The Māori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa which means ‘land of the long white cloud’ (the much less romantic English name comes from the Dutch province of Zeeland).

[Disclaimer: I’m by no means an expert on te reo, so if you’d like to find out more, head on over to the Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori or Māori Language Commission’s website to find out more.]