This would cheese Alan Partridge right off. Norwicher – meaning a person who takes more than his fair share. Why the people of Norwich were used for this description is unknown, as the Dictionary says “In what way the term originated, or why Norwich was selected before any other city, I have not been able to discover.”
Other excellent words on this page include Nub, meaning husband and Nuddikin, meaning head.
Yes, this is just what you’d expect.
Crapping Case, the closet of decency.
Also – Crapped meaning “hanged”.
Words, words, glorious words;
Nothing quite like them for polishing turds….
I’ve always loved words, I even used to collect them when I was younger. Interesting words I found I would write down in a little book, ready to spring into use when I inevitably wrote my Gilbert and Sullivan-style operetta. Just the usual kid stuff.
My first favourite words were Sweet Lemons. Nice and simple and lots of E’s, which I felt a special affinity with, being the first letter of “Estelle”. Plus, it’s a nice oxymoron.
The name Estelle itself was interesting as well. I didn’t know anyone else called it, and I was quite taken with the idea that I was named after a character in a book – Estella from Great Expectations. Mum loved the book, and as soon as I read it (although that wasn’t until I was an adult for some reason – I rather felt like it was waiting for the right time) it became my favourite book straightaway. It’s perfect – no one writes people like Dickens, the scenes are vivid sketches in their own right, and it’s still funny (Pip’s real name being Philip Pirrip made me laugh on page one and I knew then that we would get on). And for a lover of words, the names of Dickens’ characters are an untrammelled delight. Jaggers, Magwitch, Wemmick and his Aged P….
The fact that my husband’s middle name is Phillip is a good sign, I think. And thanks Mum, I can’t think of a better name for me – a name meaning star for someone who loves Dickens, anything Victorian and space.
As a teenager I loved Jewel and Jeepster, especially as both were dead cool T. Rex songs as well as being pleasing to my eye. And I had a “thing” about the letter J for a while.
Now my favourite words would have to be Nebula, Ephemera and Interstellar. Although the first two are gloriously woody, I’m troubled slightly by the fact that Interstellar is a bit tinny. But it’s a bit like my name, so I like it nonetheless. This Monty Python sketch had a big effect on me.
Tell me yours!
(The strange featured image for this post is the Engraved Hourglass Nebula, if you were wondering.)
More head insults! Cabbagehead – a soft-headed person.
Also, Cabobble – an excellent word from Suffolk meaning to confuse, and it really does sound like a muddled head.
Golopshus – well, this is a word that can be used to describe itself. It’s rather a golupshus word from Norwich meaning splendid, delicious and luscious.
It reminds me more than anything else of the unique wordysmith talents of Professor Stanley Unwin. Here he is describing Patrick Troughton’s era of Doctor Who. Deep joy.
Funking the cobbler – a kid’s trick involving the pungent spice asafoetida, also known as Devil’s Dung (nice). The spice was stuffed with cotton into a cow’s horn (everyone had a cow’s horn to hand in the nineteenth century), set alight, and the smoke blown through a keyhole or into the aforementioned cobbler’s stall.
In short, it’s an early kind of stinkbomb, perenially popular with schoolboys. I feel safe in this gender assumption having sat on a fair number of buses that have fallen victim to a gang of lads chucking a stinkbomb on just before the doors close, while we poor saps sit there choking for the rest of the journey. This is especially great if you’re pregnant and your sense of smell has basically become a superpower.
Grrrr! *shakes fist in the manner of an annoyed cobbler*
If you google it, it seems there are a huge number of meanings for the slang term “Fly the kite”. There’s two on this page of The Slang Dictionary – the first refers to obtaining money on (usually worthless) cheques.
The second is the one that fascinates me, though:
“Fly the kite”, To evacuate from a window – term used in padding-kens, or low lodging houses”
Erm. So your, shall we say, number one is the string and you, up there at the window, are the kite. I presume your average low lodging house wasn’t exactly well equipped with privies, and maybe even chamber pots were too luxurious for these dives?
The Victorians attitude to children could be pretty strict, as seen in a rather heart-breaking little section of The Mother’s Companion of 1891. It’s written with a loving tone – these parents adored their kids. And yet how far removed from today is the idea that a parent should withhold all praise from their children, for fear of making them conceited?
The heart-breaking bit isn’t really the piece itself, which is pretty cuddly. But it’s the fact that it actually needs to tell parents to admire their children’s achievements that is shocking to a twenty-first century parent – “Of course, I do not mean too much praise, but a little now and then is good for everyone.”
And I do like this sentimental childhood bit – “Flood them with sunshine from your own hearts, and they will give it back to you with interest.”
Tom and Jerry – a slang term that has made its mark, perhaps like no other, throughout popular culture. And one intertwined with The Slang Dictionary itself.
Tom and Jerry are now most famously the cartoon cat and mouse, of course, but the term was also used to refer to British and German soldiers in the Second World War – or the “Tommies” and the “Jerries”. In popular culture, it was the original stage name of Simon and Garfunkel and also the male characters in The Good Life.
But perhaps the phrase originated in 1821 from a journal called Life in London by Pierce Egan, which had a couple of flash characters called Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn who embarked on laddish sprees around London. They were also accompanied by another friend, Bob Logic, but he’s rather gone by the wayside in slang terms. Life in London ran until 1828 and was hugely popular. There was an offshoot stage show, and even a drink called “Tom and Jerry” devised by Egan to promote the show. This cocktail – a kind of hot eggnog and brandy concoction – is actually still around as a traditional Christmas seasonal drink in parts of the US.
Pierce Egan was also the editor of the 1823 slang dictionary Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. This preceded the slang dictionary I own, which was compiled by John Camden Hotten in 1865.
Corinthian Tom refers to the dictionary in Life in London,
“A kind of cant phraseology is current from one end of the Metropolis to the other, and you will scarcely be able to move a single step, my dear JERRY, without consulting a Slang Dictionary, or having some friend at your elbow to explain the strange expressions which, at every turn, will assail your ear.”
In more intertwining, John Camden Hotten himself brought out a reprint of Life in London in 1869. And by the time he had published his own slang dictionary in 1865, Tom and Jerry meant a lowdown drinking den, a gin palace (probably because these were exactly the types of places frequented by Corianthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn). And, to add to the cartoony slang, Daffy meant gin.
Pictures of Life in London can be found on the brilliant Spitalfields Life blog – http://spitalfieldslife.com/2012/03/28/tom-jerrys-life-in-london/
Laziness isn’t exactly a trait we associate with the Victorians. The work ethic was lauded, days off were few and sloth was, after all, one of the seven deadly sins.
Poor sloth.
On the other hand, I’m a big fan of laziness. I remember, in a life I had pre-kids, that I used to be a very big fan of sleeping. I wish I could do more of it now. And people banging on about how very busy they are just makes me tired on their behalf. So I rather enjoy children’s author Isabel Suart Robson’s paean to laziness in The Mother’s Companion, 1891. It’s also interesting to see that workers never fully detaching from work isn’t just a modern problem caused by email and mobile phones. In 1891, there were still those businessmen who couldn’t go on holiday without being a slave to their letters and telegraphs too.
