The term ‘blue faced’, when it is not being used to describe a popular breed of longwool Leicester sheep, has an altogether more modern meaning with which many readers will already be familiar.
Among hip people, like the Spurtle team, it refers to the practice of emailing or texting in such a way that the device used casts a blue-ish hue onto the face of the messager.
‘Hey, dude,’ we often say to each other at the start of the distribution process, ‘quit blue-facin. We’ve got to go and hit da hood with da ink.’
It can also refer to the rude practice of ignoring one's companion by devoting attention instead to a mobile telephone. 'I'm mad, man! That cat just blue-faced me all evening and didn't listen to a word I said.'
Whether it was such urban street slang that Arty Burger had in mind when adding this design to the Rodney Street Tunnel we’re not sure.
There is an outside chance he or she was subtly referring to the blue-faced raja, king of the yaksas, who – according to Soothill and Hodous’s Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms – defends Buddhism ‘with open mouth, dog’s fangs, three eyes, four arms, wearing skulls on his head, serpents on his legs, etc.’
We love that last ‘etc’, redolent of academic lifetimes spent among monsters and a weary refusal to indulge them with long descriptions of their gaudy horrors.
Our impression is that street artists have not been very active around Broughton over the last year or so. Are readers aware of any good examples locally, or reasons why the frequency of their appearance here may have dropped off?
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