Why is bad wine called plonk?

Answer 1

Jump to: navigation, search

Plonk was a Police jargon term for a female Officer, used less frequently in todays service.

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.

Please improve this article if you can. (December 2006)

Look up Plonk in

Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Plonk can mean poor quality wine in U.K. and Australian English, evidently a loan from French "blanc", white wine. The soldiers in the trenches of World War One were not as au fait with the French language as we may be today. When attempting to pronounce the words 'Vin Blanc' it came out as Vin Plonk, and the word has stuck. Plonk is a Usenet jargon term for adding a particular poster to one's kill file such that the poster's future postings are completely ignored. It was first used in 1989 and by 1994[citation needed] was a commonly used term on Usenet regarding kill file additions. The word is an example of onomatopoeia, intended to humorously represent the supposed sound[1] of the user hitting the kill file. It is also sometimes given as an acronym standing for Please Log Off, Net Kook, though this is likely a backronym. Other used expressions are "put lamer on killfile" [2] and Please Leave Our Newsgroup: Killfile! It is also used as a verb: "I plonked that idiot Tom". As a public repudiation of the plonked poster, it is appended to the end of one's reply (or may constitute the entire reply). The term's usage later expanded to include the use of e-mail filters that delete incoming messages that meet certain filter criteria set by the receiving user, so block messages from annoying senders. It has also often been figuratively used on BBSes, webboards, blogs, and wikis (which usually do not actually have filters).