Usage: “That Miss Hargreaves has a right ugly boat”
We always find it heartening when the Yoof stumble across a word dripping with history and claim it to be their own. Be it an innate love of the enduring qualities of the English language or just petty classroom one-upmanship (hey, we’re not here to judge), the delights of seeing a spotty teen unwittingly try to impress with the same utterances as his grandparents is a simple pleasure. So the re-emergence of “boat” in the classroom canon to describe someone’s face is to be applauded, coming as it does from the mid-19th-century rhyming slang “boat race”. Of course, the Yoof don’t seem to know that. You can draw straws in the staffroom to decide who gets the bonus of setting them straight. Go forth and humble - we expect it to have been discarded for some horrendous textspeak number-symbol combo by summer.
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