Is describing the likes of bungling billionaires like Bernie Ecclestone and Rupert Murdoch as ‘coffin dodgers’ or ‘codgers’ acceptable? Matthew Steeples says MOST DEFINITELY YES
Titty feeding twerp Tamara Ecclestone once charged at me as I sat minding my own business at the bar of a Pavilion Road, Chelsea restaurant enjoying a glass of vino. This modern-day Bet Lynch lookalike, clad in some kind of especially louche leopard skin number, screamed like a banshee and demanded: “Why do you call my dad a ‘coffin dodger’?”
Clearly surprised at this awkward ambush by a birdbrained bimbo, I simply responded: “Because that’s just what he is” and of this most unpleasant encouter I was reminded in recent days when somebody told me off on Twitter for using the very same description of the soon to be divorced for a fourth time old ‘codger’ Rupert Murdoch.
Said to be an alternative way of describing an “elderly person” or “crinkly” and sometimes abbreviated to ‘codger,’ this is a somewhat derogatory description that is representative of someone “good at avoiding death” but also is the name of an alcoholic beverage that is “sometimes drunk as a hangover cure.”
With even a beer named in its honour also, here is a phrase that should be used more widely and today we invite readers to suggest the names of other famous antique beings who quite frankly live on forever in the hope of simply annoying the rest of the bloody planet for as long as they possibly can.
Pictured top – Ultimate “coffin dodgers” Putin loving Bernie Ecclestone and maniacal media mogul Rupert Murdoch; here is a pair of very rich, very miserable, very tempestuous men who think they can do and say whatever they want. The vast majority of the planet most definitely won’t miss this pair of rotten toerags when they thankfully pass.
Is the description "coffin dodger" (sometimes abbreviated to "codger") offensive to you? For example describing beings such as Bernie Ecclestone and Rupert Murdoch.
Tamara Ecclestone once confronted me in a restaurant screaming: "Why do you keep calling my father a coffin dodger?" My curt answer: "Because he is" sent this mad cow even more apoplectic.
This is a description that should be more widely used.
The description is sometimes abbreviated though some claim ‘codger’ to have an entirely different meaning. Of this someone named Raeanne Dimick suggests: “The origin of [codger] seems to lie in the complex links between [cadger] and codger (not as a contraction of coffin-dodger, as one of my more inventive correspondents has suggested). In some parts of England the two words were used interchangeably, whereas in other regions they were separate words, one meaning beggar and the other eccentric/grotesque fellow. The latter meaning is the one used in an early example of old codger, David [Garricks] [farce] [Bon] Ton, 1775: [My Lords] servants call you an old out-of-fashiond [Codger]. Men who had fallen on hard times and had resorted to any means possible to keep body and soul together were often those who were too old to find work. A cadger was likely to be a [grizzled] character wanting to borrow or steal from you; a codger was a peculiar and unfashionable chap, and both were likely to be old. Old codger is most likely to be the linguistic merging of all those images.”Amusingly, this response came in on Twitter to the poll I started about whether the description was acceptable or not today. The “late granny” was most “clearly a legend” indeed and I do think that this way of referencing nasty old antiquities should be more widely used.Mugs emblazoned with the term and beer named for such antiquities can be bought online.A 2013 TV short takes the description as its title. It starred John DiMaggio and was directed by Dwayne Carey-Hill.Often clad in leopard skin banshee Tamara Ecclestone – pictured with her not especially bright and banned from the city husband Jay Rutland approaching Scalini restaurant in Walton Street, Knightsbridge, London, SW3 – does not like the description being used of her deranged dwarf-like daddy.
