numptorium n. the building used by the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, or by extension, the parliament itself. Etymological Note: Scots numpty ‘a stupid person’ + Latin -orium ‘a building or place where an activity occurs or a (type of) thing is located.’ (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Mark in Bismarck, North Dakota, spent years as a sailor, and wonders about the term sea painter, meaning “a rope attached to a lifeboat.” Why painter? The word may derive from Middle French pendeur meaning “a kind of rope that...
Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital is a sensuous, exhilarating meditation about the strangeness of life on a space station, with its mix of tedious tasks and jaw-dropping views. And: a musician who rode the rails in his youth shares the slang he...
What an irony that all the sources for this phrase should be genuine “numpties”! Hickey is a anonymous and possibly fictitious columnist, specialising in “sweaty sock” type hatred of the Scots. Jason Allardyce’s loathing for local democratic control extends to having published a map showing the best place to launch mortars at the Parliament, and George Kerevan is a self-loathing former nationalist who now pens Thatcherite hymns to business-at-all cost politics for the peculiarly anti-Scottish newspaper “The Scotsman”. There’s an unholy alliance between rabid right-wing press barons and rabid independence-or-nothing nationalists in Scotland, neither of whom ever wanted a Parliament. The only things they have in common is a hatred of democracy and an extraodinary access to the media. True numpties. (note: this is not a defence of the current Lib/Lab administration, merely the process of local political control)