Early morning palaver…

I awoke this morning just as Frankie Howard declared ‘Ooooo, what a palaver!’ He was sucking in his cheeks, turning himself into a curly haired aging cherub as he winked at me and then popped like a bubble. Just why he said this and why he was at the edge of my consciousness as I awoke, I have no idea. But he left this world, as I re-entered it, with his voice still ringing in my ears like a bell.

Frankie Howard - a palaver indeed. Ding-dong!

Anyway, it’s stuck with me all day and, as I do, I found myself Googling this and Googling that, trying to track down the meaning of the word and whether or not Mr Howard ever used it. After a lot of surfing, I’d found no hard evidence that he was a palaver user; but he must have been mustn’t he? After all, it is such a Frankie Howard type of word. I can just imagine him taking his time and drawing it out with that distinctive throaty croak at the end: ‘Ooooooo, what a PALAAAVERRR!’

I’ve heard this word used regularly and I use it myself sometimes. But I tend to use it to mean something like ‘kerfuffle’, a hasty happening or scuffle leading nowhere but stand-off, with lots of bluffing and blowing along the way. In fact, according to dictionary.com and the OE dictionary, the word palaver is defined as ‘a conference or discussion’. I didn’t know this, and in my 30 years of sitting in pointless, boring, far too long meetings with basically stupid people discussing basically stupid things (me being one of them on both counts), I never heard anyone refer to a meeting by using this word.

So it’s a confab, a pow-pow, a colloquy, a parley, a conference, a stakeholder meeting, a roundtable, a brainstorm, a thought-shower, and not an Elizabethan skirmish with doublets and rapiers as I’d imagined. It isn’t even English. It derives from the Portuguese ‘palavra’ meaning ‘speech’, specifically between Portuguese traders and West African natives in the 18^th century. Even so, the built-in Word thesaurus gives palaver’s alternatives as: irritation, pain, annoyance, pest, bother, trouble, and irritant. So perhaps it was one of those bloody meetings after all.

By the way, did you realise that the only half-decent rhyme for palaver is cadaver?

Thanks Frankie. Your few words this morning have sent me on yet another wild goose-chase that’s soaked up most of my day. Ooooo, what a………. nuisance