RIP the playboys of the western world

There are some words that defy too much definition.

Only the other day, I was trying in vain to explain the concept of cheekiness to a Latin American friend. The dictionary explanation – ‘Being slightly rude, but often in a funny way’ – just didn’t quite capture it.

And so it is with ‘playboy’, an almost quaint term – very rarely heard these days, but still in currency when I started my career as a gossip columnist in the mid-1990s.

All of us following the London social scene knew, somehow, exactly what ‘playboy’ meant and it wasn’t the bone-dry OED effort: ‘A wealthy man who spends his time enjoying