Tag: Insult of the day

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Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Forty-guts and Forty-foot

The Slang Dictionary, 1865

Two insults today –

Forty-guts, vulgar term for a fat man.

Forty-foot, a derisive appellation for a very short person.

Forty-foot, well, that could used to describe me. There must be something especially amusing about the number forty.

Slang-Dictionary-1865-fortyguts

There’s also another word for toilet on this page –

Forakers, the closet of decency or house of office.- Term used by the boys at Winchester School.

I was looking up the reason for this, and it turns out Forakers is an old word to refer to part of a field, so their original loo was the field behind the school.

Happily through that search, I found this page with two excellent American insults on it – Foozle meaning fool and Fopdoodle, meaning a silly fellow – http://www.christianregency.com/regcant/A_dictionary_of_slang_jargon_cant-ed%20411.pdf

Categories
Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – the Cove of the Budging-Ken

The Slang Dictionary, 1865

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:

The Sydney Mail, May 10th, 1879
The Sydney Mail, May 10th, 1879
Categories
Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang Insult of the Week – Cupboard-headed

The Slang Dictionary, 1865

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).