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Sunday 28 July 2019

Playing With Dictionaries


A recent post on Elizabeth Slaughter’s blog Saved By Words reminded me how in the days before teenagers spent most of their time watching Love Island and YouTube videos we played with dictionaries. We used to thumb through looking for rude and amusing words.

It got off to a good start at Junior School where I swear we had a dictionary containing “trump: a small explosion between the legs”. I’m afraid I have been unable to find any confirmatory evidence of it.

Others we later became fans of include:

         cunette: a trench at the bottom of a ditch
         fustigate: to beat with a stick
         fustilug: a fat and untidy person
         steatopygia: excessive fatness of the buttocks

Oh how witty to call someone a fustilug with steatopygia or to threaten to fustigate them. Never would it have occurred to Oscar Wilde himself to refer to someone as a stupid cunette.

Or were we just being sanguinarily crepuscular?

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12 comments:

  1. Debra She Who Seeks28 July 2019 at 17:34

    Now all the kids just check the Urban Dictionary online for the latest in suggestive slang.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tasker Dunham28 July 2019 at 20:57

      Doesn't give you the same sense of discovery as browsing and coming across something.

      Delete
  2. Bea28 July 2019 at 19:07

    Simply reading 'excessive fatness of the buttocks' makes me chuckle. Great words all around!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tasker Dunham28 July 2019 at 20:56

      I still have a juvenile sense of humour too.

      Delete
  3. JayCee28 July 2019 at 19:13

    Oh, I don't think I ever came across any of those words in my juvenile dictionary days.
    As a kid, my dad used to play the dictionary game with us. He would open it at a random page and choose a word. We had to first spell it correctly and then guess at its meaning. I distinctly remember the day he came up with antidisestablishmentarianism. The old B~gger.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tasker Dunham28 July 2019 at 20:55

      We used to talk about antidisestablishmentarianism as the longest word in the English language (did you actually type that or paste it like just I did). But it isn't - I've just looked it up as pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (pasted that as well).

      Delete
    2. JayCee29 July 2019 at 13:20

      Ha, ha. No I did actually type it up, and from memory too so no checking my spelling

      Delete
    3. Tasker Dunham29 July 2019 at 15:30

      Bet you can't do the second one from memory - or that little place on Anglesey Llanfair......

      Delete
    4. JayCee29 July 2019 at 18:11

      Nope. I surrender

      Delete
  4. Yorkshire Pudding29 July 2019 at 19:38

    What the **** does "sanguinarily crepuscular" mean? That's the trouble with you lads from The West Riding - you're all so periphrastically palaverous.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tasker Dunham29 July 2019 at 22:02

      You only had to ask. Bloody dim.

      Delete
    2. Yorkshire Pudding29 July 2019 at 22:30

      Dim? No - you seem reasonably intelligent to me.

      Delete

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