BookLust: Vulgar Tongue

Vuglartonguecover

How 'bout another new silly category? A few months ago I found this wonderful book in a secondhand bookstore, and just had to have it. The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue is "A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence". The book is unabridged from the original 1811 edition, but does have a foreward by Robert Cromie, who at the time of the publication of this edition (1971), was a daily columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

Every now and then I'll post one of the charming and sometimes strange words in this dictionary. It's fascinating to see how language changes over time – some words disappear from our lexicon, while others morph into completely different meanings. Language is fluid. Like water spilling from a glass, we cannot control which direction it will travel – it has a will of its own, and cannot be permanently pinned down to any one specific meaning, vulgar or otherwise.

UPDATE: Oh the irony! A dear blogger friend of mine has brought to my attention that in writing this post, I broke rule #11 in The Elements of Style. The last sentence in my post contains a dangling modifier! But I'm not going to change it. I like the sound of the sentence, and I also want to make it clear to everyone that I really suck at grammar, which is why I bought The Elements of Style in the first place (that and the fact that the illustrations are delish). Obviously it's not really been sinking in. Yet.

Today's word is:

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