Tag: The slang dictionary

Victorian Slang of the Week – Snobstick and a lot of Snot

Post author By Estelle
Post date October 13, 2014

This is a great page of The Slang Dictionary.

First you’ve got Snob-stick – a worker who refuses to join in strikes, and what would now be termed a “scab”.

Then there’s Snooks-and-Walker, a number game I was certainly still playing in the 90s, except it was a drinking game called “Fizz Buzz” (and the entry also says “see Buz” so that variant is also an ancient one).

Then there’s a glorious variety of snot-based words. Snottinger for a pocket handkerchief is a good one. But Snotter or Wipe-Hauler is a peculiar one. In other slang books, these terms are simply referred to as meaning a pickpocket who has a particular fancy for the aforementioned snottingers (it takes all sorts). But here it goes into a little more detail:

Snotter, or Wipe-hauler, a pickpocket who commits great depredations upon gentlemen’s pocket-handkerchiefs.

Well, maybe that just means nicking them. But is that all it means? It sounds strangely fetishistic to me.

Lastly, my fave – Snooze. Obviously this slang stuck around and still means the same thing now, but just look at the vulgar pronunciation of it – Snoodge. Isn’t that wonderful? I’m planning to bring this one back, ideally as Rowan Atkinson would say it.

Anyway, it’s Monday morning and I’ve already pressed snoodge twice. Time to get up….

Tags 1865, The slang dictionary, Victorian, Victorian slang

Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Quockerwodger

Post author By Estelle
Post date October 6, 2014
1 Comment on Victorian Slang of the Week – Quockerwodger

One of my top ten best words this week – Quockerwodger. It almost doesn’t matter what it means, really. I’m appreciating the lip-exercising qualities of it right now. Go on, say it out loud.

It’s also good because you get to use it to insult politicians. It means a kind of marionette puppet, and, by extension, it came to mean a politician who was having his strings pulled by someone else.

And, in keeping with my personal theory that anything can be illustrated by a sketch from Monty Python, Fry and Laurie or the Armando Iannucci Shows, here is a demonstration of a Quockerwodger and Quockerwodgee (not sure what the puppet master was called. This seems as good a word as any).

Tags 1865, A bit of Fry and Laurie, Humour, The slang dictionary, Victorian, Victorian slang

Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – B Flats and F Sharps

Post author By Estelle
Post date October 1, 2014

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.

Tags 1865, The slang dictionary, Victorian slang

Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Bladder of Lard

Post author By Estelle
Post date September 24, 2014

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.

Tags 1865, The slang dictionary, Victorian slang

Food & Drink Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang Word of the Week – Staggering-Bob

Post author By Estelle
Post date September 15, 2014

This week – a term for ancient or sick animals used for rather unwholesome food purposes. What with all the food scandals and randomly-named meat products of late, perhaps we are unknowingly eating rather more Staggering-Bob than we would like.

“Staggering-Bob, An animal to whom the knife only just anticipates death from natural disease or accident,-said of meat on that account unfit for human food.”

Tags 1865, food, meat, The slang dictionary

Food & Drink Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week- Gallimaufry, Pudding-head (and Robot of Sherwood)

Post author By Estelle
Post date September 8, 2014

Oh yes! Last Saturday’s Doctor Who, Robot of Sherwood, was so entirely up my street that I think I actually live there.

Robin Hood, Ben Miller, Peter Capaldi’s vibrantly grumpy Doctor, robots for the robot-obsessed small boy in my house, Clara continuing as my style icon with a magnificent red gown, (and getting a good part to play this week). All that and the use of slang…well, that was just the cherry on the cake for me.

I came across Gallimaufry a few weeks back, while putting together my post on Gander-month, as it’s on the same page of The Slang Dictionary of 1865 – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/victorian-slang-word-of-the-week-gander-month/

Gallimaufry here means a type of jumbled stew of all kind of things chucked in the pot. It’s not quite the Doctor’s cheese sandwiches in cling film that Ben Miller’s Sheriff of Nottingham referred to in the episode, but at the time I was struck by its similarity to Gallifrey and how it sounded like something that Time Lords should eat. So I was overjoyed that someone else had found that word and also thought it suitably Timey Lordy.

Of course, that someone is Mr Mark Gatiss, writer of this episode, and frankly if anyone is also likely to own the Victorian Slang Dictionary, it’s him.

It’s followed by Gallipot, meaning apothecary (and also the pot where the ointments were kept), which isn’t a million miles away from “Doctor” either.

Oh, and there was also a mention of one of my favourite “head” insults – I’ve covered Cupboard-head, Chuckle-head, Buffle-head and Culver-head already, but here we had Pudding-head, still an excellent word to be used wherever possible today, I would say. Maybe this episode will bring it back to life? I hope so.

Tags 1865, doctor who, Mark Gatiss, Robin Hood, Robot of Sherwood, The slang dictionary

Victorian Victorian Slang

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

Post author By Estelle
Post date September 1, 2014

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:

Tags 1865, alcohol, Insult of the day, pub landlord, The slang dictionary, Victorian slang

Food & Drink Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week – Lobster and Lobscouse

Post author By Estelle
Post date August 25, 2014
1 Comment on Victorian Slang of the Week – Lobster and Lobscouse

Lobster – either a soldier (red uniform) or a policeman (dark blue like an unboiled lobster).

This is also quite a Liverpool-y kind of page. There’s “lobscouse”, the local speciality dish of Liverpool still, although now just it’s just called scouse (of course). The old recipe differed a bit with the inclusion of “biscuit”, which as befits a port city, means ship’s biscuit, hard tack, made only from flour and water.

This was long before Liverpool’s love of scouse resulted in its people being known as scousers, which didn’t enter the lexicon until around the Second World War. I’ve previously posted about one Victorian nickname – Dickey Sam https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/we-are-the-dickeymen/. Here is (almost) the much better known one – “Liverpudlin”. But I can’t now find any reference to this particular spelling outside this book.

Going back to Lobsters for a minute, have a vardo at this Horrible Histories sketch that mentions this slang and much more:

Tags 1865, horrible histories, Liverpool, police, The slang dictionary

Victorian Victorian Slang Women

Victorian Slang of the Week – Gander month

Post author By Estelle
Post date August 18, 2014
3 Comments on Victorian Slang of the Week – Gander month

Today, a slang phrase that actually rather shocked me. In 1865, what was good for the gander wasn’t good for the goose.

GANDER MONTH, the period when the monthly nurse is in the ascendancy, and the husband has to shift for himself.

This refers to the four weeks “lying-in period” following childbirth, when the new mother was kept in confinement to recover. And when the poor neglected husband of the house was allowed to go and seek his fun elsewhere for the duration.

Grose’s “Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue” from 1811 also refers to it, describing it as the time when “husbands plead a sort of indulgence in matters of gallantry”.

Although later, elsewhere, E. Cobham Brewer’s “Dictionary of Phrase and Fable” from 1898 gives it a much milder description, as a time when the husband is ignored or, rather, – “…the master is made a goose of.” Possibly the meaning of the phrase had changed by that point and attitudes had changed.