Free The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language by Mark Forsyth

lavatories as a source of gossip that there’s a similar and slightly earlier version of latrinogram:
Elsan gen
, which is defined in a 1943 dictionary of services slang thus:
    Elsan gen : News which cannot be relied upon. [Literally, ‘news invented in the gentlemen’s toilet’, Elsan being the trade name of the excellent chemical lavatories with which bombers are equipped.]
    I’m not sure exactly how you would fit two people into the lavatories of an RAF bomber, or why indeed you would wish to do so. The rumble and thrumble of the engines might also make it hard to exchange the juiciest furphies in an appropriate quother. It therefore looks to me as though
Elsan gen
was a circumlocutory manner of saying that the information (or gen) was equivalent in quality to the stuff physically produced in such a cubby hole, and therefore fit only to be flushed out over Axis territory.
    Soldiers of the Second World War seem to have spent as much time gossiping as fighting, if their slang is anything to go by. Aside from Elsan gen, they had
duff gen
(bad),
pukka gen
(good) and the
gen king
(the chap who knew all of the gossip before it had even happened).
    All of the best rumours are false. The more that you yearn to believe a good yarn, the more likely it is that that yarn is mere
flim-flam
,
flumadiddle
,
fribble-frabble
,
effutiation
,
flitter-tripe
,
rhubarb
,
spinach
,
toffee
,
waffle
,
balductum
and
bollocks
.
    This leaves the question of how you should respond to the Elsan gen. The politest method would be to tell your interlocutor that they are a
controver
, an obsolete word for an ‘inventor of false gossip’. Though it’s recorded in a dictionary of 1721 theword, for some reason, never caught on or even made it into any subsequent dictionaries. This strange vanishing means that you can call somebody a controver to your heart’s content and they’ll never know what you mean. Thus the cogs of office society can remain oily.
    Alternatively, you can exclaim, as the Victorians would have done, that a story is ‘all my eye and Betty Martin’. The origins of this phrase are rather peculiar. The story goes that a British sailor happened to wander into a church in some foreign and Roman Catholic country. There he heard a prayer which of course sounded like nonsense to him because it was in Latin. So far as the sailor could tell, they were saying something along the lines of ‘All my eye and Betty Martin’. The original prayer was probably
Ora pro mihi, beate Martine
or ‘Pray for me, blessed Martin’, Saint Martin of Tours being the patron saint of innkeepers and reformed drunkards. Alternatively, it could have been
Mihi beata mater
or ‘For me blessed Mother’, making Betty Martin the Virgin Mary. So if you want to be sure not to blaspheme, you could just call your story-teller a
blatherskite
or
clanjanderer
. Or you could take a lesson from this singular dictionary entry:
    DICK That happened in the reign of queen Dick, i.e. never: said of any absurd old story. I am as queer as Dick’s hatband; that is, out of spirits, or don’t know what ails me. 2
    This is my personal favourite, as it usually takes the other party a couple of seconds to figure it out.
    Honestyis as under-represented in the dictionary as in life. It makes occasional appearances, such as:
    BUFFING IT HOME
is swearing point-blank to anything, about the same as bluffing it, making a bold stand on no backing.
    But that’s taken from an 1881 dictionary of New York criminal slang, so it doesn’t fill you with confidence. The best you can do is a
corsned
, which was a part of ancient English law:
    Corsned , Ordeal bread, a Piece of Bread consecrated by the Priest for that Use, eaten by the Saxons when they would clear themselves of a Crime they were charged with, wishing it might be their Poison, or last Morsel, if they were guilty.
    As we are having elevenses, you may simply reach for the nearest chocolate biscuit.
    Finally, there is the gossip that has