Ah! I saw “Sit-upons” and thought it meant bottom (bottoms?), but that would be a bit too rude apparently. It’s another word for “trousers” which, in slang terms, were described so shyly that I’m imagining people were only able to silently mouth the word in polite conversation. Much like a certain type of person of the older generation who does the same for the word “lesbian” now.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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….
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.
The Slang Dictionary, 1865
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).
