Darn You Marian Keyes!

Image by fabi_k via Flickr

In the little free time I've had these past couple weeks I've been doing a lot of chick-lit reading.  I know, but it's summer and I can at least pretend I'm at the beach with The Bestie.  I was involuntarily sucked into the Marian Keyes shelf at the library and it refused to relinquish it's hold until I took out five of her books. While they may be formulaic in that everyone wins appropriately in the end, she does include a twist in most that I didn't see coming.  After the first one, I expected it, but I wasn't able to figure it out prior to reading it. The last one was This Charming Man and it was both my favorite and my least favorite.  Read it.  It's hard to get through at points, and in all fairness without spoiling anything, it deals with physical abuse and alcoholism. Lola's character is written in an irritating manner.  She doesn't speak in complete sentences and I eventually gave up and added in the extraneous words such as "I, and, but the, or, is". You know, small things that make her sound English and not and ESL speaker. And even that comparison is doing an injustice to ESL speakers.

But what this post is really about is my sudden and inexplicable - ok, maybe it's a tiny bit explicable - urge to use the following in conversation:

Nutter
That's the pants!
On the dole
Rough as a badger's arse
Proper, as in "have a proper breakfast"
Pop out to a shop
Ring around
Knackered
Wearing knickers
Up the duff (I think I remembered this one correctly, otherwise I have no idea what this means)

I apologize if you have the bad fortune to run into me before this has left my system and I say something that makes you look at me like I'm a nutter.