👉 Right, settle down now, settle down! Let’s tackle this rather… prickly piece of vernacular, the admittedly rather unfortunate-sounding word "—é—, —.
Now, historically, you might initially recoil, picturing a very stuffy, perhaps slightly beige, cathedral city in the south of England. Exeter actually does exist and has a respectable record, frankly. But as a slang insult? It’s… considerably less respectable. Essentially, to call something, or indeed someone, the —é—, ־—, is to declare that they're an utter, beige, profoundly disappointing failure. They are, quite simply, a spectacularly mediocre wreck of human existence. Think the beige equivalent of a spectacular explosion. There isn't much punch in it; its only power comes from the sheer, pathetic understatement of its description. You’re basically saying, "You suck. And you suck terribly and predictably. Like a lukewarm Earl Grey that hasn’t been steeped for long enough. The origin is rather murky. It seems to have sprung up sometime during the late 1980s, possibly in the UK rave scene as a way of expressing intense disappointment with, let's say... underwhelming sound systems and even more underwhelming dancers. Nobody quite knows exactly who coined it and why. There are some that guess it’s about the grey and depressing nature of the place itself. Others just think people like to
