404·meanings

404meanings / the dictionary / old-fashioned insults

20 old insults, and which of them are real.

A list of these went round the internet with a meaning for each and no sources. We read the books such lists lean on — cover to cover, not quoted second-hand — and placed every word by what we found. North is on record; south is not. West means what the list says; east has changed.

On recordNot on record As listedChanged Coxcomb Skedaddle Scallywag Hornswoggle Whooperup Snollygoster Mutton shunter Flapdoodle Mooncalf Chuckaboo Nincompoop Fopdoodle Bedswerver Lollygag Ragamuffin Fustilugs Gigglemug Gobermouch Dewdropper Zounderkite

I · 15 words

Holds up

In the old books, meaning much what the list says. Several with a better story than the list tells.

II · 2 words

Softened

On record, but the list has quietly made them kinder than they were.

III · 2 words

Not in the books

Absent from every old dictionary we searched, including the one each is usually credited to.

IV · 1 word

A different word

The documented word is spelled differently and means something else.

All twenty, by group

Holds up15

Softened2

Not in the books2

A different word1

What we checked

Most of them are real. Five are not quite what the list says.

We read five sources in full rather than trusting quotations of them: J. Redding Ware’s Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909), the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1847), and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, alongside the public etymology dictionaries. Each word’s own page carries the evidence and the sources.

Softened

Fustilugs & mooncalf

“A clumsy, slovenly person.” “A foolish or absent-minded person.”

Halliwell gives fustilugs as a fat, gross woman and quotes an older source calling it a rank-smelling one. Mooncalf began in the 1560s as a word for a shapeless growth blamed on the moon, and by the 1620s was a cruel word for a person.

Not in the books

Zounderkite & dewdropper

“Victorian slang.”

Neither is in Ware, the 1811 dictionary or Halliwell. Zounderkite is usually credited to the 1811 dictionary; we searched its full text and it is not there. That does not prove nobody said them. It means the record they point to does not have them.

A different word

Gobermouch

“A nosy person.”

The documented word is gobemouche — French for a fly-swallower, in English from 1818 — and it means someone who believes anything, not someone who pries.

Where each story begins

Oldest first.

The earliest date on each word’s own page, for 18 of the twenty — the two we could not find anywhere have no date to give. For a few, like fopdoodle, the earliest date is only the first dictionary to catch the word, and it was already calling it old.