Mind your language
`WHY don't you do roid rage?' asked my husband, 'Or fanny pack? — that's amusing.'
`Don't be silly,' I replied patiently. Put that down and get on with your paper on irritable bowel syndrome, or that won't be the only thing that's irrita- ble around here.'
He had been flicking through the quaintly named Fifty Years Among the New Words (edited by John Algeo, CUP, 1992) an American compilation of articles on neologisms. Roid rage is one of the supposed consequences of taking steroids to improve athletic prowess, and it was noted in 1989; a fanny pack is nothing more than what we might call a bum bag, one of those pouches on belts that became fashion- able at the end of the 1980s. By then, they were being worn in front, but in the 1970s, when they began to be advertised in catalogues for hikers' equipment, they were intended to be worn out of sight, behind, hence the (American) adjectival fanny or (British) bum.
What I didn't find among those new words was result, as in: 'We hope to get a result in the Wales match.'
An exasperated reader, John Lindsey, had written in wondering 'who started this awful habit amongst sports com- mentators of misusing the word result'. We shall never know. Like most things that seem to have begun five minutes ago, this usage has been with us for years. The OED gives a citation from 1973, in the sporting context. It seems to be an extension of results, as in 'this really gives results', i.e., good results.
Strangely enough, the second edition of the OED, which proudly carries the date 1989 on its title page, did not notice the specific meaning of results applying to a statement of profit or loss for a business, especially an annual one. The OED Additions Series for 1993 sup- plies the lack, giving quotations dating back to 1887.
As for result (`good result'), the some- times hopeless (I can give an important instance, though not in a family maga- zine such as this) Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (1990) points out perceptively the extension of the word to any advantageous outcome, citing an episode of the television series Minder from 1982: 'He's not ill — it's just a ploy to stop me getting a result!' Moreover it points to the popularity of the term among the police to mean an arrest or, more usually, a conviction. Whether the telly picks these things up from the Old Bill or the police from the television is not always easy to discern.
Dot Wordsworth
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