Victorian musical slang for household creepy-crawlies – B Flats for bugs and F Sharps for fleas. Maybe they’re musical terms because you make a noise if you’re bitten? Or maybe it was just being funny. It does sound quite a music hall-y kind of thing.
I like that the word “Foxed” on the second page is included. It (still) means brown marks that develop on old books and the page itself is an illustration of it.
Another insult (seeing as a good quarter of The Slang Dictionary is insults).
Bladder of Lard – an affectionate term for the baldy man in your life.
That Naked Video music is the 80s summed up in a sound for me.
The Cove of the Budging-Ken – a Northern phrase meaning pub landlord.
But it sounds to me like the title of a 1960s cartoon film about Cornish smugglers who are also animals. Or a portentous song along the lines of “The Hall of the Mountain King”. But still! The cosy strangeness of it makes this my favourite Victorian slang so far.
See also – more of my favourite “head” insults with “Buffle-head” – meaning a stupid or obtuse person; from “buffalo”, rather than the American duck of the same name.
And “Who struck Buckley? – a common phrase used to irritate Irishmen”. This seems to have been a very common phrase with no agreement at all as to where it came from or what it really means. It also gets a mention in James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake”.
Some theories here, from The Sydney Mail in 1879, about where it originated:
If a person wearing advertising boards (or a “human advertising medium”) front and back is a “Sandwich” then what other food-based item are they called if the boards enclose them on all four sides? A “Toad in the hole”, of course!
“I’m going to see my aunt” was a phrase mostly used by women from around 1850 onwards – meaning to go to the toilet.
This entry can’t bring itself to talk other than entirely in euphemisms though, so instead of WC we get the wonderful “closet of decency” and “house of office”.
On this page, I Also love “My Lord” – a nickname given to a hunchback. And “My nabs” – the phrase “his nibs” still exists but the version referring to yourself is now very obscure.
But “My aunt”, though. What does it mean? Is it this…….?
[If you haven’t seen Curb Your Enthusiasm, this is Not Safe For Work]
Softhorn – a simpleton, a donkey, whose ears, the substitute of horns, are soft.