call my bluff

I presume erudition in my readers, but I’m going to be even more presumptuous and put that erudition to the test. For the benefit of non-British readers, Call My Bluff was a panel game that ran on BBC2 from 1965 to 1988 and on BBC1 from 1996 to 2005. It consisted of two teams of three taking turns to define a word provided by the game’s chairman. Each team had a permanent captain who was a noted wordsmith and two celebrity guests who had no previously known skills in that department. According to a prearranged system, one member of the defining team was given a card on which the real definition was printed, while the other two members were given cards bearing the single word ‘bluff’. The job of the opposing team was to identify which of the three definitions presented was the correct one. A small fraction of the words used came from the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, but most were from the twenty-volume dictionary, the one that you would need a large wheelbarrow to transport from one place to another. However, unlike in Call My Bluff, I’m not going to provide competing definitions; I will merely ask the following questions to test your knowledge of English:

1. What would you be doing if you were faccing?
2. If you were to scunify something, what would you be doing?
3. What is a thrag?
4. If someone is behaving sedly, what are they doing?
5. What is a siblet?

Now, be honest, how many of the above words did you define correctly? Be even more honest: how many of you spotted that these are not words at all, or if they are words, they are words that you would not come across in any dictionary. I discovered them in the process of commenting on other people’s blogs; they are examples of the sequence of letters that you are required to type in order to verify that you are not some spam-generating automaton. Most of these are actually pronounceable, but most are also readily identifiable for what they are. The ones that I selected do have a modicum of credibility though: ‘scunify’ and ‘faccing’ have recognizable suffixes; ‘siblet’ is not so far removed from ‘tablet’ and ‘goblet’; ‘thrag’ has a Saxon feel about it; and ‘sedly’ might just be some obscure adverb. However, they are all meaningless, although this shouldn’t be taken to imply that they cannot be given meanings.

This is where you, the reader, come in. Not every action, process, object or concept has its own word, so can you identify a vacant niche where one of the five ‘words’ could usefully be parked? In other words, can you provide a suitable definition, one that you would have been proud to think up on the spur of the moment had you been a panellist on Call My Bluff?