Question 1

What was the radio show My Word!?

Accepted Answer

My Word! was a BBC panel game that ran from 1956 to 1988 — on the Home Service until 1967, then Radio 4 — with Frank Muir and Denis Norden in every series, always on opposing teams. The early rounds tested vocabulary and the origins of sayings; the closing round, which made the programme famous, gave each panellist a well-known phrase and invited him to invent an elaborate false history of it, ending in a pun. The Norden Bomb Site is built in its honour.

Question 2

What is a feghoot?

Accepted Answer

A feghoot is a story told entirely for the sake of the pun it ends on — a shaggy-dog tale whose every incident is quietly engineered so that the final line can collapse into wordplay. The form is named for Ferdinand Feghoot, and it was the closing turn on My Word! The test of one is not whether the story is good but whether the groan is earned.

Question 3

Is there an online version of Call My Bluff or Balderdash?

Accepted Answer

The Bluff is that game played against a judge rather than a table of friends: you are given a real but obscure English word and must invent a definition convincing enough to pass as the dictionary's. You are scored on plausibility, on whether the forgery reads like real lexicography, and on invention — and never on accidentally guessing the truth, which earns nothing.

Question 4

How can I learn the real origins of common phrases?

Accepted Answer

Most phrase-origin folklore is itself a feghoot — a tidy story invented after the fact and repeated until it sounded official. The Reckoning inverts the usual lesson: it puts one true derivation beside two forged ones and asks you to tell them apart, which teaches the shape of a real etymology far better than reading a list of them does.

The Norden Bomb Site

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