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Show Something Wrong if RAF Pilots Tut Up a Black' The RAF has developed a language lan-guage all its own. Many of the terms, such as "Browned of!" for bored, and "Put up a black" for doing something wrong, have been adopted now into common usage. Some expressions have been borrowed bor-rowed from the United States, including in-cluding "Flinging a woo," which means to have a date with a girl, and "Roughneck" which, In the RAF does not mean a tough guy, but an unlikeable person. "Gen" means the real. Inside Information on anything, and, similarly, "duff gen" means wrong information. A "flap" is a sudden operation. To be in a "flap" or in a "flat spin" means to be busy on a job, too busy to do anything else. The "Chief Plumber" is, of course, the Chief Engineer; the "Quack" is the doctor; the "Second "Sec-ond Dickey" is the second pilot, and a stickyback is an RAF photographer. pho-tographer. Pilots who go "dicing" or on a "shaky-do" are attacking a difficult diffi-cult and dangerous target; it it's an easy target it's a "piece of cake." After they drop their bombs they sometimes "stooge around to take a beaker," meaning to hang around to have a look. To "carry the can" is to "hold the baby" or to be the scapegoat, while pilots suffering from that morning-after feeling are "newt-ed." |