chout

I discovered this word through one of my mum’s random Wordle guesses (as we all do, sometimes she just tries random letters until Wordle says ‘yes’). And being as it’s nearly Christmas, it’s actually quite fitting. Well, half of it is, anyway. That’s because ‘chout’ has two completely different meanings.

Let’s start with the (sort-of) Christmassy one. ‘Chout’ in this sense means to joke, play the fool or mess about in a silly, good‑natured way. This meaning appears in some older English dialect dictionaries, like the Century Dictionary, a massive, multi-volume English dictionary originally published in the late 19th century.

The second, and better documented, meaning of ‘chout’ comes from a tax that Maratha rulers in western India demanded from neighbouring territories during the 17th and 18th centuries. (The Maratha were a powerful group of rulers and warriors who controlled much of western and central India during this time.) They called this ‘chauth’, which meant ‘a quarter’ in Marathi, because they demanded a quarter of the revenue from the territories they targeted. I say ‘tax’, but it was essentially protection money which rulers paid to avoid being raided by the Marathas. British administrators in India picked up the word and began describing it in English as ‘chout’.

There you go. I hope we all have a good chout this festive season – just the first kind, though. If you find yourself demanding payment from your neighbours in exchange for not setting fire to their recycling bins, you’ve got the wrong one.

(PS While I was researching this post I found Chout, a Chicago-based 90s-style grunge rock band known for their Alice in Chains-like sound and music. And I think I love them.)

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.