Thursday, July 25, 2013

Yarbles! Great bolshy yarblockos to you.

One of the many beautiful features of language is that if you know the language quite well, but you sometimes come across words you don't know, you can often estimate their meaning through the context in which they are used and your knowledge of language patterns that exist. 

The yobs (Georgie, Alex and Dim), as seen in the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange, based on the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess, have a fabulous language of their own.  Guess the meaning of these words in blue from quotes from the film, if you can...


Quote 1:

Ho, ho, ho! Well, if it isn't fat stinking billy goat Billy Boy in poison! How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if ya have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou!

Quote 2:

[Alex has just struck Dim on the legs]
Dim: What did you do that for?
Alex: For being a bastard with no manners, and not a dook of an idea how to comport yourself public-wise, O my brother.
Dim: I don't like you should do what you done, and I'm not your brother no more and wouldn't want to be.
Alex: Watch that. Do watch that, O Dim, if to continue to be on live thou dost wish.
Dim: Yarbles! Great bolshy yarblockos to you. I'll meet you with chain or nozh or britva anytime, not having you aiming tolchocks at me reasonless. Well, it stands to reason I won't have it.
Alex: A nozh scrap any time you say.
Dim: Doobidoob. A bit tired, maybe. Best not to say more. Bedways is rightways now, so best we go homeways and get a bit of spatchka. Right, right?

Quotations taken from:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066921/quotes

Interested in watching the film or reading the book? Click below.



Fun side note: 

compare the similarity of the sounds Doo/bi/doob from the quotations above and tu/be/dube which forms part of the name of this website.

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