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Diamond Geezer
Professor David Crystal
Diamond geezer. London slang. Cockney accent usually, I
suppose - ‘diamond geezer!’ ‘Geezer!’ It’s dialect
pronunciation in London for a ‘guiser’ - that’s G-U-I-S-E-R -
in other words, somebody who puts on a guise, a kind of
mummer, if you like, a kind of travelling player. So that’s
where the word comes from.
But the modern usage in London and further afield – a
geezer is, well, it means ‘he’s one of us’. An older person
tends to be a geezer. You wouldn’t usually call a child or a
young man a geezer. It tends to be an older person. A
geezer is your mate. It’s somebody reliable, solid, a
trustworthy person. And ‘diamond’ in front of it is, well,
diamonds of course are wonderful things, they’re special
things, they’re valuable things, so a diamond something, is
a very special something. So, a diamond geezer is a
reliable person who’s really a very special person. So you add all that up,
and you get an equivalent in ‘he’s a good sort’, ‘he’s an OK chap’, ‘he’s a
great bloke’, ‘he’s a good feller’, ‘he’s a hero’ – these are the glosses for
diamond geezer.
But because it appeared in a 2005 film staring David Jason, ‘Diamond
Geezer’, there is a touch of the eccentric and the maverick about it. Here,
we’re talking about a thief who’s charming and cheeky and everybody
loves him really, he’s got a heart of gold, he’s a good sort, he’s not really
a bad guy – he’s a diamond geezer.
© British Broadcasting Corporation 2007
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