Pit your wits in opposition to Quentin Letts and Boris Johnson in new quiz

They’re each good writers and each joined the Mail this yr, however columnist Boris Johnson and sketchwriter Quentin Letts have one thing else in frequent – over the previous six months they’ve helped broaden our vocabularies. So have you ever been maintaining? And what number of of their extra abstruse* phrases are you aware? Test your phrase information with our dastardly dictionary quiz.

LETTS’S LEXICON 

COPROLALIA

As in: Mr Keith reheated a few of these sweary messages despatched by Mr Dominic Cummings, the coprolalic former No 10 adviser.

a) Prone to fibs and exaggeration

b) Short-sighted

c) Obsessive use of scatological language

ORLOP

As in: But allow us to park the cynicism and categorical surprise that 10 Downing Street had for as soon as taken cognisance of protests from the orlop deck, and had achieved so lower than every week after a backbench mutiny.

a) Slippery, slimy

b) Type of wooden utilized in shipbuilding

c) Platform protecting the maintain of a ship

CAPTIOUS

As in: The sole linguistic sensation was when Mr Hancock stated ‘there’s so many questions’ and Judge Hallett butted in to right his grammar with ‘there have been’. Hancock paused simply sufficient of a nanosecond to point that he thought of her captious.

a) Irritating and dim

b) Disposed to seek out fault

c) Lacking any sense of humour

OXTERS

As in: Time and once more Mr Keith ‘put it to you, Mr Johnson’. When barristers say ‘I put it to you’, they imply: ‘You have been in all this as much as your oxters from the beginning, weren’t you, Dr Crippen?’

a) Armpits

b) Top hat (plural)

c) Nostrils

MOMME

As in: When Messrs Hancock and Keith arrived within the inquiry room at ten o’clock it turned obvious we had a vogue conflict. Both have been carrying pink ties. Mr Hancock’s was one we noticed typically when he was a cupboard minister. Alongside good-looking Hugo’s, it regarded a bit Tie Rack, or at greatest Marks & Sparks.

Pukka Mr Keith KC is certainly one of life’s charcoal double-breasted New & Lingwood males and his neckwear was altogether extra beautiful, a richer coral, a heavier momme.

a) Japanese unit of weight

b) Unit of measurement used to grade silk

c) Clothes worn by a dandy

MILQUETOAST

As in: It was International Men’s Day – when the world’s sniffling milquetoasts have their second.

a) Timid, submissive, or ineffectual individual

b) Cry-baby

c) Low standing French aristocrat

CLERESTORY

As in: In the Crossbenches sat varied inertia retailers from the mandarinate and nut-brown know-alls from the higher clerestories of HM diplomatic service.

a) Epic tales instructed by males of the fabric

b) Upper a part of the nave, choir, and transepts of a cathedral

c) Social climbers

POOHBAH

As in: An honour to take a seat among the many careerists and the crocked and yesterday’s poohbahs?

a) An individual who holds many places of work on the identical time

b) An individual or physique with a lot affect or many features

c) A pompous or self-important individual

PETTIFOGGING

As in: For good or unwell, proper or unsuitable, lockdown or liberty, he [Boris Johnson] had the stamp of democratic validity. That must not ever be made subservient to the pettifogging of hindsight.

a) Petty, quibbling

b) Slight confusion

c) Accident, mishap

SEPPUKU

As in: He [Lord Cameron] can in all probability make even the decapitation of his breakfast boiled egg resemble an act of formality seppuku.

a) Ancient type of sudoku

b) Ceremonial suicide

c) Sucking up

SAL VOLATILE

As in: Lady Hallett, presiding, saved calling brief adjournments, fairly presumably to clutch maintain of the sal risky bottle and provides it a great sniff.

a) Ammonium carbonate resolution used as a restorative after fainting

b) White spirit

c) French slang for fiery low-cost brandy

OTIOSE

As in: Mind you, if oblivion is imminent, sartorial requirements could also be otiose.

a) Depressing, lacklustre

b) Redundant, superfluous

c) A major enchancment

ACCIDIE

As in: The chamber, in a state of superior accidie, groaned.

a) Apathy, lethargy, torpor

b) Irritation, annoyance

c) Bad hangover

GRALLOCH

As in: Forward to victory. Let the gralloch of Rishi Sunak start! That was the temper as Labour’s convention closed.

a) Form of torture devised in Scotland

b) To trample or squash (correctly, a small bug)

c) To disembowel (correctly, a deer)

CENOBITE

As in: Money could also be tight nevertheless it doesn’t suggest all of us should turn out to be self-denying cenobites.

a) Miser who will get pleasure from going with out

b) Hermit

c) Member of a spiritual order residing in a group

CAUDILLO

As in: Tim Farron, as soon as their caudillo, tore into the Young Liberals for wanting housing targets. He referred to as them Thatcherites.

a) Great hope for the longer term

b) Head of state of a Spanish-speaking nation, particularly a army dictator

c) Swaggering, charismatic chief, macho

BORIS’S BIG WORDS

SEA-GIRT

As in: This fortunate sea-girt nation is distantly fringed with much less lucky and fewer affluent locations, the place folks have solely a fraction of this nation’s per capita GDP.

a) Surrounded by the water of the ocean or ocean

b) Made rich by the bounty of the ocean

c) Populated by seaside lovers

COPROLITE

As in: It is, they protested, a glorified phosphate coprolite in an in any other case huge and inhospi-table ocean.

a) Type of semi-precious stone present in water

b) Fossilised animal faeces

c) Underwater sand mountain

AUTARKY

As in: It is autarky that results in aggression, and free commerce that results in peace and prosperity; and what’s good for Walmart might be good for America and the world. Remember the Nineteen Thirties.

a) Early type of street rage, comes from ‘auto anarchy’

b) A state or society which is economically unbiased

c) Greed, avarice

SCOFFLAW

As in: Yes, of us, if this plan is to make any sense in any respect, it should logically imply that we’re keen to ship repeated and incorrigible scofflaws to jail – for smoking!

a) A defendant who is ready to make a decide chuckle

b) An individual who lives their life to nice extra, e.g. by means of consuming and consuming

c) An individual who flouts the regulation, particularly by failing to adjust to a rule that’s troublesome to implement successfully

AUGUR

As in: If I see a single magpie, I believe it is unhealthy luck, and I begin scanning the skies like an augur for that essential second magpie.

a) A spiritual official who noticed pure indicators, particularly in birds’ behaviour, deciphering these as divine approval or disapproval

b) Bird of prey that enjoys the flesh of different birds, from Anglo-Saxon for ‘feathered cannibal’

c) Bird-spotter who specialises in looking for black species

HOPLITE

As in: These hoplite helmet-hairstyled girls are a part of a sporting sensation – the worldwide arrival of ladies’s soccer.

a) Particularly agile one-legged Visigoth warrior

b) A closely armed footsoldier of Ancient Greece

c) Roman infantry division that used big rabbits to hold provides

PANKRATION

As in: By the best way, if the Musk-Zuckerberg bout does go forward, I problem the winner to a Cumberland wrestling pankration.

a) Ancient Greek sports activities occasion combining boxing and wrestling, launched in 648 BC

b) Jousting contests between monks from totally different non secular orders, time period first utilized in 1362

c) Sausage-eating contest originating within the Lake District

BUND

As in: If now we have to create complete newt-friendly bunds to cease them falling in, we’ll.

a) Luxury resort

b) Embankment or causeway

c) Bridge or stairway

PLASHY

As in: We have plashy meadows and pleasant bogs and all over the place there are nice little our bodies of water.

a) Abundant and fertile

b) Large or expansive

c) Wet or marshy

LEAL

As in: Look at Putin’s place. It was solely three weeks in the past that Yevgeny Prigozhin — founding father of the Wagner Group and hitherto seen as his leal and devoted mastiff — immediately turned on his grasp and despatched his troops to march on Moscow.

a) Loyal and true, as in being loyal to your King

b) Humble and low rating

c) Hanger-on who sticks so tightly to a grasp or group he is sort of a leech

MULCT

As in: Everyone can see what is absolutely occurring right here. Khan has so badly mismanaged the funds of Transport for London that he must steadiness the books – and that’s the reason he has immediately determined to mulct the motorist once more.

a) Extract cash from somebody by wonderful or taxation

b) Hold a gaggle of harmless folks hostage

c) Throw backyard waste on prime of somebody’s head

HOMUNCULUS (PLURAL HOMUNCULI)

As in: What would you like in case you make little pink plastic homunculi and their related merchandise?

a) Doll-like individual

b) Perfect individual

c) Miniature individual

EPICENE

As in: In Barbie world, epicene males with peroxide hair prance round in faux fur coats and admire the Barbie women, however don’t know what to do subsequent.

a) Muscular, chiselled, having heroic qualities

b) With traits of each sexes; of neither intercourse; sexless

c) Flamboyant, theatrical, over-the-top

PHILOPROGENITIVE

As in: And what would you like, if you’re a Hollywood studio? You need bums on seats. You need younger children going to see it and loving it — and passively absorbing its philoprogenitive message.

a) Proudly pro-feminist

b) Over-spending on plastic tat

c) Producing many offspring (or fond of kids)

* Abstruse: obscure, obscure, recondite.

Answers 

Letts’s Lexicon: Coprolalia C, Orlop C, Captious B, Oxters A, Momme A is the dictionary definition – a unit of weight equal to three.75g – however B can be right, Milquetoast A, Clerestory B, Poohbah A, B and C are all right, Pettifogging A, Seppuku B, Sal Volatile A, Otiose B. Accidie A, Gralloch C, Cenobite C, Caudillo B.

Boris’S Big Words: Sea-girt A, Coprolite B, Autarky B, Scofflaw C, Augur A, Hoplite B, Pankration A, Bund B, Plashy C, Leal A, Mulct A, Homunculus C, Epicene B, Philoprogenitive C.