Victorian Slang: D to F
J. Redding Ware sought to record the ‘passing English’ of the Victorian era. His Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang and Phrase provides only a snapshot of the ‘daily history of the nation’, he declared his chief hope was that the book might be ‘found amusing, if neither erudite nor useful’.
Below are some the Victorian phrases he recorded from letters D to F:
- Daddies: Hands
- Daisy: A charming, delightful person
- Damager: A nonsense name for manager (autocratic)
- Dance upon nothing: To be hanged
- Death-promoter: An ominous synonym for alcoholic drink
- Dicky: Doubtful
- Dilly-dally: Hesitative (like shilly-shally)
- Dipping: Pick-pocketing
- Dog-cheap: Very cheap
- Doing: A thrashing
- Don’t care a Pall Mall: A synonym for damn
- Don’t lose your hair: Don’t lose your temper
- Dook: A large nose
- Dookin: Fortune telling.
- Double-breasted water-butt smasher: An athlete
- Drilling: Punishment
- Duchess: Mother
- Elephant’s trunk: Drunk
- English pluck: Money
- Europe on the chest: Home sickness (used by soldiers in India)
- Evening wheezes: False news (spread in half-penny papers)
- Everything nice in your garden: A gentle protest against self-laudation
- Eye in a sling: Crushed/defeated.
- Farthingtaster: Lowest quality of commonest ice cream from London vendors
- Fenian: Irish
- Field-running: Building rickety houses rapidly over suburban fields
- Funger and thumb: Rum
- Five or seven: Drunk
- Flam: A fib rather than a lie
- Flapper: An immoral young girl in her teens
- Flash: Imitation gold coin
- Forever-gentleman: A man whose good breeding is ingrained
- Foundling temper: A bad temper
- Four-legged fortune: A winning horse
- Freakeries: Freak and acrobat shows at Olympia
- Frenchy: A term of contempt for a man with a foreign air
- Frisky: Bad tempered
- Frump: Badly dressed woman (from a high cut bodice)
- Full as a goat: Drunk
- Fuz-chats: People who camp out on the ‘furze’ (show-people and gypsies)
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