n parentheses. The things that Americans call “brackets” [these ones], Brits know better as “square brackets.”
The Letter B
1 n cup of tea: Would you like a brew? Northern English but widely understood elsewhere in the U.K. At a stretch it could refer to coffee, too. 2 n pint of beer: Fancy heading out after work for a couple of brews?
n dependable person; rock. Someone who will stand tall in the face of adversity. A largely upper-class term, it is hardly in use nowadays.
n shit scared: He didn’t do very well in the interview – we felt a bit sorry for him as he was clearly bricking it.
adj particularly good: I had a brilliant holiday; What a brilliant night out. It’s a little bit childish — you’d be less likely to refer to a “brilliant board meeting” or a “brilliant shag.” Also carries the usual other meanings (as “gifted” or “luminescent”) in the U.K.
n Steak sauce. A mysterious thick brown sort of savoury sauce. Popularly added to burgers, chips and other pub-type food, brown sauce is more than ketchup and less chunky than the American “relish”. I believe it contains vinegar. And probably some other stuff. Also it is brown.
n broom. Brits use the word “broom” too (they don’t talk about witches flying on brushsticks), but not as often.
1 n dish made from boiled vegetables (often cabbage), potatoes, onions and sometimes some leftover meat. 2 n Greek person, usually shortened to “bubble.” From Cockney rhyming slang “bubble and squeak” / “Greek”: Did you hear Harry’s brother’s gone and started dating a bubble?
pron. “bub-shun” n Scottish baby. From the German “bubchen”, meaning a young boy. Has a cosy, affable connotation. You’d never refer to your baby as a bubtion if it had lately been sick on your three-piece suit and drooled in your cornflakes.
1 n jerk. Or substitute any other inoffensive insult (“git” works just as well) 2 v sodomise 3 -off a friendlier alternative to “fuck off.” 4 interj “rats.” Stand-alone expletive usable in a similar way as “bollocks”: Oh, bugger!
1 n posterior; pretty much the British equivalent of “butt.” 2 v mooch: Mind if I bum a ride home? or perhaps more amusingly: Can I bum a fag? What the Americans call “bums” Brits call “tramps.”
n copious amounts of paperwork or literature: You would not believe the bloody stack of bumf that came with my new video recorder. Possibly derived from the army and a contraction of the phrase “bum fodder,” i.e., toilet paper.
1 v stick; wedge. Push something into something, often something that was not intended for that purpose: Eventually we discovered that it wasn’t working because our son had bunged a Polish sausage into the video recorder. 2 n stopper, often rubber. The type of thing you use to block fluid from coming out of things. 3 n bribe intended to buy silence. A monetary reward given to someone in order to buy their tacit agreement, often associated with the fixing of sports games: Everyone knows that their manager’s taking bungs to throw the matches anyway. 4 – up full of cold; congested: I can’t come into work today, one of the kids is bunged up.
v skip (as in school); play truant: I think I’m just going to bunk off and ride my bike today.
v break into somewhere and nick stuff. Americans have the hilarious word “burglarize,” which means the same thing; for all I know, Yanks might refer to the event as burglarization. Or perhaps not.
v sit in the street playing an instrument and hoping people will give you money. See also “waster.”
n look: Hey, give me a butcher’s at that. ‘From Cockney rhyming slang: “butcher’s hook” / “look.”
n colloquial name for something sold in a chippy that’s served inside a roll or a folded-over piece of bread. It’s a bit of a northern English/Scottish thing, and has more recently started being used to cover pretty much any sort of sandwich. The most popular is a chip butty, but you can also buy bacon or fish butties without seeming strange. May be derived from the German “butterbrot” meaning “butter bread” and referring to a similar sort of dish.