“Dodgy”. What does this word actually *mean*?
I’m editing pieces ahead of a two-week break, so I’m doing lots in a rush.
And I keep coming across the word “dodgy”. In a quote: “If it’s not fraudulent, it is at least dodgy,” he says.
Or: “it uses dodgy websites”.
What’s the linguistic distinction that we’re drawing here? Are we saying that dodgy is legal, only in danger of veering into illegal? I don’t get it. I’m tempted to just replace it (out of quotes) with “fake”, and to see if the quoted people can’t be made to be more precise.
Ian Hargreaves, as editor at The Independent, once put out a ban on “Hey” - as in “Hey, but that’s how it is.” It adds nothing to the sentence but a spurious familiarity. I’m thinking that dodgy doesn’t really tell you anything about the object or activity being described. Either it’s illegal, or it’s not, surely; and either it’s done with the intention of defrauding people, or not. Intention counts. You can’t accidentally come up with a scheme that relieves people of their money against their will.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Yeah, that might be a bug in Microsoft Word. Just, you know, guessing (20 March 2006; score: 28.76%)
- The guaranteed way to avoid being phished; and the mobile business's best news in a decade (14 April 2005; score: 26.48%)
- Could you explain the question first, Clippy? (1 October 2004; score: 25.05%)
![[Valid RSS]](wp-includes/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}
July 28th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
Illegal or not? Crikey, if only. How about allofmp3.com? No-one seems quite sure if that’s entirely legal. How about downloading songs from file-sharing networks?
Sorry, tangent. Er, yeah, I guess when talking about the legality of something, dodgy isn’t a particularly useful word. But as far as “it uses dodgy websites” goes, I’d say “dodgy” is being used as a shorter synonym for “untrustworthy”.
July 28th, 2006 at 9:36 pm
I’m a Canadian living in the UK and Dodgy threw me for a loop when I first got here. It was a bit of a tricky word for me to get my head around at first but now I’ve grown quite attached to it. I don’t find it to be meaningless, to me its a british way of softly saying iffy/illegal/bad. The precise shade of meaning you have to determine from context which I quite like. Dodgy is a sound word as far as I’m concerned.
July 29th, 2006 at 8:34 am
It means “immoral”, but one can’t say that in public without sounding prissy. So people say “dodgy” instead.
July 29th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
I always though it came from attempting to dodge or subvert the rules (or the laws). Not the same as breaking them, but merely circumventing what’s right and proper.
July 30th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
I’ve always taken dodgy to mean “dubious origin or purpose”. Like Tony Blair and the point -and-click interface in Windows.
July 31st, 2006 at 4:04 pm
I use dodgy when I want to infer that something is either illegal or just plain bad but without the hard evidence to back up my claim. Dodgy is basically a personal opinion…. hence why i would probably be very wary of using the word in any published article. Last thing you want is a libel case thanks to some dodgy lawyer!
August 7th, 2006 at 11:06 am
*wendyg notes pedantically that David Micallef means “imply” not “infer”.
Since the “dodgy, if not fraudulent” quote was mine, I will explain what the source meant. “Dodgy” is on the edge of being criminal; “fraudulent” is over it. And I will note (also pedantically) that it’s not a word *I* use. But that’s what the source *said*. We’re not in the business of editing quotes, are we? :)
The difference is pretty much the same as the one between “suspected” and “proven”. You know, a dodgy builder is the guy who takes your money, shows up, and leaves you with a gas leak. It probably wasn’t deliberate; it *may* even have been a mistake that happens to a completely reputable guy. A fraudulent builder is the guy who takes your money and either never shows up or builds your marble bathroom with something really cheap that looks like marble but melts in hot water, because by the time you take that first bath he’s long gone.
wg