I started doing the buried words part of this blog because I love to hear words that are rarely used these days. They would stick in my head more effectively if I wrote a post about them and I hoped that maybe someone else would read them and remember them too. I considered it job done yesterday when the man of the house used ‘boudoir’ in the context of a sulking room. No, he hadn’t read my blog, he had just heard me raving on about it and obviously it stuck in his head too. I wouldn’t have been going on about it if I hadn’t been writing the post so, indirectly, the blog has had its desired effect. Job done. Maybe I should write a post about men doing more housework too….
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When I was looking for more articles with the word ‘weasen’ I found this one using weasened to describe a little old man in a fish shop. I also found the word gamin which is a homeless boy roaming the streets, an urchin a waif or a naughty child. This article was amusing. Made up accounts or true, I still laughed. The raggedy beggar looking down on the coachman who doesn’t own the uniform he works in, the lazy Irish waiter and the gamins begging for cigar butts. I could almost see them.
The Matiland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser 23rd April 1892-http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article19009053
I love old slang and this article is full of it! I was looking for an article containing the word bobbery (a noisy disturbance, a squabble, to raise a bobbery) and had to spend quite some time looking up the meanings of other words used in this very long article. It is a Friday, you have extra time over the weekend to squint at the tiny font (sorry!). Toggery was self-explanatory (clothing, put on your togs) and charley is often used to refer to police but James Carty’s ‘bird’s eye fogle, killingly twisted about his weasen’? What a wonderful string of words. But, what the?!
A bird’s eye fogle was, disappointingly, merely a silk handkerchief with eye like spots. Weason was much harder. There are references to it but not really a concrete definition (if you can find one please let me know!) I found ‘weasen faced’ and ‘ hideous little weasen face’ but I would say that they refer to the weasel-like countenance of the person being described and I don’t think his fogle was twisted about his head. I did find an ‘I’ll slit his weasen’ from 1910 so I would say that weasen would mean throat or neck. I thought it much more likely that ‘killingly twisted about his weasen’ meant his fogle was worn rakishly around his neck.
Gammon means nonsensical or misleading talk (also smoked ham, funnily enough) and a Virago is a mannish, bold or scolding woman. I think that Margaret DeCourey was probably a scary and grumpy woman when sober!
If only police reports were still published in the daily press. All we get now is sensationalistic news stories. These old police/court reports seem to be just an amusing account of actual events.
The Sydney Herald 13th June 1833-http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article12847011
Yeah, I know, this is hardly a buried word. We all know the meaning and often use it. A ladies private sitting room or bedroom, right? Usually when I think of it I have the mental picture of a room, richly decorated with heavy drapes and expensive artwork with an imposing four-poster deep in pillows and cushions. Very unlike my bedroom…
I bet you didn’t know the word boudoir is originally an old French one for ‘a room to sulk in’? Since finding that out my mental picture of a boudoir also contains a spoilt woman in an expensive frock sobbing theatrically in amongst the myriad of pillows.
I think we could justifiably start calling any blokes shed a boudoir. They do go out there to sulk when things go wrong. However, I think that re-branding the man-cave in such a way has the potential of seeing me banished from it forever.
I need a sulking room today though. I downloaded the last two episodes of Castle yesterday and have exceeded my download limit. My internet speed has been slowed for the next week and I’m not sure I can handle living under dial-up conditions for too long….
Where do I begin?! This is the most amusingly written police report I have come across so far (The Sydney Herald 26th Dec 1831). The author of this article must have been in fine spirits that day. Forgive me for putting such a long one up, but once I started reading it I just had to share it. A long one also makes me feel better about missing putting a post up yesterday. We were driving all day on our way home from our Easter getaway, and by the time we got home and the kids sorted out, that day’s post would have almost have been late enough to be the one for the next day!
I was actually looking for an article containing the very amusing word bouncible (prone to boast, bumptious) but when I found this one all thoughts of a ‘buried word’ post flew from my head, although fortunately this article still contains that word.
If you were at the courthouse on that Monday in 1831, there would have been an amusing array of people before you for a few unexpected crimes.
Sarah Sutcliffe, described as ‘an ungrateful hussy, with the rotundity of a rum puncheon’ charged with ‘having an inveterate hankering after the male sex.
William Power enjoyed prison so much last time, he had no trouble getting a return trip.
Kate McDonald, whose crime I am unsure of. Flitting? ‘Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon’? Today she would probably be sent to rehab.
Ann Smith, for being a little too free with her affections for a singing sailor. Well, her affections were not exactly free …
Thomas McPhene for not being able to tell the difference between toast and flesh.
Samuel Cordwell for ‘keeping a house, the character of which had as many holes as a culander’.
The last is my favourite. Mary Evans charged with ‘having perpetual motion in her tongue and a gout for strong waters in which she had been overtaken the previous night and in consequence, handed out the rhino, and was discharged.’
Handed out the rhino. It sounds like a wonderful slang term for bad behaviour when drunk. I did a bit of looking around and, as rhino is an old slang term for money I think that it is really saying ‘she paid the fine’.
Pity, The thought of ‘I was so drunk on the weekend, I really handed out the rhino’ being used to describe the weekends frivolities really amuses me.
Lusus Naturae. A freak, mutant or monster. A deformed or strangely marked creature.
Never heard of this word before reading this article and when I read it, for a second I thought all of my sea-monster article collecting would come to nix, with ‘sea monster’ being slang for a known creature. I was wrong. It was a word used by the captain to make it seem like he knew what he was talking about. The children thought it was seaweed, the carpenter thought it was seaweed but the captain said it was a sea monster, so sea monster it was. I love that the captain describes it as ‘the sea serpent in one of its early stages of development’. He obviously knows enough about sea monsters to recognize an adult sea serpent, it’s just the fact that this one was a juvenile that threw him off a quick identification.
I think that even a landlubber like me would be able to tell the difference between a sunfish and something described as a ‘serpent’ though. I have never come across a giant sunfish anywhere but on the telly, but I have noticed that they are far from serpentine. Blobby, perhaps. Not serpenty.
(Kilmore Free Press 23rd March 1882)
Buried words and Bushwa. 
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