See also: Balance of power, Blogsters, Black ops, Brainfades and Bitchy resting face.
C is for Confidence and Supply, two feral cats that live in the parliamentary grounds.
See also: Coat-tailing (or, in Ohariu, "bowtying"), Cross Benches (a new TV programme in which Winston Peters scowls at Colin Craig for an hour) and Crusher (listing no longer available).
D is for Dramatis personae, the almost certainly invented boxset-ready names of the characters that have cropped up in the Dirty Politics saga. Among them: Key, Carrick, Slater, Lusk, Ede, Odgers, Fisher, Savage, Pleasants and Feeley. A fiction, surely. Apart from Collins, which is rather dull.
See also: Devil-beasts, Despicable and Double.
E is for the End of the Day, a mini-golf theme park on Planet Key where a soothing soundtrack is pumped out around the clock featuring Eminemesque muzak and mid-morning talkback radio.
See also: Eyes (Colin's), Effigies and Epsom.
F is for Flip-flop, a foreign word for a Jandal.
See also: FJK, FTW and FBI.
G is for Gangster rap, the official soundtrack of the 2014 election.
See also: Godwinning, Green-Gold card, and Giddy Aunts.
H is for Hi-vis, the clothing of choice for campaigning politicians.
See also: Hikois from Hell, Hootonany and Hoskingdom.
I is for the Ice bucket challenge, a procedure followers of NZ politics undergo daily to be sure they're not dreaming.
J is for Jones, Shane, a man probably watching gleefully from an opulent Pacific Island hotel. (Watching the NZ election, that is, just to be clear.)
K is for Kim Dotcom, a man named after an internet address, who hacked the German chancellor, has made millions with his Mega-enterprises, lives in a mansion surrounded by giraffes, is sought by the US for extradition, has been involved in nearly every court case and political scandal in New Zealand in the last couple of years, founded and bankrolled an internet-focused political party that has formed a bizarre alliance with the leftwing Mana movement, and yet is still not the strangest thing about this election.
See also: Kingmaker (ie Kate Middleton).
L is for Love New Zealand, the slogan on the Green Party's election billboards, which draws attention to the disappointing performance of NZ Davis Cup tennis efforts.
See also: Lochinver, Lager (rhymes with Hager), Lazy New Zealanders (too often overlooked in favour of the hardworking ones), and Lorde (just because).
M is for MMP, the proportional system in which everyone's vote has equal weight, apart from those who like really small parties, whose votes count for nothing, and many who vote in Epsom, whose votes count double.
See also: Mallard, an extinct bird that long-serving MP Trevor Moa wants to revive.
N is for Nautical themes: drunken sailors, rowboats, and bloggers who run their own ships.
O is for Overhang, a hangover so bad the individual suffering cannot even get the word the right way around. Typically caused by the casting of a wasted vote.
See also: Ohoh-Riahh (the PM's pet name for Ohariu).
P is for Puffed up little shits - the sobriquet given by Pam Corkery to television reporters. These "glove puppets of Cameron Slater" should "just piss off", said Corkery, mastermind of a vast left-wing swear campaign.
See also: Polls (a survey in which the Labour Party travels downwards), and, if you absolutely must, Policy.
Q is for the type of political writing that consists substantially of interviewing one's own typewriter: Qwerty politics.
R is for Rodney Hide, a valuable leather made north of Auckland.
See also: Rogue, Rock solid and Rotten borough.
S is for Selfies, the modern version of baby-kissing, except reliably uglier.
See also: Scum, Shock jocks, Screaming left-wing conspiracy and Show me the sugar daddy.
T is for Tea, A drink with jam and bread.
See also: Tricky, Twewible, Teflon, Tax cuts, #TeamKey and Twerking for NZ.
U is for the Undecided, a chimerical voter invoked by a party struggling in polls.
V is for Vote Positive, a painful condition brought on by internal organs trying to destroy one another.
W is for Whale Oil, as contemplated by Paul Henry's daughter Bella Hopes on his late-night TV3 show: "I don't know if it's the actual whale being killed for the whale oil or if it's just oil in the sea that whales are around. But, yeah, you know, don't kill whales. But then you know we need our oil, so it's kind of just like don't kill the whales, but if it's oil in the water, you know, scooch the whales over a little bit."
See also: Wongs (Two), Welfare and Watergate.
X is for Xero, a successful NZ firm, which has barely anything to do with the election but does begin with X.
See also: Xenophobia, Xanadu and X-Factor.
Y is for Youth which, apart from a 12-year-old National candidate in Southland, there is not a lot of. Among the notable retreads in this campaign: Richard Prebble, Laila Harre, Donna Huata, Georgina Beyer, Matt McCarten, Ron Mark.
Z is for Zinger, a hideous Americanism that has crept into this election alongside "optics", another word that should be illegal. Z is also for Zaire, a country now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, but at one point called Belgian Congo. And Belgium, since you mention it, is a place that went 589 days without an elected government in 2010-2011. Which sometimes seems like a very attractive idea.
