Reading antiquated dictionaries activates the same portion of my brain as reading poetry: it’s thinking about words in new ways. I considered this as I read A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, compiled by Francis Grose and published in 1811. Even if the defined words and phrases are unknown or obsolete, the descriptions are a language of freshness and economy. Here’s one:
Jibber the Kibber. A method of deceiving seamen, by fixing a candle and lanthorn round the neck of a horse, one of whose fore feet is tied up; this at night has the appearance of a ship’s light. Ships bearing towards it, run on shore, and being wrecked, are plundered by the inhabitants. This diabolical device is, it is said, practised by the inhabitants of our western coasts.
As for words active today, busy is exemplified as, “As busy as the devil in a high wind; as busy as a hen with one chick,” while gypsies get editorialized as:
A set of vagrants, who, to the great disgrace of our police, are suffered to wander about the country. They pretend that they derive their origin from the ancient Egyptians, who were famous for their knowledge in astronomy and other sciences; and, under the pretence of fortune-telling, find means to rob or defraud the ignorant and superstitious.
Why shouldn’t we revive words like snaggs to mean large teeth or nope to mean a punch? They seem to fit.
This particular dictionary features other entertainments for the reader today. Being British, it contains lots of snipes at the Scots and Irish, and being common it contains definitions that cannot compete with the OED in terms of sauciness, including a half-dozen synonyms for commodity (“the private parts of a modest woman, and the public parts of a prostitute”) and many variants on hump (“once a fashionable word for copulation”).
Simpletons and alcohol run through the book as well. Gin, which was apparently the Pabst Blue Ribbon of early Nineteenth Century Britain, boasts a bouquet of synonyms: blue tape, sky blue, blue/white ribband/ribbin, diddle, frog’s wine, heart’s ease, jackey, Lady Dacre’s wine, lightning (“a flash of lightning”), max, strip me naked and blue ruin, which was mentioned in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a good name for a hair dye.