#Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue

[beggars-opera]

You guys drank the seawater again didn't you

[diana-andraste]

Still Life (In An Airshaft), Joel-Peter Witkin, 1967

"He cut off his nose to be revenged of his face."

A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by Francis Grose, 1788

[clove-pinks]

Even if the word funky apparently dates to the 17th century, I did not expect to read about a funky canoe in 1813:

We both sat on the sound end of the wooden Canoe, cocked her broken bow over the water and launched our bark for fame and glory. It was, in vulgar parlance, a funky affair but we got over safe. (x)

[dollypopup]

come over here and profound for me

-is officially completed!

Did you wish the show explored Pen and Colin's emotions in more depth? That Penelope and Eloise's friendship fallout was more tense- and the reconciliation more meaningful? That Polin's romance was a focal point that burned slowly as they fell deeper and deeper for each other? That Lady Whistledown had the narrative weight it was building toward? Were you, too, displeased with 'and then everybody clapped' endings and wanted a Polin honeymoon? Are you a fan of character growth? Accountability? Tender smut? Dorks in love? Reconciliation? Colin backstory and POV? Poetry? Love and Romance? Women treated as full people? Family feels? Angst? Polin as a team? Pen and Colin and Eloise and Marina all winning?

Come Over Here and Profound for Me! The fic one person left 75 anonymous hate comments on, and another said "I feel like I understand them in a new way, and I really wish your insight into the soul of each of them was reflected in the show. It made the reconciliations that much sweeter and the love deeper."

Snippet:

“Penelope! Pen! ” he called out, running and running, and just as she turned, he threw his arms about her. There, in full view of the ton, in bleary sunshine and in the eyes of those who were still mulling about, Lady Whistledown articles in their hands, he curled into her, breathed once more for the first time in what felt ages. “Pen.”

It took her a moment, but then she fully leaned upon him, exhaling as though she had not had the opportunity even a moment in their separation, and she melted into him. Slowly, as though to assure he was real, her hands came up to his back, gently grasping hold of him, disheveled as he was. “Colin,” she whispered, and he nuzzled his nose against her temple. “Oh, Co-”

“-lin Christopher Bridgerton!”

He nearly hissed when he felt Anthony grasping him by the collar with a yelp, scruffing him as though a stray cat and pulled him away. “In the middle of the street!? Miss Featherington, I apologize for my brother’s behavior.”

“Hey!” he protested, twisting about to see that familiar vein throbbing in his brother’s forehead.

“You’ve lost your wits! In broad daylight! Have you gone mad!?”

“Of course I have!” he yelled, just as Penelope herself proclaimed “Do not speak to him that way!” and the surprise of it left Anthony speechless. Colin’s entire body felt to bursting, all the relief, all the ache he had for her, all the tenderness intensified. “Did I not just tell you I love her? And here she is! For an entire day, I thought there was no future and now my future is before me- and you question if I have gone mad? After I watched the woman I adore be dragged off to a place I could never hope to reach her and now she has returned?”

Through the pulse pounding through his ears, drumming his body, he felt another hand upon him, a voice most dulcet sharpened. “I demand you release my intended this moment, Lord Bridgerton, or you shall see what true madness is from a woman displeased,” Penelope insisted, protective and deadly as she pulling him toward her, Anthony’s grip fully slackened, and the two of them leaning upon one another once more. 

read me

[tricornonthecob]

perusing the Good Book, the Scriptures, the Truth (Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue) and I finally found an old-timey word for teenager:

Honestly, petition to use this instead of teenager now.

[dimity-lawn]

Do you have any favorite bits of slang from that book that you noticed Pratchett using in discworld?

Unfortunately not any that I can think of off the top of my head. Sometimes I'll write "18th c" or "18th c slang" on a piece of scrap paper and use it as a bookmark to mark examples I come across, but I'm not very consistent about doing this...

I might make a list of terms upon rereading the series, but I'd probably miss terms.

While I can't think of favorites right now, I've included a few of the many examples that I think are neat, as well as a few that would be nice below, followed by their respective entries:

Something that catches my attention is when "foot pad" is used. It's not my favorite, but I find it somewhat amusing because it seems a rather mild term for what it is.

It's not a favorite term, but as I mentioned in another post, the man who runs/owns the livery stable and said that he always gave the customer what he wanted is named Hobson, and I like that Pratchett was able to make a character out of "Hobson's Choice".

In Going Postal, Vetinari mentions the "sisal twostep" and "hemp fandango", and while I'm not sure if those were real terms, there are certainly similar ones (such as "the Paddington Frisk"), and I think it's cool that Pratchett seems to have based it off of period terms (or perhaps used real term(s) that I'm not familiar with).

Honestly, I'm somewhat disappointed that the Nac Mac Feegle didn't (at least to my memory) call a cat a "Grimmalkin", and I'm really hoping that there's (even a minor) witch named Mrs. Evans...

I wonder how bad it would've been if someone tried to say "you are a thief and a murderer: you have killed a baboon and stolen his face" in the presence of the Librarian. Or the Librarian, a licensed thief, an assassin, a watchperson, and an Igor...

I think it would've been funny if Ankh-Morporkians referred to Vimes as something along the lines of "Old Smoaky", "Smoaky Vimes", or "Commander Smoaky", or if someone (perhaps Nobby?) referred to Cheery and Vimes as "Cheery and Peery".

For anyone wondering what this is about:

[vulgartongueposting]

Starting Off Strong

"Abbess, or Lady Abbess, a bawd, the mistress of a brothel."

In other words, the lady proprietor of a whorehouse. I'm not an etymologist so I don't know (etymology folks pipe in!) but I would imagine this is a cheeky inversion of an Abbess, who is the head of an Abbey or Cloister - in other words, the Nun in charge of running things.

[frimleyblogger]

Lost Word Of The Day (85)

#Durham man -someone who is #knockkneed #mustard #lostwords #obscurewords #logophilia

The glorious city of Durham was once famous for more than its impressive cathedral and castle. It was also the home of the finest quality mustard, the brainchild of a Mrs Chalmers. It was so superior that it blew the socks off the previous stronghold of English mustard production, Tewkesbury. In 1720 the enterprising Mrs Chalmers had invented a method for extracting the full flavour from mustard…

[dackleshmurf]

- 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Francis Grose

[hexjulia]

oh no! not the (furtively checks A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788))

oh. yeah anyway people are engaging in whipt syllabub on my dashboard again.

[corvidaedream]

top 5 facts about non-famous Bostonians from the 1770s? (general facts about the population or facts about specific historical people)

oooh hoo hoo! excellent question!!! ty!!!!!

these will not necessarily be in an order. also my sense of who is famous or not is heavily skewed.

this is me trying to figure out who counts:

as some followers may already be aware, in 1771, owner of a local ropewalk john gray successfully sued lendall pitts for damages incurred when they had a brawl downtown over the fact that pitts discovered that the woman he had been flirting with the night before had, in fact, been gray himself. pitts' defense was essentially a gay panic defense, and the jury sided with gray.

this is technically first recorded in the 1780s, but in the classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue, published in london, "gouging [someone's eyes] out" is noted to be something that tends to happen "at boston, in america". i have no actual stats to back this up, but apparently that's our reputation.

i've read notes from a man working under general washington at camp in cambridge where complaints about the behavior of continental soldiers from boston included spending too much time chatting with the enemy while on guard duty, using too much butter to cook, and bathing too close to the bridge where women could gather to watch them.

there's a young man named henry prentiss (or prentice) involved in the boston tea party who later got in trouble with the law because, as far as i can tell, harvard students kept stealing from his vegetable garden, so he started lacing it with laxatives to deter them.

most people in boston in the 1770s, statistically speaking, were under the age of 16

i have more but theres not so many fun facts in my head as there is just very involved gossip and i have no idea any longer whether something is common knowledge or if it's just something i and 20 other people bring up a lot

[beggars-opera]

There are very few f-bombs in the 18th century slang dictionary, but when they do show up they are CLASS

[amphibious-thing]

Fop, dandy and namby-pamby were all terms for effeminate men. There is nuanced difference in their meanings and how they were used in the 18th century.

According to the OED:

Fop

One who is foolishly attentive to and vain of his appearance, dress, or manners; a dandy, an exquisite.

Dandy

One who studies above everything to dress elegantly and fashionably; a beau, fop, ‘exquisite’.

Namby-pamby

Of a person or group of people: inclined to weak sentimentality, affectedly dainty; lacking vigour or drive; effeminate in expression or behaviour.

I wouldn’t say any of them are gay slurs per se. They comment on femininity not sexuality. However there was a strong association between gender nonconformity and sodomy and that can’t be dismissed either. Look at how A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) defines molly:

a miss Molly, an effeminate fellow, a sodomite.

There were words that specifically were used as insults against men who had sex with men. The writers could have used words like catamite, sodomite, molly, pathic &c. But they chose fop, dandy and namby-pamby. These are specifically used to insult men for being effeminate. Even ponce (notably not used in the 18th century) is defined by the OED as:

depreciative. An effeminate or affected man or boy; (also) a homosexual man.

This one is a gay slur but its also is an insult for effeminate men.

The focus of these insults is gender nonconformity probably because the show is thematically about toxic masculinity. Auguring back and forth about whether insults aimed at effeminate men are technically gay slurs seems a little silly to me and often implies that if they're not gay slurs then it's ok to use them as an insult. It implies that bigotry against gender nonconforming people is not a problem or at least not as bad as homophobia.

The way that gender nonconforming people were marginalised in the 18th century and are still marginalised today is bigotry in and of itself. However we can never truly seperate the oppression that gender nonconforming people face from misogyny, homophobia and transphobia as these are all intrinsically interlinked under the patriarchy.

[pixelbumblebee]

(Modern flash dictionary, containing all the cant words, slang terms, and flash phrases, now in vogue by George Kent, pg. 6)

(A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose, pg. 490)

okay Edwin holy shit chill

[clove-pinks]

When I learned that there was an 1814 caricature by William Heath called "Boney and Maddy Go to Pot," I immediately thought that it would somehow be making fun of the diminutive statures of two major figures in the 1810s rogues gallery. (Yes, yes, I KNOW that Napoleon was average height for his time—but there is definitely a tradition of depicting him as tiny, and James Madison was a genuine shrimp.)

Points for vulgarity, I guess! They are both on chamber pot commodes. The dialogue is as follows:

NAPOLEON (holding paper labeled 'Orders for an Imeadiet march to Elba'): "You See its all dicky with me. They have sent me to Pot."

MADISON (holding paper inscribed 'March to the Tomahawks'): "And soon I fear it will be all dicky with me. they will send me to pot too, see what a fine kettle of fish we have made of it, this comes of my believing you and Takeing your Bribes."

According to the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1811 edition, "It's all Dicky with him; i.e. it's all over with him."

Was the artist unaware that James Madison was only 5'4" and shorter than Napoleon? This fact was not lost on Sir George Cockburn, who never missed an opportunity to call him "Little Jemmy."

[tricornonthecob]

Looking up some good 18th century insults to hurl at a catcaller in the Dictionary of the Vulgar tongue that isn't prick or dildo and just

"It was once fashionable. It's still fashionable, but it was also once fashionable."

Honestly this book just keeps on giving