This won't go over well with the English Language Firsters

Just came across a British slang word: dekko. It means a glance or a look, as in, "Hey, I just found this smartphone. Let's have a dekko through the pictures."

I guessed it must be some sort of Cockney thing, but apparently not. According to Wiktionary, it is:

From Hindustani देखना / دیکھنا (dekhnā), to see, to look. Comes directly from the Hindi "Dekho" (see)

Various other sources confirm this.

My example sentence wasn't chosen at random, of course. It came from a post on CNET UK, about a study that Symantec just completed.

Here's how it begins:

Executive Summary

The Symantec Smartphone Honey Stick Project is an experiment involving 50 “lost” smartphones. Before the smartphones were intentionally lost, a collection of simulated corporate and personal data was placed on them, along with the capability to remotely monitor what happened to them once they were found.

Chief among the findings is that there is a very high likelihood attempts to access both sensitive personal- and business-related information will be made if a lost and unprotected smartphone is found by a stranger.

Chris Matyszczyk of CNET USA was nice enough to wade through the report and pick out the juicy numbers.

Sexters will be particularly disturbed that 72 percent of those who found the smartphones went through the pictures buried therein.

Please imagine your feelings, should some seedy New Yorker have gone through your holiday snaps and intimate self-portraits and, who knows, copied them to (and for) his own devices.

While your extremities shiver at that, please consider that 96 percent of finders tried to open at least one app or file. Some 43 percent of these finders opened all the banking and financial apps on the phones. A fulsome 57 per cent perused the saved logins and passwords. Oh, and a nosy 45 percent tried to access the corporate e-mail on the phones.

But at least you might imagine that, in the end, all these smartphones were returned to their rightful owners. You might imagine that quilts are made of popcorn. For a mere 50 percent of finders attempted to return the phones to their keepers.

(pic. source)