Abbreviations

Some abbreviations you see around the place. Some may have crept in from uk.rec.sheds, where we also occasionally see new words.


 * FCVO: For Certain Values Of (see FSVO)
 * FSVO: For Some Values Of. Thus: "Here's an interesting fact [FSVO]..."
 * LBS: Local Bike Shop
 * MDG: Mobile Death Greenhouse
 * PFDB: Polystyrene Foam Deflector Beanie
 * PSF: Paving Slab Fairy
 * WOCAB: (of the French) Who Of Course Are Abstrads. Thus:  And it is said that the French (WOCAB) do this...
 * YA foo &amp;ICMFP: You Are foo And I Claim My Five Pounds - reference to a Sunday Mirror competition of the first half of the 20th century where readers could win cash prizes by walking up to the "mystery man" (whose picture had been published in the paper), carrying the Sunday Mirror (of course) and state: "You are Chalky White and I claim my five pounds!" The reference on urc is almost always humorous or ironic.

Sometimes words are obscured by rotating them 13 letters through the alphabet (A->N, B->O etc.), known as Rot-13 or rot for short; this is very much a Sheddi affetcation. In the Shed it is Not Done to utter alarming words like "new" or "work", and these are decently obscured to arj and jbex respectively. Several urcers are also Sheddi (me, Dave Larrington, Carol Hague and others - oh, all darksiders, I wonder if that might be significant?), so some rots are now creeping inot urc. Some of the more common rots are:
 * arj: new
 * fpubby: school
 * Senapr: France
 * Serapu: French
 * Trezna(l): German(y)

The best ROTs are anagrams of the original worm. Double points for "boob" which becomes "obbo"... Another way of obscuring words is to transpose characters in pairs thus:
 * abstrads
 * Serapu (shome mishtake, shurely? - ed)
 * ubggre
 * bugger