I've often used the word (or phrase) one-up-man-ship (oneupmanship) and did not think it to be a real word and for some reason I thought that I had invented it. A search on Google shows that it is referred to on approximately 80,000 pages so I'm guessing that I'm very wrong. On requesting the definition of oneupmanship I see that it is undefined so I'm guessing that it does not appear in a dictionary yet even though Stephen Potter wrote a book that was published in 1952 called One-Upmanship. (The word verywrongmanship appears on zero pages in a Google search as I type this but at some point in future Google may have indexed this page and so verywrongmanship may appear in the index when you read this.)
I found two definitions of oneupmanship (next to an advert to learn Spanish - go figure) that said it was (1) when you were ahead in a game (for example cricket) or (2) you were cleverer than someone else. I disagree with both of these definitions. I would define oneupmanship as a pissing contest - metaphorically. However, that leads me on to an actually pissing contest that I once witnessed.
It was, of course, at a bachelor's party. We were in a small garden behind a pub and against the wall was another small wall about a foot or two off the ground. The groom-to-be and and a couple of others were on the low wall and they were literally having a pissing contest - who could pee the furthest. The groom-to-be was, understandably, not too steady on his feet and fell forward and being the agile athlete that he was kept one hand on his equipment and did a one-armed cartwheel creating a spectacular Catherine Wheel effect with his kidney-filtered Carlsberg Lager and landed on his feet facing the opposite direction - perfectly dry - but still unsteady on his feet. The judges ruled him the winner (extra points for staying dry) and arbitrarily assigned him another pint to down as his prize - of course.
(I was going to talk about oneupmanship here but got way-laid by a story so hopefully I'll return to the subject in the near future.)
It's 4 days after I posted this and I just clicked on the verywrongmanship link to see if Google had indexed it and they had so I can no longer say that verywrongmanship is not in the Google index.
ReplyDeleteA quick check of Yahoo search that it is not in there but it is in MSN search which surprises me because they are usually the laggards.