Looking for some rather unique swear words - Classical Dictionary 1788

[packman]

While a good deal of the slang has survived into the present day — to screw is to copulate; to kick the bucket is to die — much would likely have been lost had Grose not recorded it. Some of the more obscure metaphors include a butcher’s dog, meaning someone who “lies by the beef without touching it; a simile often applicable to married men”; to box the Jesuit, meaning “to masturbate; a crime, it is said, much practised by the reverend fathers of that society”; and to polish meaning to be in jail, in the sense of “polishing the king’s iron with one’s eyebrows, by looking through the iron grated windows”. Given this was the era of William Hogarth’s famous painting Gin Lane (1751), it’s not surprising to find the dictionary soaked through with colourful epithets for the juniper-based liquor: blue ruin, cobblers punch, frog’s wine, heart’s ease, moonshine, strip me naked. The Grose dictionary also contains hundreds of great insults, like bottle-headed, meaning void of wit, something you can’t say about its author.


Site allows you to thumb thru the book and magnify the pages - kinda interesting:

https://archive.org/stream/b2876190x#page/n3/mode/2up

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. we do need to find more adjectives to describe trump, that's for sure!

the typical ones get used so much that they lose their impact!

[ret5hd]

2. That is wonderful! Bookmarking.

[justhanginon]

3. I had a book many years ago that was called, if memory serves,

"The Classical Book of the Vulgar Tongue" or something similar. The only problem is that the wording was so esoteric nobody realized I was insulting them. That's no damn fun.

[TuxedoKat]

4. This is great

I have a small collection of books about obscure words. Also bookmarking.