Following the failure of a parliamentary motion to ennoble seven times unelected former UKIP leader Nigel Farage with a peerage or a knighthood, the Oxford English Dictionary has announced that it is to honour him with his very own word in the planned 4th edition of the full English Dictionary.
The scheduled entry will see Farage immortalised as the collective noun “a farage of lies”.
The word is believed to have been coined spontaneously by several hundred thousand listeners to BBC Radio Four, irritated by news producers using Farage as an off the peg oppositional quote on everything from hare coursing to European Commission policy on jam and Greek breast sizes, before during and after the Brexit referendum.
“The near impossibility of turning on any news programme without hearing him ranting on about some bigoted nonsense or other has clearly played a significant role in the emergence of this most useful word,” OED spokesperson Mr Richard Shoneri told the Rochdale Herald explaining that the word is probably an unconscious compound of “farrago” – a “confused mixture” and – “barrage”, a “vigorous or rapid outpouring or projection of many things at once”.
The word will be simultaneously included in the new edition of Roget’s Thesaurus as a synonym for “endless stream”, “limitless flow” and “absolute fucking shit-storm”, while the full expression “farage of lies” will be listed alongside, “massive sack full of whoppers”, “sty full of porkies” and “infinity of fibonaccis”.
Speaking to the media Monday Farage said that he was surprised and extremely honoured to be given his very own entry in the dictionary.
“To be immortalised in the Queen’s English is an honour accorded to very few people and even fewer politicians and is frankly belated recognition for the major contribution I have made over the years to political discourse in the United Kingdom,” he said adding that it went some way to making up for the disappointment of not being granted a peerage or a knighthood in the Queen’s New Year’s honours list.
“I was anticipating a Lordship at the very least but then what else can you expect from a family of Germans and Greeks. They should go back to their own countries and stop sponging of the British tax payers,” he said.
OED spokesperson Shoneri confirmed that the new word is in line with the dictionary’s recently adopted policy of associating popular words with celebrities and prominent public figures, in an effort to raise the dictionary’s profile among young people who may otherwise be tempted to use txtspk.
“We’ve been looking for some time to associate Nigel with a word that’s in common day usage by some of our younger exponents,” he said.
“Unfortunately Chris Evans had already bagged “gobshite” and Michael Gove has frankly made “twat” his and his alone,” he said adding that they had also been thinking of immortalising Jeremy Corbyn, with “quislyn” but that the younger generation seems generally not to recognise the reference to the WW2 Norwegian Nazi leader Vidkun Quisling whose surname entered common parlance as a name for someone who collaborates with an occupying enemy force and is subsequently executed.
“It’s a measure of the uniqueness of the man that Nigel was able to bring his own entirely new and immediately recognisable word to us for inclusion,” he said.
“Given the enormity of his mendacity we can think of no more fitting tribute than to be immortalised as “a farage of lies”, ” he added.
