etym. wazzocks ME ( iybtyba )
guilty postscript added a few days later ...
Confessions
Many years ago, in the subconscious part of my mind that discovers unlikely things, in the middle of a conversation with a trusting and deeply affectionate woman, I found a near-assonance between mike harding’s derogatory noun, often aimed at people whose wit and intelligence were less nimble than his own, “wazzocks”, and the French plural noun for birds, “oiseaux”, which a northern student beginning to learn french might easily mis-pronounce.
I lied to her.
I told her that wazzocks were an extinct british bird, slow moving and too trusting, like a cross between a wood pigeon and a turkey, and were once commonly found roosting in the rafters of large buldings such as churches and tithe barns, up until the period following the dissolution of the monasteries and during the increasingly common ownership of hunting guns, around which time they disappeared for ever.
If it isn’t too late, I really ought to apologise.
