No dumbing down here then.

In an item about chess in schools on the BBC breakfast program today the interviewer suggested,

"The image of chess is that it's a bit spoddy."

I haven't heard the word "spod" since I was at school about forty years ago. For those who have never heard it it's roughly the same as "nerd". Someone who is, as the Cambridge Dictionary says, " boring and unfashionable and, as a student, works very hard".

It's a slang word, and nothing especially wrong with that, but surely they could have found a better word in a more appropriate register for a BBC news report.