It's used for a woman who has sex enthusiastically. So the golden grummet is, to be coarse, the arsehole. In the 16th and 17th century, when people went around to empty cesspits and collected what was called nightsoil, they were either called Tom Turdman-which is pretty obvious-or a goldfinder. "Gold," in terms of slang, means excrement. A grummet is British navy jargon for a rope ring. Knight of the golden grummet refers to a homosexual person, particularly one who takes the passive role in anal sex. Johnny Hog-Leg-a man with a large penis-dates to 1978. She, through the heat of her sexually aroused vagina, is giving a "hot poultice" to this poor bloke who's got the Irish toothache.Ī hog-leg is the nickname for a Colt Single Action Army revolver, otherwise known, some might suggest paradoxically, as the peacemaker. This is one of those pretty rare slang terms which comes from the woman's point of view. The "Irish toothache" means "erect penis"-so intercourse is "to give a hot poultice to the Irish toothache". But this is a pun on "hole" and a pun on "poke", and it's the penis. Originally, the holy poker was an instrument of punishment used on souls who were in purgatory. Why "peculiar"? It's slang's male point of view again. Basically, the peculiar river is the vagina. You do get an "old trout" to mean an old woman, but that is a hundred or so years later. It's one of the earliest versions of the equation of women and fish.
This is a class act, because this is Shakespeare from the play Measure for Measure.
1603)īasically, the peculiar river is the vagina. One must consider this sensation to be a positive term! This is a fine Australian phrase that is an attempt to represent orgasm. The "three" represents the penis and the two testicles, the "one" is the vagina, and the "loss" is of semen when you ejaculate.įlock of geese flying out of one's backside (c. There's a lot of terms of this sort, like "Rosie Palm and her Five Daughters" and "Mrs Palm and her Five Daughters." They all refer to the hand that a man uses to masturbate.Įngage in three to one and bound to lose (c. The dry mouthed widow is the hand-the dry hand that substitutes for the wet vagina. The barmaids, however, have their own big knife they advance on him with it, pull out his clatterdevengeance, threaten to cut it off, and he faints. There's a story that goes with it-I found it in a propaganda news-sheet from the English Civil War-this soldier goes into a bar and claims he's going to rape all the barmaids. It sums up slang's take on the organ, in a way: You've got the macho noise of "clatter" and this image of a man waving it around you've also, with "vengeance" got slang's invariable misogyny. It comes from the mid-17th century and it means the penis. Grose says it is a sea term for masturbation, and then he comments, "a crime it is said, much practiced by the reverend fathers of that society." This is traditional anti-religiosity to do with the Jesuits, who were not well thought of in England-particularly in the 18th century when this was coined. Read more: The Broadly Guide to Having Sex in PublicĪccording to my predecessor Francis Grose, who wrote slang dictionaries in the 18th century, it was a Navy term. Let's put this one down to a late Victorian slang joke. "Cabbage" itself is used in slang to mean the vagina, as has the "cauliflower," the "mushroom," and the "artichoke." There's also "take a turn among the cabbages" to mean have sex. "Summer cabbage" is hard to work out, I must admit. We asked Green to explain a few of the weirdest ones. If you want to see the ingenuity of slang in action, look no further than all the bizarre words and sayings people have used over the centuries to mean penis, vagina, and sex. And that's because slang is 99 percent written from a male point of view."
The vagina is always going to be this frightening, scary, dark hole. "If you go back to the 16th century and the 17th century, you can see that the penis is always going to be a gun, a club, a knife, a dagger-in other words, some kind of boys' toy. "Although it's always reinventing itself-and this is true of all of slang-there are basic themes that never go away," he explains.
(You can see the full archive on his website The Timelines of Slang.) Over his career, Green has collected 130,000 words and phrases and about 600,000 accompanying examples.