A new word for my bank

THERE are lots of things we don’t have words for in English.

The relationship, for example, between a girlfriend or boyfriend, and their partner’s parents.

It’s a very common relationship, but the word to describe it simply doesn’t exist.

As our language has evolved, we’ve poached words from elsewhere to explain things, rather than coming up with translations.

Schadenfreude, for example, or entrepreneur. Or bildungsromane – the literary genre that focuses on a character’s coming of age.

As someone who writes for a living, it’s probably not a great surprise that I’m quite a fan of English, on the whole.

But I do think it would benefit if we were to take the German approach of just occasionally smashing words into each other to create a new one with its own meaning.

For example, there’s currently no word for chores you actually enjoy doing.

Cleaning my rear-view mirror – I’m not entirely sure why I enjoy it, but it’s something I’ve always found satisfying.

But chore implies a job that you don’t enjoy doing, so I took a leaf out of the German book and stuck a couple together to make fore – a fun chore.

Not as fun as something you actually want to do, like going to a party, but not as boring as a chore that brings you no joy at all, like taking the bins out.

An aside, but I consider balling up clean socks a fore. Just one of those supposedly dull tasks that I always found quite pleasing.

My bank forced me to create another new word the other day – delibbish.

I have a cheque to pay in, and “due to Covid” the only remaining branch in the city doesn’t open on Saturdays anymore.

In fact, it opens after 9am, and closes before 5pm, so anyone who has a job with regular hours can’t go.

They do this, of course, so that people stop going to the bank altogether, and instead use the services online.

Even if you do manage to get in, you’re met at the door by a teenager who tells you that you should be doing it on the app, in much the same way your mother tells you to eat your greens.

Banks are ludicrously wealthy organisations, and this one happens to be largely owned by the taxpayer, due to their 2008 dalliances.

If it wanted to, it could open branches 24 hours a day. But by being purposefully awful, it can make its branches obsolete, so it can close even more, and keep the remaining ones open for about the same amount of time it takes me to sneeze.

They are deliberately rubbish. Delibbish.