Slang Dictionary — Modern Slang, Decoded

In kink, 'play' is the umbrella word for actually doing BDSM with someone — impact, bondage, sensation, power exchange, whatever's on the menu. It works as a verb ('we played last night') and a noun ('the play got intense'). The word does real work: it keeps things light, consensual, and framed as something you do together rather than something done to you. Specific flavours stack onto it — rope play, impact play, edge play, knife play.

A batter's ignominious feat of striking out five times in one game; also called the 'Olympic rings.'

By extension, used of footsteps or where one is standing.

A cheeky way to refer to whoever's in charge at home.

The round weight discs loaded onto the ends of a barbell; a '45' or 'wheel' is the big 45lb/20kg plate.

A point at which progress on a lift or in physique development stalls despite continued effort.

The arse, reached by a two-step rhyming chain. 'Arse' rhymes with 'bottle and glass' (clipped to 'bottle'), 'bottle' becomes 'Aristotle' (clipped to 'Aris'), and 'Aris' rhymes with 'plaster of Paris'. By the time you say it, nobody outside the East End knows what you mean — which was always the point.

A planogram (often shortened to 'POG') is the blueprint head office sends down for every aisle: which SKU sits where, how many facings it gets, what shelf height, what order. Brand reps fight for the eye-level slots because that's the real estate that sells. When a merchandiser 'resets' an aisle, they're rebuilding it to the new planogram.

To die. Most associated with RuneScape, where to plank is simply to drop dead.

To strike someone with the flat (not the edge) of a machete; also the beating itself. Used literally and as a threat.

Irish for the soft-soap — empty flattery, sweet talk laid on thick to get something out of you. Not a compliment when said about you. 'Stop with the plámás' = stop trying to charm me, I see what you're doing.

An unmarked cop car — no decals, no light bar, just a regular sedan with a radar gun and a hidden agenda. The metaphor: it's the same product in a plain wrapper instead of a branded one. Often paired with a colour: 'blue plain wrapper.'

Describes something plastic or someone not genuinely local. Alternative spelling of 'plazzy'.

In Chicano Caló, the police (badge), or a person's graffiti tag/street name.

Player Killing. Hunting down and killing other players in PvP zones like the RuneScape Wilderness, often to take their dropped loot. A PKer is someone who does it for a living.

Pile Jumping. Attacking a player who's already mid-fight with someone else, swooping in to snag the kill and the loot before the original attacker can finish them. Considered scummy etiquette, but all fair in the Wilderness.

A slang reference to certain square skill badges, likened to a flat pizza box worn on the chest.

A setup where your character has to be standing on one precise pixel for the trick to fire. The spatial cousin of frame-perfect — instead of nailing the exact moment, you're nailing the exact spot.

To make a significant change in strategy, product, or direction, often in response to feedback or market conditions.

The distinctive dialect and vocabulary of the North East coal-mining communities.

A coal miner; historically the archetypal Geordie.

The signature artefact of investment banking. A heavy, glossy slide deck packed with logos, league tables, comp analyses, and football-field valuations, used to convince a client to do a deal (or hire your bank to run it). Junior analysts spend their twenties making these at 3am, tweaking the same logo by two pixels because an MD said so.

The bound PowerPoint a bank shoves in front of a client to win a mandate. Cover page, market overview, comparable deals, league tables showing the bank is number one at something, then the actual pitch. Junior bankers live and die printing these at 4am.

A stepped octagonal arena on an exchange floor. Traders stand on the rim shouting orders into the middle — the tiers exist so everyone can see everyone else's hand signals. Each pit handles one product: the bond pit, the S&P pit, the gold pit.