While eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied, less well-known are the era’s popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon. Strange Vernaculars by Janet Sorensen delves into how these published works presented the supposed lexicons of the “common people” and traces the ways that these languages, once shunned and associated with outsiders, became objects of fascination in printed glossaries—from The New Canting Dictionary to Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue—and in novels, poems, and songs. Check out the whiddes below so you can chounter with the best of them; and don’t be alarmed if some of them sound strange to your modern lugg.
Idiot pot—the knowledge box, the head
Rantipole—a rude, romping boy or girl, also a gadabout dissipated woman
Coggle—pebble
Rumbo ken—a pawn shop
Bugher—a dog
Hot bak’d wardens—pears
Golden pippins—apples
Crap-merchant—hangman
Coom—come
Nerst—next
Bingo-mort—a female drunkard
Black mouth—foul, malicious railing
Clod-hopper—a ploughman
Conny-catching—cheating the unwary, figured as hapless rabbits, or coneys
Stauling ken—a house that will receive stolen wares
Autem—church
Nab—head
Bite—cheat or cozen
Fencing cully—receiver of stolen goods
Fambles—hands
Cove—a man
Dimber—pretty
Bowse—drink
Darkeman—night
Whiddes—words
Harmanbeck—a constable
Feather-bed-lane—any bad road, but particularly that betwixt Dunchurch and Daintry
Anglers—cheats, petty thieves
Dead-men—empty pots or bottles on a tavern table
Chuck farthing—a Parish-Clerk
Keffal—a horse
Chittiface—a little puny child
Chounter—to talk pertly and sometimes angrily
Pateepan—a little pie or small pastry
Cow-hearted—fearful
Prog—meat
Scowre—to run away
Stag-evil—A disease, a palsy in the jaws
Thirdendeal—a liquid measure containing three pints
Thokes—fish with broken bellies
A parson’s lemon—a whore
Diver—a pickpocket
Rapping—perjury
Cleave—a wanton woman
Leap in the Dark—execution by hanging
Crimps—contractors for unloading coal ships
Cocquets—warrants
Bully-ruffins—highway-men
Night sneak—house burglary
Nimming—thieving
Collaring the coal—laying hold of money
The college—Newgate prison
Fatal tree—the gallows
Leatherhead—“a thick skull’d, Heavy-handed fellow”
Long-Meg—a very tall woman
Lord—a very crooked deformed or ill-shapen person
Malmasey-nose—A jolly red nose
Brick—loaf of bread
Janet Sorensen is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing.