Tag: Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..

Chuck Farthing

The dictionary defines this as “a parish clerk” and I have no idea how that’s supposed to have come about. ‘Chuck farthing’ is best known as a game that essentially involves getting a farthing coin into a hole. And, this was a big game, which one MP complained in 1839 was debated for three hours in the House of Commons, but that was required as it became quite a common gambling option and legislation was considered. In 1884, the Dean of Manchester Cathedral said that “it was not right to stop a boy playing chuck farthing”, a situation that had arisen because there remained fears of gambling.

Wikipedia has a nineteenth-century description of how the game, which existed since at least the seventeenth century, worked:

“Each competitor starts with the same number of coins. They pitch their coins one at a time from a mark at a given distance towards a hole in the ground. The competitors are ranked based on how close they come to the hole. The competitor closest to the hole receives all of the coins and proceeds to a second mark nearer to the hole, from which he throws all of the coins at once towards the hole. All of the coins that remain in the hole are his to keep. The remainder of the coins are given to the next closest competitor, and the process is repeated until no coins remain.”

It’s clear to see how gambling became a problem here, especially when the game was played for hours in pubs.

But back to the parish clerk definition of the term, this goes back to at least 1655 when ‘A Satyr Against Hypocrites’ was written by John Phillips. And, perhaps the hypocrites bit is important, maybe parish clerks played the game regardless of the betting issues related to it. But, who knows….

Judging from this, the game went out of fashion long before the farthing coin ceased to be used at the end of 1960.

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..

Chop-Stick

The dictionary definition is simply “a fork”, with the first usage of the word in English being at the end of the seventeenth century. It’s too far back in history to work out, but it’s likely that the ‘chop’ meant quick and had been picked up from travellers to China.  At some stage, the word became an alternate name for a fork, before more recently returning to its original meaning.

The use of the word chopstick over time, a relative surge since the 1970s. I’m a little surprised though that people at the beginning of the nineteenth century would be freely using the word chopstick, I thought it was a word brought into the English language much later on.

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..

Choak Pear

Quite a lengthy definition this:

“Figuratively, an unanswerable objection: also a machine formerly used in Holland by robbers; it was of iron, shaped like a pear; this they forced into the mouths of persons from whom they intended to extort money; and on turning a key, certain interior springs thrust forth a number of points, in all directions, which so enlarged it, that it could not be taken out of the mouth: and the iron, being case hardened, could not be filed: the only methods of getting rid of it, were either by cutting the mouth, or advertising a reward for the key. These pears were also called pears of agony”.

And the instruments that the dictionary refers to have since been created to show what they would have been like. They are though almost certainly a figment of imagination from the early author, F. de Calvi, who first mentioned them. It’s true that devices like this were used as gags in punishment, but there has been no evidence present for criminals ever using them.

If a criminal of the time wanted to steal something from someone, they could easily do that. The chances of them having some complex mechanical device which they then used to extort a ransom seem low, there must have been easier ways for them to manage to get money out of their victim. I’m blaming the grub street press again, keen to sell newspapers and scare people, this would be the perfect story to spread. A few newspapers reported the device, but they all referenced Grose’s dictionary.

So, the stories behind devices also known as Pears of Agony or Pears of Anguish are likely false, with the museum pieces mostly dating to the nineteenth century. But if they were true, this must have been a hideous thing to endure.

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..

Chirping Merry

A charming way to describe someone who has been drinking perhaps just a little too much, the dictionary defines this as “exhilarated with liquor. Chirping glass, a cheerful glass, that makes the company chirp like birds in spring”. The phrase was also linked with a regional term that was “cherry merry” meaning the same thing, the phrases were in use from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. It’s quite a polite term, there are much more vulgar ones in the dictionary.

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..

With the moving of server last week I got a bit behind on these, but I’ve caught up now and today is day 72 of this. This has lasted for considerably longer than I had anticipated.

Cherry-Coloured Cat

I had heard of this phrase in relation to PT Barnum, when he agreed to buy a cherry coloured cat for his circus and realised he had been fooled when he was presented with a black cat and the seller told him “you can get black cherries as well as red”. But, this dictionary pre-dates Barnum, and their definition is nearly identical, which is “a black cat, there being black cherries as well as red”.

The phrase has also been used to describe a confidence trick or scam and there was a report in a newspaper in the 1830s fondly telling the story of how a man in Scarborough enjoyed fooling the gentry who came to the town with the same trick. This then became a common jape in the late nineteenth century, but it’s perhaps through Barnum that this lives on.

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..

Chaw Bacon

This beautiful phrase, now more commonly just one word, is defined as “a countryman, a stupid fellow”. ‘Chaw’ is an old English variant of the word chew and the combination of the bacon element, which was traditionally seen as a poor man’s food (well, and women and children) so it’s the equivalent of a country bumpkin.

The phrase dates back to at least the early eighteenth century, but it seemed to have a resurgence in the late nineteenth century before falling back into obscurity.

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..

Chatter Box

This of course remains a commonly used phrase today, but I did like the quite vivid definition given by the dictionary, which was “one whose tongue runs twelve score to the dozen, a chattering man or woman”. When the dictionary was published, this was a relatively new phrase as it had only started to be used in the 1770s. It was originally two words, but it has been corrupted down into one over the years.

I think I prefer the dictionary definition than the word it’s describing, I will definitely attempt to get the phrase “your tongue runs twelve score to the dozen” in somewhere this year.

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..

Chapt

Defined as “dry or thirsty”, this is a now obsolete word for chapped, although I’ve seen people write about their “chapt lips” in error so it might go full circle. Or indeed, unless they were aware of its archaic roots and wanted it to be brought back in the mainstream.  Although chapped is more used as an adjective now, its origins are as a verb and in the US there are far more of these ‘-t’ endings than in the UK where it’s usually ‘-ed’. But not here, even the Americans like the idea of chapped, even though they also like words like learnt, spelt and spoilt to name just a few.

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..

Chalkers

Many words used in this dictionary seem to have been used sparsely and although they might be interesting for their formation, they weren’t really part of the vernacular. This definition was though used widely in Ireland and I suspect that you could easily make a whole book out of it. The dictionary says:

“Men of wit, in Ireland, who in the night amuse themselves with cutting inoffensive passengers across the face with a knife. They are somewhat like those facetious gentlemen some time ago known in England by the title of Sweaters and Mohocks”.

Going back to front, the Mohocks story scared a lot of people in eighteenth-century Britain. There were stories that it was a group of young men who killed and maimed men and raped women, all just for fun as they never stole anything. John Gay wrote his first drama about them, but he also noted that most of the stories had been made up on Grub Street, a street in London known for journalists who wanted to sell newspapers by exaggeration, fraud and shock. Little has perhaps changed.

The story of the Sweaters is similar, they were meant to be gangs of young men who would physically attack men in a horrific manner, leaving them to sometimes die of their injuries. In reality, actual facts about this happening are much harder to come by.

So, over to Ireland and the Chalkers. There is much more evidence for gangs causing physical harm and Parliament got engaged with this topic. A Parliamentary Act from 1796 reads:

“Evil dispossessed people have of late with knives or other offensive weapons, cut and stabbed, or with pistols have wounded, or attempted to wound, by firing, shooting and discharging the same, many of his Majesty’s subjects either with an intent to murder, rob or maim, or merely with a wicked intent to disable or disfigure them; and whereas the laws now in force to prevent wanton, wilful and malicious maiming and wounding, are found not to be sufficiently effectual to deter such evil dispossessed people”.

The decision was then that anyone involved in these actions would be sentenced to death and their bodies sent to anatomists for dissection.

Random attacks on civilians weren’t that common though, it was mainly directed at soldiers and had been caused by arguments in how the Irish Army had been managed during the late eighteenth century. Rewards were offered for soldiers who were maimed, which is why criminals moved into this arena of attack, it was still for a financial gain but just not one which directly took from the soldier.

But, all of this caused fear in the population and these gangs lived on in the collective memory for some decades, ready to terrify the next generation.

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..

And catching up today since I’ve missed a few days over the last week.

Caxon

This word is defined as “an old weather-beaten wig” and it is apparently still in very occasional usage today, although I can’t say that I’ve ever heard anyone use it in general conversation. It seems though that the word was usually placed before the word ‘wig’ to signify that it was old and worn, rather than being used as a word on its own.

The dictionaries don’t know how the word came into usage, one suggests it was probably just named after a person called Caxon who happened to have a worn a rather dilapidated old wig. This is what interests me most about the word, some poor sod from centuries ago has likely had centuries of people using his name in vain…..