I am now reading Juliet Macur's page-turner of a portrait of Lance Armstrong, entitled Cycle of Lies. I found a review at The Guardian, and this sentence:
The picture of Armstrong that emerges from Neal's testimony is not a flattering one: he starts out a yob and his behaviour only degenerates.
Here is a definition of 'yob':
A thugish young male.Sid Vicious was a yob...but, you know, people change...they get older, wiser...they mature...Sid's no longer a yob; he's dead.
'Yob' is British slang, whether it is exclusively British I don't know. I first encountered the word today. Some confidently assert that it is an example of 'back slang,' it being 'boy' spelled backwards. Plausible. Spelled backwards but presumably not pronounced backwards. I'd guess it is pronounced like 'job.'
Maxim: Look up and memorize every unfamiliar word and phrase. I am regularly appalled at the miserably impoverished vocabularies of most people.
Laying about are all these free tools of thought and expression, and people are too lazy to pick them up.
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