My Boss Was Really Chuffed

At work, we do "sprints" to get from milestone to milestone. There's a software methodology that's been making the rounds in the last decade or two that companies adopt or adapt depending on how it fits their way of thinking. A sprint is really just the time between milestones or fixed dates where certain parts of the program are completed.

After our third sprint, when the whole team (now grown to a dozen people) were all gathered around, my boss told us that he was "really chuffed about how the sprint turned out."

He then went on to talk about something else, but I stopped him and asked him to back up a little bit. Chuffed? Chuffed doesn't sound good. With the word "huff" in there and some resemblance to "chufe" or "choof" (collegiate terminology for losing control of the last several hours worth of beer in a violent, spectacular and messy display of no doubt deeply seated personal problems as yet untended) the word "chuffed" sounds decidedly double-plus-un-good.

"Um, pumped. Pleased. Excited." was the definition I got back from a room full of Kiwis amused by my poor grasp of distinctly local colloquialisms. Every time I stumble on nomenclature or idiomatic expressions ("he was definitely taking the Mickey out of him") that I'm not familiar with, the people around me are amused but also seem to take a certain pride in the terminologies that are so distinctly un-American.

I also had a problem with "knackered" which is pronounced something close to "naked" which made for an interesting lunch time conversation about a co-worker's impending trip to London, New York and then Vancouver.

"You'll be pretty naked when you get back, I'll bet."

"What?"