Tittybiscuits

Watching Come Dine with Me last night on Channel 4. Pretty dire viewing except for a couple of moments of unintentional amusement. One when host Carlos exploded a mixing bowl in the oven, the other when his guests discussed the food he served.

Critiquing Carlos' citrus sorbet, two separate guests complained that it was "tarty". Fits of giggles from me and Debs, imagining slutty bowls of frozen fruit in fishnets, drinking too much at a party and flirting shamelessly with the married host...

I'm pretty sure they actually meant "tart", a great word meaning either "agreeably sharp or acid to the taste e.g. a tart apple" or "marked by a biting, acrimonious, or cutting quality e.g. a tart rejoinder"

I particularly enjoy the following use of tart, in this touching song by Reeves and Mortimer:

The day the donkey derby came to town,
the people came to watch from all around,
alas we didn’t see who won the race,
’cause the supergroup The Who swooped down from the moon,
and squirted tart lemon in our face.

Hang about, the usually reliable website listing these lyrics has printed this as "tartar lemon". The plot thickens, but I'm sticking to my guns: R&M have already shown a fondness for tart in their short The Weekenders, when tasting pots of turkey leakage and pork seepage. And if you listen to the song, they're clearly just precisely enunciating the word final "t" of tart.

So now you know.