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!
Category: Victorian Slang
“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]
So Joey Essex claims to have invented the word “reem”, does he? Well in the 1865 Slang Dictionary here, we have “ream”.
Spelt slightly differently, but meaning “good or genuine” which is pretty much what I imagine TOWIE mean by it. And there’s also “ream bloak” meaning “good man”.
It comes from “rum”, in the days when “rum” meant “good”, before it meant “bad” or “suspect”. Confusing this slang business, sometimes.
Softhorn – a simpleton, a donkey, whose ears, the substitute of horns, are soft.
Spunk-fencer. Go on, have a guess at what this slang is referring to.
Well, according to The Slang Dictionary of 1865, it’s a match seller, “spunks” also being the term for lucifer matches. Lucifers were rather unstable and prone to explosive reactions, and had been replaced by this stage with phosphorus matches. But the slang persisted for quite some time, until at least the First World War seeing as it’s mentioned in the song “Pack up your troubles”,
“Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile
While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag, smile boys, that’s the style….”
I love Victorian insults, especially the “head”-based insults like “chucklehead”, as used by Mark Twain brilliantly in the below letter to his gas company in 1891:
“Dear Sirs: Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again today. Haven’t you a telephone?”
And did you know the word “mutt” started out as “muttonhead”, and so was basically an insult used for dogs?
Here’s my top insult for today – “Cupboard-headed” from “The Slang Dictionary”, 1865 – for one who’s head is both wooden and hollow.
(There’s two for the price of one on this page – there’s also “culver-headed” meaning weak and stupid, which I presume is from an old word for pigeon).
Rik Mayall died two days ago and it’s just the saddest thing. As a teenager mad about history, comedy and silliness, his turn as Lord Flashheart in Blackadder was just joyous to me.
We were right in the middle of rewatching the wonderful Bottom too, which was reminding me again of just how good an actor he was, both in delivery and in his incredible physicality and endless expressions. As we have watched the Tony Hancock box set recently as well, I suddenly realised just how alike Hancock and Bottom were – the delusions, the pretensions, the acting done half by expression alone. The importance, and lack of, women, TV, money and respect. Bottom is pretty much Hancock in hell.
And so this is my small tribute, an extract from The Slang Dictionary”, 1865.
“Bottom” – endurance to receive a good beating and still fight on.
Farewell sir, you had good bottom.
Oh, The Slang Dictionary. I have so much to post from this Victorian beauty. It’s pretty much an 1865 version of Viz’s Profanisaurus with insults and phrases galore. The Victorians really had a way with words.
Definition of “Tootsies” below. Ha!
I’ve been in Liverpool for 21 years and, until I read this, I’d never heard the term “Dickey Sam” to mean Scouser, but it seems it was the common term up until mid last century – http://virtuallinguist.typepad.com/the_virtual_linguist/2008/10/scousers-and-dicky-sams.html
Nb. “Look, the bulky is dicking!” [no comment]