Words that amaze

By Lizzie Kean, 29 September 2026 

When you emigrate to another country, you spend the first few years learning that language and the ensuing years speaking it. Well done you! But what about your native language? It retreats, almost unnoticed, into a second-language version of itself, leaving you to use an impoverished vocabulary and sound like a true European!

Thankfully, taking up a career as a translator helps to reverse that process, but you do have to keep working at it. Now, after many years in the Netherlands, and more than 12 years as a translator, the English I want and love is slowly returning. One of the ways I try to encourage the process is by writing short blogs about the words that pop into my head, uninvited but very welcome. Often, it happens while I’m driving – I drive a lot. I don’t have any radio or music on, so there’s space for musings and those are often the times that words reappear after decades of disuse, now destined for blogs! Words I have featured in the past include hoodwinked, newfangled, chivvy, codswallop, brass neck, bigwigs, nincompoop, askew (and skew whiff), rigmarole…. My intention with the blogs is to plea for those words to be used in everyday language again and my intended audience is non-native English speakers but it’s very possible that some of my compatriots have suffered the same fate as far as their mother tongue is concerned so whoever you are, I hope you enjoy reading this.

The first word is game, now almost exclusively heard in connection with video games. But long before that, it referred to Monopoly or Scrabble, football (it was a good game) or venison (interesting how hunting was for game). Here the Dutch word is much more appropriate – wild. But the use of the word that interests me here is in the sentence I’m game if you are. Obviously, this is not a roe deer speaking. It means you’re up for it, whatever it is. Or in the phrase the game’s up, used when you’ve caught someone out in a secret or doing something they shouldn’t have. Not to be confused with the game’s afoot – first coined by William Shakespeare, later pinched by Arthur Conan Doyle to be much used by his eccentric sleuth.

Then there’s gammy, a word much loved by grannies and granddads as in I’ve got a gammy leg. In such cases, it describes something too vague for an actual diagnosis. The word might come from game (archaic English for lame or crooked) or from the Latin/French gambier. There may even be a connection to the Irish Celtic word cam, meaning bent or crooked.

Completely unrelated, but a perfect rhyme, is jammy. Jammy comes from the noun jam, which far from limits itself to being spread on your morning toast. Although it was jammy if you dropped your toast and it landed jam-side up! Strangely enough, jammy used to mean a pleasant or lucky situation – in a jam – whereas today that means the exact opposite. Traffic can get jammed up, the printer can have a paper jam and if you’re in a jam these days, it’s neither pleasant nor lucky. However, even nowadays, if you’re a jammy dodger, you’re either a biscuit sandwiched together with jam and with a face cut out of the top layer, or you’re very lucky.

Dickens had his Artful Dodger. A jammy dodger is apparently able to dodge bad luck, you might even say dodge the bullet. But somehow, the adjective from dodge again goes in the opposite direction. The word dodge first appeared in the 1560s in Scottish and Northern English dialects. It originally meant to trudge or go back and forth. That doesn’t explain the name of the baseball team – the Los Angeles Dodgers. Maybe they should have played dodge ball, where all you have to do is dodge the ball.

If the deal is a bit dodgy, it’s probably best not to get in on it and if the weather is dodgy, it’s probably best not to go out in it. If you have been dodging your taxes, it’s probably best to get into your Dodge rather than onto your horse. And get out of Dodge.

And that was actually where my blog stopped but before I could share it with you, three other words popped into my mind. They’re too nice not to share.

Snag. You can hit one when there’s a problem, you can get one in your tights or sweater when a hole appears, you can use it as a verb when you grab something.

Snog. UK English for making out. You can snog someone, have a snogging session or hope for a snog.

Snug. For anyone who grew up watching ‘Coronation Street’, you’ll know this as the part of the pub where the ladies sat. The other meaning is clear in the phrase – as snug as a bug in a rug.