n something very easy.

n bumper-car. Once used in U.S. English too, but now chiefly British. Odd that it should imply an aim to the game that is quite the opposite of what it is.

adj something either shady: I bought it off some dodgy punter in the pub, sexually suggestive: The old bloke in the office keeps saying dodgy things to me at the coffee machine, or simply not quite as things should be: I got rid of that car; the suspension felt dodgy. What appalling sentence structure. Fuck it.

n stubbed-out end of a cigarette. More commonly Brits use the international term “butt.”

n See “bollocks.” I’m not writing it twice.

n something which has been made a complete mess of: When we finally got his tax return through it turned out it was a dog’s breakfast. Why the dog should have any worse breakfast than the rest of us, I have no idea.

n same as “dog’s breakfast” (marginally more common).

n lowly servant; gopher. Your dogsbody would be the person who polished your shoes, emptied your bins and cleaned your loo. That is, if you were lucky enough to have someone like that. The term may originate from a dried pea-based foodstuff used in the Royal Navy, which sailors called “dog’s body”. Perhaps the first person to be called a dogsbody closely resembled a dried pea.

n welfare. An allocation of money that the government gives to unemployed people, ostensibly to help them eat and clothe themselves during their fervent search for gainful employment but really for buying fags and lager. on the dole receiving welfare: Bob’s been on the dole since his accident.

n ages; a very long time: That shop’s been there for donkey’s years. The term originates from the fact that donkeys are larger than human beings, and so if we were all planets then years would be longer on the donkey-planet than they would on the human-planet. This is certainly the most likely explanation.

n money. A fairly London-based term until being popularised by the Harry Enfield pop song “Loadsamoney.”

v sit about not doing much. You might describe one of your less-productive colleagues as a dosser, because he (or she, I suppose — laziness is not quite confined to males) sits around dossing all the time instead of working.

v holding two drinks at once. The double-entendre is not entirely lost on the Brits and so it’s best not used in overly polite company.

adj surname which consists of two hyphenated names, such as “Rhys-Jones” or “Fox-Kelton.”

adj perhaps most kindly characterised as “slow.” Someone described as dozy might be a little sluggish in understanding things.

n pron. “draft” the flap inside the chimney of an open fire which you can open or close to allow more or less air into the hearth. Americans know it better as a “damper,” which is a part of car suspension in the U.K.

n pron. “drafts” two-player board game where each player gets sixteen pieces and takes the opponent’s by jumping over them diagonally. I mean the pieces jump diagonally, not the players. Though it’s an interesting point as to whether two people could really jump over one another diagonally, given that the vector is relative to the positions of them both. In the U.S. the game is known as “checkers.”

n thumb-tack. A pin with a fairly large flat head. So called because they were once used to draw blood during satanic rituals. I just guessed that one, it might be wrong.

n bathrobe; the outfit that you wear if you’re an attractive young lady coming out of the bath to answer the door in a coffee advertisement. Or if you’re Hugh Heffner. Ah, the great contradictions of modern life.

n drunk driving. The art of driving a car whilst intoxicated: Sarah’s stuck at home right now, she got done for drink driving last week. Why the Brits chose a phrase that doesn’t make linguistic sense, I am not entirely sure.