slang - What do the British mean by "bolshie"?


In this week's edition of The Economist there is a review of Edith Pearlman's latest book of short stories. In it, the reviewer says the volume is



characterised by prose that is bolshie yet nuanced, elegant but not fussy, stylish without being vain.



Dictionaries I've consulted* inform me that bolshie means "radical" or "left-wing." These don't seem productive contrasts to "nuanced" in my view. I surmise that bolshie has to mean more than the dictionary is telling me. If so, what?


*NOAD ("A Bolshevik or socialist"), TFD ("difficult to manage, rebellious; any political radical"), Random House ("Bolshevik"), Webster's 3rd New Int'l, ("Bolshevik"), etc.



Answer



Over 50 years ago I was perfectly familiar with the "playground slang" term bolshie meaning uncooperative, recalcitrant, truculent (Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, 2010). That was long before I knew anything about the political etymology - which later knowledge hasn't significantly affected how I've used and understood the word over the decades.


There are probably still some Brits who see overtones of US commie in the term even today, but it's worth noting that there was no equivalent to McCarthyism in the UK, and the British public at large never really perceived any threat from "reds under the bed".


It may also be worth noting a couple of hundred written contexts where bolshie occurs in close proximity to stroppy (obstreperous = bad-tempered and argumentative), very few of which carry any political overtones. In fact, I'd say the adjectival usage ("Why are you being so bolshie?") is effectively "orthogonal" (Def:3) to the much rarer noun usage ("They're just a bunch of bolshies") that etymological dictionaries are always so keen to tell us about.



In OP's specific context I don't think there's any "political" connotation to the usage. The reviewer just means...



although superficially the prose appears to reflect nothing more than mindless hostility/negativity (towards everything), closer examination reveals evidence of a finely nuanced writing style.



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