Word: bovver
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...shrieking, they swoop down in groups on unsuspecting victims in dark streets, at lonely bus stops and in deserted toilets. Kicking, biting, scratching, punching, they reduce the victim-usually another female-to hysteria and then disappear, stealing perhaps only a few pence. To Londoners, they are known as the bovver (cockney for bother, which in turn means fight) birds, the newest and in some ways the eeriest street gangs since the Teddy boys terrorized London...
London police currently count some 30 gangs of bovver birds, including a quartet that attacked a 55-year-old baker walking home in south London last July. "It was suddenly like having banshees wailing in my ear," the baker recounted. "They kept screaming while two of them took my arms and one jabbed my back with what felt like a knife blade. They made me kneel down with the side of my face against the pavement, and they took everything I had. Then one of them took her foot and crushed my head against the pavement...
...Bovver...
...campaign speech, "is billed to play a major, perhaps a decisive part in the battle of Britain." In the campaign's closing week, Powell's racist utterings assumed a major role. Demonstrators shouting "Sieg Heiir picketed his rallies, and squads of skinheads in braces and "bovver" boots formed guards of honor for him. Undeniably, Powell's message had substantial appeal to blue-collar white Britons, who resent the intrusions of the Pakistani, West Indian, African and Indian immigrants...
...Beyond bovver, pleasures are simple: beer, a very occasional whiff of pot and dancing in seedy clubs to the solid, punchy beat of West Indian blues. Skinheads don't bovver with the West Indians, probably because they are tough. Pakistanis are a favorite target because they seem passive, weak and, above all, different. "They smell, don't they?" says the son of a London docker. "It's all that garlic. I mean, they've no right to be here." One skinhead described the "Paki-bashing" technique to a British television interviewer: "You go up to them...