It occurred to me recently that my common slang vocabulary has diminished over the years. Many of those colorful words or expressions were used as well-directed insults or derogatory references. Others were just colorfully descriptive. I didn’t coin any of these. I learned them from my long-gone elders. When I was just a “little squirt,” I recall the rather disagreeable woman next door to us being referred to by my mother as a “battle ax.” Another neighbor who was “into the sauce” quite a bit was a “toss pot.” If a fellow were noticeably effeminate in his appearance and mannerisms, folks might call him a “limp wrister.” If he were also timid and cowardly, he was a “pantywaist.” If a person was lacking in resolve and never really “cocksure” of anything, he was considered to be “lily-livered.” If this led him to be fawning and subservient, he was a “lick spittle,” which is the antithesis of a “popinjay.”
Certainly we’ve all had the experience one time or another of encountering someone who tried to “put one over” on us or otherwise try to “hornswoggle” us. We might refer to him as a “scallywag.” In northern New England where logging is a common practice, such a disreputable person would be dismissed as a “jillpoke.” That term technically refers to a log which is used to either help or hinder the movement of other logs. That’s a hard image to relate to a person, but it’s interesting to try. Other people among us who may warrant our scorn are the “dingbats” and “crackpots” who are ready advocates for conspiracy theories that are really just “hogwash.”
Learning to drive a car introduced me to more related terminology. If a vehicle was going too fast, it was going “like a bat out of hell,” “hell bent for election,” or “lickety-split.” The visual imagery of any of those is lost on me. If my father wanted me to speed it up, he would tell me to “give her the oats.” That imagery is evident to me, knowing of his experience growing up on a farm with horses for motive power. If things were just as you would want them to be, he would say that’s “the cat’s meow.”
Some of these expressions are colloquial to North America and others are common to wherever English is spoken. Jeezum Crow! The Brits would be gobsmacked to hear some of the things we say. It is interesting to ponder how our present age of remote communication by internet, social media, and texting will impact our vernacular vocabulary. In most such exchanges, people don’t actually see each other or even respond to one another in real time. Texting is largely done using acronyms instead of actual words. OMG! IMHO it’s hard to imagine this stuff catching on. LOL.
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