I've been feeling like quite the word geek lately. I've been on the lookout for new words and phrases of 2000 (the list so far : "hallway medicine").

 Last week I thought I had stumbled upon some crazy new piece of internet jargon when I read, in the Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine, of a corporate website filled with "bumf".

But it wasn't a new word at all. It was British.

It helps to know a bit of British slang. I have a friend who never really understood why a movie about heroin addicts was called "Trainspotting". He didn't know that there are people in England who collect train numbers as a hobby. It's a pointless and anti-social hobby and the point being made was that heroin users are the ultimate trainspotters.

 And until recently, I didn't realize that there was an anti-heroin campaign in Britain in the eighties under the banner "Choose Life."  This explains the film's tagline and, I suspect, the reason why Wham! wore those horrid 'Choose Life' T-shirts all those years ago in their "Wake me up before you go-go" video. And to think thought that they were not pro-choice for so many years.