It’s been a long year! And I’ve got a short time to meet a half-dozen deadlines. But I don’t want to leave you without something interesting, so herewith some intriguing words culled from volume 2 of the Dictionary of American Regional English. (Remember that?)
• Diddy-wah-diddy: Used as a substitute for a word or name one does not want to use; hence as the name of an imaginary place, often conceived of as fabulous and far-off.
• Drindle: To diminish, shrink; to waste away, die out. You might drindle away if you’re in failing health.
• Fish-drownder: A very heavy rain.
• Fussful: Quarrelsome, at odds.
• Gald: To chafe; make sore by rubbing
• Gardaloo: A noise expressing contempt; a raspberry (Bronx cheer).
• Gully washer: A very heavy rain or the run-off it occasions (“Send us, not a gentle sizzle-sozzle, but a sod-soaker, O Lord, a gully washer”).
• Hacking and hammering: Vacillating, equivocating (hemming and hawing).
There’s only one on this list I knew: gully washer, which was a part of my father’s vocabulary. Drindle, fish-drownder, and fussful all sound “country” to me—that is, rural. What do you think? Had you heard any of these? I could spend all afternoon paging through these enormous books (I have volumes 1 and 2 so far). Does this list make you want to hear more?
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6 Comments
Gully-washer was my only familar–but I grew up near a gully.
Fussful? Sounds Irish to me.
But, unfortunately, too often like me! :-(
Fussful sounds very “country” to me, which is a word Southerners use to mean rural, and often unsophisticated, when referring to a person.
Like you and Michelle only gully washer rang a bell.
Is “tetchy” in one of your books – or do you not have the T volume yet? I remember reading that word decades ago in a book set in Appalachia.
I don’t have the volume with the T’s yet! I can’t wait! These books are huge and not inexpensive… Your local library may have them though?
The ‘auld toon’ of Edinburgh huddles on Castle Hill, that being the only bit of real estate for miles that could be defended easily should the English / Vikings / Irish / Highlanders /Orcadians (Orcs) / Weegies* come maurauding.
Consequently space was at a premium so they built up (and down but that’s another story) The houses became very tall with gentry living on the top floor, professions and courtiers on the next layer down, then the merchant classes, the artisans and finally the laborers (and below ground level the scum). The streets were also very narrow and doubled as sewers
Now there was no indoor plumbing in those days and the so the people on the upper floors pissed in a pot. Those on the lower levels were described as piss poor because they had no money for crockery and so hadn’t a pot to piss in.
The arrangement worked quite well but for one thing. It was a hell of a schlepp from the upper floors to empty the pots in the street. What lazy housemaids would do was simply open the window and (because French was the language of the upper class) with a shout of “Gardez, l’eau,” fling the contents of the pot out of the window.
Now “Gardez l’eau in a Scottish accent sounds like Gardaloo. And the rather prissy British middle class term for toilet, ‘loo’ derives from that as I suspect does that noise expressing contempt, a way of saying ‘piss on you’ perhaps..
I’ll tell you what NAFF, another term used by the terminally prim means sometime. The terminally straight laced would die if they knew.
*weegies – Rough types from Glasgow.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
Yes, the etymology is very interesting. (I’m puzzled, as I thought someone else had commented on gardaloo, but it doesn’t seem to be here.) I didn’t copy all the history out with the definitions; the history is what makes these books so huge—that and then all the regional notes. :) It’s interesting how things become so garbled, like an international game of Chinese Telephone.
Happy New Year to you too! :)