Such Language! Part 20 (seriously!)

Another installment of colorful verbal shenanigans from the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Enjoy!

Article: A wench. A prime article; a handsome girl. She’s a prime article (Whip slang), she’s a devilish good piece, a hell of a goer.  (When my insufferable brother and his equally insufferable friends begin talking about the girls they see driving or riding in Rotten Row as prime articles, I have been known to lay about me with a riding crop.)

Grumble in the gizzard: To be secretly displeased about something. (My sister, on the other hand, smiles and laughs at them, but secretly I know she’s grumbling in her gizzard about it.)

Kidney: Disposition, principles, humour.  Of a strange kidney; of an odd or unaccountable humour. A man of a different kidney; a man of different principles. (As you might have guessed, my sister and I are of a very different kidney.)

Totty-headed: Giddy, hare-brained. (Totty-headed Clarice Smedley may be—she tends to promise to dance with twice as many gentleman as there are dances at any given ball—but she’s also exceedingly kind.)

Yam: to yam; to eat or stuff heartily. (Cousin John’s tendency to yam at all meals has made him the despair of my aunt and the favorite customer of his tailor.)

Maggotty: Whimsical, capricious. (Did you hear that Lady Smythe-Flittery had the maggoty idea of dyeing the champagne green at her first party of the season, as a way to celebrate the coming of spring?)

Flustered: Drunk. (Of course, everyone at her party was so flustered that I’m not even sure they noticed the verdant hue of the champagne they were guzzling...or no longer cared.)

Richard Snary:  A dictionary. A country lad, having been reproved for calling persons by their christian names, being sent by his master to borrow a dictionary, thought to shew his breeding by asking for a Richard Snary. (No more from me--I don’t think I can top that!)