Monday, April 04, 2005

Chelsea players and my vocabulary

Richard Ingrams' magazine The Oldie used to have (and may still have) a feature called "Still With Us". It contained articles about people you thought were dead but turned out not to be.

Someone who falls into this category is Brian Mears, the chairman of Chelsea FC before Ken Bates. He is interviewed by Bryan Cooney in this piece from the Sunday Herald. I am posting it partly because I am a Chelsea fan and partly because Cooney is the first football writer in 29 years to teach me a new word.

In 1976 Brian Glanville described the young Ray Wilkins (still sometimes known as Butch Wilkins in those days) as a "gamin" figure on his England debut. Here Cooney calls Peter Osgood "pavonine", which my dictionary tells me means "of or resembling a peacock".

To be fair, the journalist done great.

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