I overheard a couple of girls in the pub the other day. They
weren’t girls in the sugar-and-spice, pre-teenager sense, but girls as in that they
were about twenty-two years old. I suppose they were technically young women
but at my age any female under thirty is still a girl. But even old dogs can
learn new tricks and these ‘girls’ taught me one. It was one of those lessons
that I particularly love to learn. They taught me a new word.
‘I got a fantastic Ripon in Matalan yesterday’, one proudly
said to the other. Now being male and in my late forties I had no idea what a
Ripon was. That’s not really unexpected though, given that it took me a while
to work out what a Matalan was. I presumed that a Ripon was some kind of
handbag or maybe a skirt named after the hotbed of haute couture where it was
first designed. I’m not really au fait with women’s fashion. Or men’s fashion
either come to that. I tend to just stumble around in the dark of a morning,
grab whatever’s lying on the floor and that’s my attire for the day. If it fits
then I know it belongs to me and the Beloved, and that’s good enough for me.
What the other girl said explained the situation though. ‘I
love it when you get a Ripon, it’s nice to get your own back. They try to rip
you off so much these days.’
Ah! So it wasn’t Ripon, the cathedral city of North
Yorkshire. She used the term rip-on to
mean the opposite of rip-off, a bargain, a transaction where she got more value
for money than she’d expected.
I loved it. Isn’t the English language magnificent?
© Shaun Finnie 2012
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