Thing Not To Make Today: a boob.

It's boobies who make boobs.



No, no, not that sort of a booby!

The booby in question is an foolish or ignorant person, and a boob, in Britain, is an embarrassing blunder. It's something like asking a woman her due date when she's not pregnant, or expressing an opinion about the intellectual abilities of policemen and then discovering that your companion is in plain clothes.

Stuff like sending back the gazpacho because it's cold, or asking for a half-price ticket at an adult-rated film.

If you're in Australia, however, a boob is a prison, and anything that's boob is the sort of low quality stuff that is, I'm told, provided in jail.

Someone who's boob-happy is suffering mentally from the strains of prison life, and a boobhead is a someone who's been in prison repeatedly.

How to avoid making boobs?

Either stop talking entirely, or develop a habit of caution and kindness, I suppose.

But it's probably easier just to shrug and enjoy the boobs as they come.

Thing Not To Make Today: a boob. This word comes from booby, which is from the Spanish bobo, from the Latin balbus, stammering. Boob meaning prison comes from the unfortunate American expression booby-hatch which means mental hospital.