Down with one-upmanship

There are many titles of disgrace that can be bestowed upon a person at school; some fair and reasonable, some cruel and indefensible.

Those amenable to engaging with the authorities were branded telltales, touts and grasses, while pupils who too openly attempted to win the affections of their teachers were called pets, licks and brown-noses.

Anyway, among the rich catalogue of pejorative labels that did the rounds when I was in uniform, one of my personal favourites was ‘story-topper’.

Beautifully self-explanatory and straight-to-the-point, the term story-topper requires little to no unpacking.

However, in the interest of clarity, here’s the definition as it appears in McElhatton’s ‘Dictionary of the Evolving English Language’.

Story-topper: One who is inclined to outdo another person’s story with one they deem more funny, extreme or engaging.

Though the source cited does not provide an indication of when this word came into popular usage, I seem to remember it insinuating itself in our common vocabulary somewhere around third year, and it changed the game.

No more did you have to acquiesce to being some attention-stealing dirt-bag’s warm up act.

As soon at they tried to seize the limelight, you could just hit them with a ‘story-topper!’, and that would be the end of that.

Checkmate.

Anyway, while there would be some who think such juvenile phrases should be left at the school gates, I believe we should have no shame about wielding the word story-topper until the day we die.

In fact, I have two pieces of anecdotal evidence which demonstrate how even in the absence of a good story some older people are still willing to engage in this most irritating act of one-upmanship.

The first occurred when a local man found himself in conversation with an American couple who were on a visit to Ireland.

After courteously purchasing a few rounds of drink for one another, the travellers opened up to the local fella about how their New Orleans home had been all but washed away during Hurricane Katrina – a natural disaster which seen the population of New Orleans fall by almost 30 per-cent.

“Oh, Jesus, sure, tell me about it,” said your man, bold as brass.

“I use to live down in Hunter’s Crescent, and I mind there was one year we got wile bad floods.

“I am talking an absolute washout. Wile so it was.”

Having no idea of the true magnitude of the floods, the once-homeless couple took pity on your man, and bought him a drink to help temper his troubles.

The other snippet that stands in support of my claim that you’re never too old to be called a story-topper occurred in the living room of a local lady, aged somewhere in her seventies.

With a crowd of relations gathered in the room, one began to give off stink about the amount he believed he had been unfairly charged by his mechanic.

“And that is all he done, and now he is l ooking £600 of me the robbing tramp,” he said, his eyes clouded with anger.

Up pipes the matriarch, “Here, I know all about it. There is a letter after coming through that door earlier on from the TV licence man.

“Four pound he is looking off me. Well, let me tell ye, he’ll not be getting it of me.”

Imagine your man had been in a tsunami or your woman had been in deep with the sharks…