Saturday 19 December 2009

Figjam


The Inky Fool overheard this little exchange between two British journalists coming out of Gordon Brown's press conference in Copenhagen yesterday:

Journo 1: That was so figjam.
Journo 2: Figjam?
Journo 1: Fuck I'm Great, Just Ask Me.

Figjam is similar to the obscene acronym Snafu (Situation Normal: All Fucked Up), but utterly different to Sweet F.A. which is Sweet Fanny Adams, an unfortunate girl who was murdered in 1867. Sailors in the Royal Navy thought that their meat rations resembled her corpse so she became synonymous with "tinned mutton". By 1919 the term, though still military, had drifted to mean little or nothing.

You can of course make jam out of figs if you particularly want to. There's a recipe here.


Figjam

Update: After writing that last post I went to a bookshop to do some Christmas shopping and came across a whole book about military slang titled FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recongnition).

2 comments:

  1. Did this acronym first come into the public consciousness in relation to England cricketer Kevin Pietersen?

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  2. The Urban Dictionary certainly has the term down as Australian and I also know that their cricket team refer to Pietersen as figjam, so that's pretty much how it must have got to Britain. Unfortunately, in terms of google it's hard to filter out recipes and restaurant reviews.

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