Lost English

by Chris Roberts

  Eiderdown

  This refers either to the ‘down’ – the soft, fine insulating feathers – of the eider duck, or to a form of bed quilt filled with that down. Essentially, an eiderdown acts as a kind of over-blanket laid on top of the other bedclothes, typically sheets and (in pre-central heating days) a number of blankets; should the bed’s occupant become too warm, it is easy to throw the eiderdown off, as, unlike blankets and sheets, it is not tucked in. The eiderdown seems to have been completely usurped by the duvet, or in America by the slightly odd-sounding ‘comforter’. Duvets (or ‘Continental quilts’, although they are not quilted) come in different ratings indicating how warm they are, and a range of sizes to complement beds of different dimensions, from single via twin and queen up to king, and can be filled with cotton, silk, or synthetic fabrics, and, rarely, feathers. The triumph of the duvet over the (often heavier) eiderdown is probably because of better heating in houses, more people with allergies and a general move away from the heavier fabrics and clothing of previous eras; it is also much easier to make a bed by simply straightening the sheets and the duvet, than to rearrange sheets, blankets, eiderdown and, perhaps, counterpane (q.v.).

  (In one of those curiosities of words borrowed by English from other languages, French duvet means down – as in feathers – and what is called a duvet in English is generally called une coquette in France, although le duvet now seems to be catching on there.)

  Fancy goods

  It would be pleasing to think that these are so called because one only buys them if one fancies them, but realistically the derivation is from the ornate (or fancy) nature of the items, which have a primarily ornamental use. (The expression seems to have originated in the early nineteenth century – New York’s famous jewellery store, Tiffany & Co., was founded in 1837 as a ‘stationery and fancy goods emporium’ – while ‘fancy’ in this meaning dates from medieval times, as a contraction of ‘fantasy’.) There is a definite overlap with gimcrack (q.v.) products, and though the term ‘fancy goods’ is still used in the wholesale trade, members of the public tend nowadays to refer to ‘gift items’, or even ‘souvenirs’ or ‘impulse purchases’. Department stores no longer have fancy-goods sections, because today such items are so widespread across different areas of the store, nor, sadly, did one feature in Grace’s Department Store, the setting of the popular television sitcom Are You Being Served?, which ran from 1972 to 1985. Even so, one can still sometimes find old-fashioned shop fronts including the phrase ‘Fancy Goods’ (usually with ‘Stationery’ as well) in the list of wares on offer inside.

  Flicks (US: flickers)

  First used in the 1920s to describe films or as a generic word for the cinema (as in ‘Let’s got to the flicks’), the word was still quite widely used in the 1970s. Its most likely origin is the obvious one: the erratic nature of many early projections, which offered a rather different experience from today’s high-definition movies. The flickering was caused by the rate of frames per second (fps) as the film passed through the projector. A projection speed of 40 fps reduced the flickering but led to other issues with the available technology (which can best be put under the heading ‘health and safety’, as this was chiefly overheating of the projector, which sometimes caught fire), so often the projections had to run at a lower rate. Advances in film technology rendered the phenomenon obsolete long before the term fell out of use.

  This is possibly because although the projectors had improved, as had film, colour and sound, British cinemas themselves had often remained more or less the same, so offering a clear link back to the age of the flicks. The cinema renaissance since the 1980s (when it was feared video would wipe out film-going) has led to the closing of many of the old ‘fleapits’, with their single screens and ageing, musty seats, and the opening of multi-screened modern venues. This initially brought about a reduction in the number of cinemas. Brixton in South London once had as many as eight, for example, but now has one, despite a gradual increase in the number of cinemagoers since the trough of the early 1980s. In 1984 10 per cent of under-fourteens went to the cinema once a month, 16 per cent of fourteen-to-twenty-four-year olds, 4 per cent of twenty-five to thirty-four-year-olds, and only 1 per cent of those over thirty-five. By 2000 these figures were 32, 54, 3 and 14 per cent, respectively. In overall numbers these figures are still down on the peak years, with 167 million cinema visits in Britain in 2003, compared to 1,400 million a year in the 1940s, when audiences packed the flicks to see double features, B movies, weepies and westerns.

  Four-eyes

  A very simple-to-use insult for anyone with glasses, the word ‘speccy’ added before it completing the abuse. Other derogatory terms like ‘Joe 90’, ‘Magoo’, ‘Deirdre’ or ‘Ant and Decs’ (rhyming slang for ‘specs’) rely on characters transiently in the public eye (if you’ll forgive the pun). In the modern world of contact lenses and laser eye surgery, however, wearing glasses has become increasingly a lifestyle choice. Pop stars in the 1980s started the trend for ‘cosmetic’ disability aids and since then there has been ‘librarian chic’, ‘geek chic’ and, more distressingly, a subsection of pornography devoted tospectacle-wearers. All of which rather gives the lie to the famous line by Dorothy Parker that ‘Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.’ Additionally, according to Dr Erin Heerey of the School of Psychology at Bangor University in Wales, teasing and, even unpleasant, nicknames are an ‘essential part of life’ and are actually positive for children’s development, helping rather than hindering their social skills. In fact, though, ‘four-eyes’ has largely fallen out of use, as has the older and even more archaic ‘gig-lamps’, a term for glasses, or a name for someone who wears them, originating from the oil lamps on a gig, a light two-wheeled carriage drawn by a single horse.

  Galloping consumption

  ‘Consumption’ was once the most commonly used term for tuberculosis (TB), and is a vividly horrible way of describing how the disease consumes and wastes its victims. (An even older word for the disease, phthisis, comes from Classical Greek phthinein, meaning ‘to decay’.) It is a common, highly infectious and often deadly bacterial disease that has been with us since ancient times, killing hundreds of millions of people over scores of centuries. The more severe form (miliary TB) is known as ‘galloping consumption’ on account of the speed of its spread and effects. Hopes that the disease might be eradicated altogether, at least in developed countries and largely through vaccination programmes, were dashed when antibiotic-resistant strains of the disease began to appear in the 1980s, something exacerbated by widespread immigration of people, often refugees, carrying the disease. Although modern drugs combat TB far more effectively than the old fresh-air sanatorium cure, the illness is still widespread, and its effects are typically worst among the poorest people. (The idea behind sanatoriums, of segregating patients, has rather disappeared for serious illnesses like TB, but all sorts of health clinics still exist for detoxing patients, or for rest cures of various types.) Despite its horrors, consumption has always had a sort of ‘deathly chic’, not merely because so many writers, poets, composers, singers and actresses fell victim to it, but also because it was a recurring theme in novels and operas, from Alexandre Dumas fils’s 1848 novel La Dame aux camélias (on which Giuseppe Verdi based his opera La Traviata, first performed – disastrously – in 1853) to Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924), which is set in a TB sanatorium. Away from fiction, at least two and probably all three of the Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood died of consumption, as did their brother, Branwell. Other famous victims of the disease include the poet John Keats and the American dentist and gunfighter John Henry ‘Doc’ Holliday, whom his friend Wyatt Earp described as: ‘A long lean ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption, and at the same time the most skilful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a gun that I ever knew.’

  Galoshes

  A galosh (though the plural is more usually seen) is a kind of waterproof overshoe, usu
ally made of rubber, worn over other footwear to protect it, although the term was sometimes also used for any protective waterproof boots. The word (which appeared in the mid-nineteenth century and derives originally, via a Middle English word for a clog, from Latin gallica, meaning a ‘Gallic shoe’) has been replaced in popular use by ‘overshoes’, or sometimes by ‘wellingtons’, though strictly speaking the latter are not the same thing, since ‘galoshes’ refers to any form of protective overshoe, and originally were not necessarily made of rubber. Either way, outside of the shoe trade and the fetishist market the term is in danger of disappearing, although galoshes are still readily available, albeit generally under the term ‘overshoes’; they are rarely seen in this country nowadays, however. The word has also vanished from the product catalogue of the Finnish company Nokia, which was a major producer of galoshes and rubber boots in its pre-mobile-phone days.

  Gasper

  This dated slang word for a cigarette (especially a cheap one) is used to good effect in Sarah Waters’s 2006 novel The Night Watch, set in and just after Second World War, in which the heroines regularly light up. The term goes back at least as far as the First World War, when a gasper might have been sparked by a lucifer (q.v.). Gasper aside, slang for cigarettes is surprisingly resilient, with ‘tabs’, ‘fags’ (late nineteenth century, from ‘fag end’, a slightly derogatory term for the last of something) and ‘smokes’ all having a decent lineage, while ‘baccy’ and ‘snout’ are well-used terms for the material that goes into making a ‘rollie’ or filling a pipe. With tobacco, it seems to be the modish ‘clever’ terms like ‘coffin nails’ or ‘cancer sticks’ that quickly fall from favour while the old favourites remain. It is likely, if current anti-tobacco pressures continue, that a whole world of words relating to legitimate smoking may be lost over the next decade, together with the rich folklore of packets (including bizarre myths, like the word ‘jew’ and the letters ‘KKK’ on the Marlboro pack, and the supposed naked woman – or man – on the front of the Camel pack). Yet it is also possible that a new clandestine world of outcast tabbers will evolve a rich, fresh vocabulary, one that reflects the changing mores of a society in which the innocent term ‘gasper’ may now apparently mean someone who enjoys erotic asphyxiation.

  Gauleiter

  In Nazi Germany, the leader (Leiter) of a region (Gau). A Gau was roughly the equivalent of an English shire, and the archaic German noun was revived by the Nazis and coupled with Leiter to describe the political officials given charge of local areas, or the leaders of local branches of the Nazi Party. Whatever the legal authority of a region after Hitler came to power in 1933, the gauleiters, of which there were several different ranks, ran Germany with an unswerving obedience to the Nazi Party line. It was this unquestioning obedience to authority and general willingness to overrule opposition that brought the word to Britain, albeit as an insult. Bosses, council officials, police officers, traffic wardens – basically, anyone deemed to have a modicum of power who was inflexible in the operation of that power, could find himself or herself called a gauleiter or, worse, a ‘little Hitler’. (Such people are not a new phenomenon. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, which dates from 1604, Isabella refers witheringly to ‘man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority’.) In view of the evil perpetrated by the Nazis, it was obviously a very wounding insult, though with time it has gently faded from use. Like a great many terms associated with the Nazis, the word is not used in Germany.

  Gay

  The widespread adoption of ‘gay’ to mean homosexual – which in its various mutations is both the most popular and the most accepted usage of the word in the English-speaking world today – goes back at least as far as the 1920s. Since the 1970s it has virtually eclipsed all other meanings of the word, from happy and carefree to bright and colourful, even gaudy (not, of course, that these meanings are mutually exclusive). It is, however, worthwhile recording other, now defunct, applications of the word, including the state of being a bit tipsy, and also with reference to an immoral woman or one engaged in prostitution, a ‘gay girl’ being somewhat akin to a doxy (q.v.) or brass. It was sometimes also deployed as a synonym for lewd or dissolute.

  The word offers a very good example of the vibrancy of the English language, arriving here in the twelfth century from Old French gai (although nowadays the French increasingly use gay to mean homosexual as well, thus getting their word back, albeit in a different spelling). It had picked up associations of immorality by the seventeenth century when a gay man meant a womanizer. By the 1890s (referred to, mainly in America, as the ‘Gay Nineties’, and by the upper echelons of English society as the ‘Naughty Nineties’) the word was still mostly used to mean bright, and it was not until nearly a century later that its primary meaning shifted. Other words have undergone similar transformations – for example, everyone knows that ‘nice’ once meant fine or subtle (and is still sometimes used in that way), but another former meaning was wanton or profligate, as in this line from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1606–7): ‘For when mine hours were nice and lucky, men did ransom lives of me for jests.’

  One occasionally still encounters people who will, often rather pompously, denounce the change in the meaning of gay, but they are fighting a hopeless battle – the meaning is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. One interesting difference, though, is that the noun from gay meaning homosexual is ‘gayness’, whereas that from gay meaning bright or cheerful is ‘gaiety’. In archy and mehitabel (1927), Don Marquis’s wonderful collection of stories about a literate cockroach and a world-weary alley cat, mehitabel the cat often signs off – rather gallantly, given the circumstances of her life – with a cheerful ‘toujours gai’.

  Gimcrack

  A lovely word which, with the proliferation on British high streets of pound stores, remainder bookshops and other outlets for cheap and often poorly designed or made goods, should actually be at the height of its popularity. Gimcrack, which derives originally from a Middle English noun referring to some sort of intricate inlay work, so eventually coming to mean a knick-knack, refers to showy objects – ornaments, gadgets, and so on – of little real use or value, which might alternatively be described as ‘gewgaws’ (another good Middle English word, though of unknown origin) or even ‘tat’. In the past gimcrack goods might have been cheap metal objects, but today they’re as likely to be plastic – or even clothing, given the proliferation of ridiculously cheap items pretty much constructed to last until the first visit to the washing machine. In some places (Great Yarmouth springs to mind) entire streets seem to sell nothing but gimcrack (pronounced ‘jim-krak’), and it is possible they have been doing so since the word was first adopted in its present meaning in 1676.

  Gin and It

  This is a mix of gin and Italian vermouth, which to all intents makes it a martini, although today’s dry martini is generally made from an equal blend of white (dry) vermouth and gin. The original martini, however, contained four parts sweet red vermouth to one part gin and came garnished with a maraschino cherry. It is this earlier drink that evolved into the gin and It, popular, especially with women, up to, and just beyond, the middle of the twentieth century. Since then the same demographic has been bombarded by Babycham (launched nationally in 1953), seduced by Snowball and pandered to by Pony (both of the latter were 1970s pub staples), before being charmed by Chardonnay in the 1990s. Those remaining stalwarts who still like the taste will today almost certainly ask for a ‘sweet martini’, which is a shame because ‘gin and It’ is a far racier name, conjuring up images of saucy baggages (doxy, q.v.) with beehives and loose smiles, offered strong drink by lounge lizards in co-respondent (q.v.) shoes. Sadly, that staple of perhaps a slightly older generation of women, the port and lemon, seems to have disappeared. The great rival to the gin and It, the gin and French, was made with French (dry) vermouth, usually Noilly Prat, to the gin and It’s sweet Martini or sweet Cinzano.

  Halfpenny, ha’porth

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nbsp; If the bob and the tanner (qq.v.) were affectionately regarded and are remembered fondly, the opposite can be said of the halfpence or halfpenny (pronounced ‘hayp’nce’ and ‘hayp’ny’), the value of which was a ha’porth, a contraction of ‘halfpenceworth’. Most of the phrases associated with this copper coin were negative, such as the ‘daft ha’porth’ of the North of England, used to denote a person who shouldn’t be asked to conduct research into rocket propulsion any time soon. Then there is the self-deprecating ‘Well, that’s my tuppence-ha’porth’ to suggest that the opinion offered may not be worth much, since two and a half old pennies – just over one new pence – would not buy a great deal. Similar phrases, like pennyworth, still exist in the UK, as also in the US, where people put in their two cents’ worth. The inference is something of little value because the halfpenny wasn’t really worth a great deal, and ceased to be legal tender in 1969, when the coin became more expensive to produce than its face value. The Tory MP (Sir) Anthony Beaumont-Dark noted at the time that ‘most people don’t even bother to pick them up when they drop them.’ Running slightly counter to this is the indignant cat in a drawing by Louis Wain asking, ‘You call that a ha’porth of milk?’, clearly outraged at the small amount in his cup. Then there is the loss to children, unable to go into a shop for a ha’porth of pear drops, or tuppenceworth of halfpenny chews (penny chew, q.v.). Even lower down the financial scale was the farthing, two of which made a halfpenny, so to be without a ‘brass farthing’ meant to be really very poor. Production of farthings, which date back to the thirteenth century, ended in 1956, and the coin ceased to be legal tender in 1960. With decimalization in 1971, the old coinage began to disappear, to be replaced with ‘new pence’, of which there was even a ‘half penny’ or ‘half new pee’, worth 1.2 old pence, although that too was dropped in 1984.