Bounders, cads, nincompoops, trollops, balderdash & other words in that list unknown to the young
A couple of weeks ago some British media were agog with the news – ‘Shock! Horror!’ – that twenty words in a list compiled by a research agency were largely unfamiliar to people in the 18–30 age group. The results showing the percentages of people who didn’t know each one are listed at the end of this piece and there is a link here to an article about the survey.
I have no idea who compiled the list or how they did so. Several things, though, struck me. First, some words (e.g. bounder, cad, trollop) were old-fashioned even when I was growing up. They are the sort of words I might have heard my parents use, and even then, if air quotes had been invented, I feel sure Mum and Dad would have used them.
Second, many of them were from the slang/informal (boogie, brill, lush, minted, randy) areas of English vocabulary, which, naturally, changes over time and can sometimes change very fast.
Third, and largely as a corollary of the previous point, many of them were insults or somehow dismissive. Slagging someone or something off is always fun, it seems. Fourth, some are marked by (some) dictionaries as especially British (cad, bounder, yonks), even if that limitation turns out not to be exactly true. Finally, one group contained words which, at a guess, I would say are of some considerable vintage, such as nincompoop, balderdash, betrothed, kerfuffle, and sozzled.
The list set me thinking about how old some of these words are and about how short-lived – or ephemeral, if you want a posher word – slang can be.
I’ve grouped the words into loose piles and briefly describe the history of each, with examples. Because describing them shows signs of turning into an epic, I’m going to deal with ten in this blog and ten in the next.
Definitions and formality/informality etc. markings are from the Collins Unabridged Dictionary online.
Investigation reveals, inter alia, stories of Scottish ancestry, Oxbridge and public-school snobbery, Dr Johnson’s cod etymology, stomach-churning concoctions and a ‘discernment’ of homographs – I think that’s the appropriate collective noun. (H/T @tonythorne007).
Old-fashioned even in my parents’ day
bounder – old-fashioned, British slang; ‘a morally reprehensible person; cad.’
It’s interesting that the above definition proffers cad as a synonym; they have the same period flavour.
Bounder has to me a feel of Victoriana, and sure enough, according to the OED, it first appears in print in a major 1889 dictionary of slang, Barrère & Leland’s Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant (B&L) so must have been in the air before then. The OED entry [1933] notes ‘occasionally applied to a woman’ (one citation, by Angela Brazil, in The New Girl at St Chad’s) but it seems, surely, a generally male epithet. Chambers Slang Dictionary suggests that in origin the word describes someone who bounds about. What the OED citations make clear is that the word started as university slang (i.e. Oxbridge); B&L defined it thus:
a student whose manners are despised by the soi-disant élite, or who is beyond the boundary of good fellowship…(society), a swell, a stylish fellow, but of a very vulgar type
The next citation, from The Times a year later (1890) echoes that:
To speak of a man as a bounder is to allude to him as an outsider or cad.
Thereafter, it seems the word developed from social disapproval to moral turpitude. The last OED citation is by that bounder Somerset Maugham, suggesting that ‘Women … adore a bounder’, a self-justifying male excuse for bad behaviour if ever there was one.
cad – British informal, old-fashioned; ‘someone who does not treat other people with courtesy and consideration.’
Before checking, I surmised that this, too, is Victorian or Edwardian. That turns out to be true in the meaning we’re looking at, but there’s a bit of backstory too. Cad is a truncated version of Scottish caddie, nowadays used to refer to a golfer’s little helper. However, earlier (1754) caddie meant, as the OED puts it, ‘A lad or man who waits about on the lookout for chance employment as a messenger, errand-boy…etc.’ Then, in the early nineteenth century the short form cad was part of Eton and Oxford slang to refer to people who were ‘not one of us’, that is, townspeople in Oxford, or at Eton ‘low fellows, who hang about the college to provide the Etonians with anything necessary to assist their sports’ (1831). From being the preserve of the educationally privileged it then passed to mean ‘a fellow of low vulgar manners and behaviour’ to which definition the OED adds the surely superfluous (An offensive and insulting appellation.) However, that entry was written in 1888, so the health warning was probably necessary at the time.
That these two words are far from dead, and, equally, not confined to Britain, becomes clear from Merriam-Webster online, where there are recent press citations referring to actors or characters in books having the said moral character.
With trollop and randy we move from social manners to sex and, sadly, to the masculine denigration of women.
I am not sure if I am imagining I heard one or other of my parents coming out with the jingle Brandy to make you randy, Gin to make you sin – perhaps when being offered a drink. It sounds like forces or wartime slang, which would fit my parents’ wartime experience.
randy – Collins defines randy thus:
informal, mainly British
a. sexually excited or aroused
b. sexually eager or lustful
Randy has a much longer history than bounder or cad, stretching all the way back to 1665. It derives, probably, from the obsolete verb rand, a form of rant, and was originally Scots. It went through a larva and chrysalis phase before emerging, resplendent or otherwise, in its modern meaning:
larval stage (1665–2003): ‘loud-mouthed, coarsely spoken, esp. of beggars’ (OED [Dec. 2008]):
Nothing but scolding and noise;…I’d rather not marry at all: if she is thus randy beforehand what will she be afterwards?
M. Pix Innocent Mistress II. 11, 1697
chrysalis stage (1723–1935): ‘Boisterous, riotous, disorderly – Chiefly Scottish and English regional’ (OED):
That young bay [horse] you’ll find a little randy, With rather more of ‘devil’ than comes handy.
The now defunct British satirical magazine, Punch, 8 Mar. 1884
butterfly stage (1771–…). The OED cites a startling Steinbeck quotation:
Fust time I ever laid with a girl…snortin’ like a buck deer, randy as a billygoat.
Grapes of Wrath vi. 69, 1939
Talk of brandy and gin leads on seamlessly (I had to think hard about the spelling there) to sozzled.
sozzled – Respondents maxed out on ignorance of this word (40%), which surprised me; to me it seemed like a standard, though not core, part of vocabulary. But then that probably just shows my age. Collins marks it as informal and defines it simply as ‘drunk’.
Which loses, IYAM, its somewhat (self-)forgiving nuance. The OED [1986] marks it as beyond informal, that is, as slang. Its first written record is in 1892, in a British newspaper, the Sporting Times. It comes from the verb to sozzle, which in the U.S. has the meaning ‘to splash’. That fits meaning wise but is puzzling, given that the first citation of sozzled is British. In British dialect in the nineteenth century, to sozzle is attested as meaning ‘to mix or mingle in a sloppy manner’ (OED [1913]). As drunksh shtereotypically shlur their wordsh, exchush me, officer, perhaps that fits as an origin. The next citation nicely illustrates an outraged continuum of inebriation:
I wasn’t what you’d call sozzled. I might have been lit up a bit, but sozzled—no.
Blackwood’s Mag. Feb. 157/1, 1921
trollop – Collins defines it as below for British English, and pronounces it derogatory:
1. a promiscuous woman.
2. an untidy woman; slattern.
In its American English incarnation (Webster’s New World College, 4th edn.), Collins reverses those two meanings and pronounces the word rare:
1. a slovenly, dirty woman; slattern.
2. a sexually promiscuous woman; specif., a prostitute.
I’d be interested to know if that order reflects the hierarchy of meaning in American minds. Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged seems to bear it out, though.
It is first attested in print in 1615, in the ‘wanton woman’ meaning. In other words, that predates the ‘slattern’ meaning. As to where it comes from, well, several sources (Collins, Webster’s, Merriam-Webster) suggest a link with German Trolle, wench or prostitute. The OED rather tentatively suggests a connection with the earlier noun trull (also meaning a woman ‘of low morals’), which it links to German Trulle; or with the verb to troll, meaning ‘to move to and fro, to saunter’ and other shades of movement. The –op ending might be related to the suffix found in dollop, lollop and the like.
(As an aside, Shakespeare uses the word trull four times, perhaps most notably in Richard Plantagenet, the Duke of Gloucester’s, rant against Queen Margaret (of Anjou) in Henry VI, Part I
She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France,
Whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth!
How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex
To triumph, like an Amazonian trull,
Upon their woes whom fortune captivates!)
I’m pretty sure my parents might have used trollop, for example, to criticise a woman who was overdressed or ‘tartily’ dressed. Otherwise, of course, it could have entered my vocabulary from reading. As it happens, growing up I rarely had to use a dictionary; if I came across a new word, my parents could usually define it for me quite satisfactorily, which makes me reflect how lucky I was in that – and so many other – respects.
The OED entry (2020) remarks: ‘Now often considered somewhat old-fashioned and typically used self-consciously for stylistic or humorous effect.’ It is hard to see how it could indeed be used other than tongue-in-cheek. Respondents to the survey thought that some words should be allowed to die if considered insulting, and this is surely one such.
It has, nevertheless, other meanings, or rather, as a verb it is still used colloquially to mean ‘to walk in a clumsy or ungainly’ (OED [June 2020]) way, and in Scotland, Australia and New Zealand, of something, especially clothing, that dangles down:
One tail of his gown escaped from a jacket pocket to trollop around his feet.
B. Kiely, There was Ancient House v. 213, 1955
And in Scottish English, trollopy has a long history (1748, at least; OED [June 2020]) of describing clothing that hangs loose and untidily. If you didn’t know that, the next quotation could easily be misinterpreted;
I am forced to agree with Mr Charles Edmond, of Tighnabruaich*, who laments the modern tendency to wear the kilt in such a ‘trollopy’ fashion.
Express, 18 September 2002
* Generally pronounced as tie-nah-BREW-ich; listen here. It means ‘the house on the hill’ in Scots Gaelic.
Stuff and nonsense!
From lack of morals, we move on to four words suggesting lack of intelligence or lack of meaning: balderdash, tosh, nincompoop and wally.
balderdash – ‘stupid or illogical talk; senseless rubbish.’
Collins Unabridged assigns it no usage label, but Collins Cobuild (for learners of English) marks it old–fashioned.
It’s got a lot going for it as a put-down, if you ask me. Its syllables starting with a(n) (ex)plosive b–d–d respectively bestow on it at a certain weightiness. Then it’s got three syllables, unlike lamer alternatives such as rubbish, boll***s, claptrap, nonsense and so forth. In fact, the only word to rival it in my view is poppycock, similarly syllabled but rather less antique (1852, OED). (If you wish to gorge on the numerous synonyms in the field of nonsense, Merriam-Webster and Collins have excellent lists.) Merriam-Webster goes into the history of 10 words for nonsense here.
For balderdash qua word (I had to get qua in there, sorry) goes back to that Blackadderish Elizabethan Thomas Nashe in 1596. Its modern meaning is first recorded in print in Marvell’s work in 1674 (OED [1885 entry]).
As for where it comes from, it belongs to that forlorn troop in the OED of ‘etymology unknown’. In Nashe it seems to refer to froth or frothy liquid, and a few years later to an unappetising ‘jumbled mixture of liquors, e.g. of milk and beer, beer and wine…’
Beere, by a Mixture of Wine..hath lost both Name and Nature, and is called Balderdash.
J. Taylor Drinke & Welcome sig. B3, 1637
tosh – slang, mainly British. ‘nonsense; rubbish.’
Here’s a word of no great antiquity and unknown etymology. Being short, it sounds almost like an exclamation. The OED [1913] attests it first in 1892 in the Oxford University Magazine, which might suggest that it too, like bounder, started life as university slang:
To think what I’ve gone through to hear that man! Frightful tosh it’ll be, too.
Oxford University Magazine 26 Oct. 26/1
Merriam-Webster dates it to 1528, which is puzzling.
nincompoop – informal; ‘a foolish person.’
Yet another word whose origins are murky. I seem to remember being told, perhaps at school, that it came from non compos, short for non compos mentis, ‘not of sound mind’. It turns out that is the etymology posited by Dr Johnson, who was not, let’s face it, terribly hot on word origins. (The page with his entry heads this post.) He saith [a corruption of the Latin non compos]. In hindsight, that sounds like a classic linguistic urban myth, like posh being from ‘port out starboard home’. On its first written appearance c. 1668, the word was not spelled as we know it today but nickumpoop and later as nicompoop, which leads the OED [Sept. 2003] to hazard a derivation from a real person’s name, presumably Nicolas, Nicodemus, etc.
Other possible connections according to the OED are with a) an obsolete verb to poop, meaning to ‘fool, deceive or cheat’; and b) ninny, for the forms that have that first-syllable ‘n’. The OED also labels the word slang and regional. It does not strike me as the first, and I wonder which regions.
Despite its evident shortcomings, Dr J’s entry reminds me of that exquisite word ninnyhammer (1592), meaning the same as nincompoop.
Among nincompoop’s derivatives is the rather wonderful nincompoopery, that is, the action or behaviour of a nincompoop: ‘No 1970s rock star indulged in prog nincompoopery with such gusto’, opined someone in the Guardian.
wally – derogatory, slang; ‘a foolish person.’
Given that 36 per cent of respondents didn’t know this twentieth-century word, it seems to have enjoyed a rather curtailed shelf life. And given, also, that the majority of my visitors are from the US, it is only polite to tell you that the first vowel in wally is the same as in sorry or golly. This becomes important later, to distinguish it from its homographs.
First cited in print in 1922 (OED [June 2019]), it meant at the time ‘unfashionable person’. It is only in 1980 that it surfaces in print meaning ‘a foolish person’. The OED labels it only ‘mildly derogatory’, which chimes with me: you can say someone is ‘a bit of a wally’, that is, it’s gradable, whereas I think you couldn’t temper, say, nincompoop in that way because it’s an absolute, IMHO. I think I first heard it from a Northern friend in the 1990s and marked it in my mental lexicon as ‘Northern’ – which I now think is not correct. Collins Cobuild marks it as British, and Merriam-Webster online confirms that by not including it.
Its origins are ‘uncertain’ in OED-speak. Possibly, it might derive from the name Walter: after all, people can be proper Charlies, namby-pamby comes from the name Ambrose Philips, and, militarily, a Rupert is a bit of a chinless wonder. Alternatively, it might just come from a different wally noun, meaning a large, pickled cucumber. Go figure. But there is, I suppose, pea-brained in a similarly vegetative metaphor.
But wally also dons a different garb and again, like cad, that garb is a kilt. In fact, there are three homographs — two nouns and three adjectives. Pronounced in several ways, the first vowel aligning in British English with whale (Collins, M-W), or hat (OED ) is the adjective wally1, wallie and other variants meaning ‘excellent, fine, splendid’ or ‘imposing, strong, sturdy’. It’s Scots, mostly archaic but still occasionally seen, and is used most notably in Burns’ Address to a Haggis:
But mark the Rustic, haggis fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread.
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He’ll mak it whissle;
An’ legs an’ arms, an’ heads will sned,
Like taps o’ thrissle.
In modern English:
But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread,
Clap in his ample fist a blade,
He’ll make it whistle;
And legs, and arms, and heads will cleave,
Like the heads of thistles.
And then there’s a second adjective wally or wallie and other variants meaning ‘made of china or porcelain’, which the OED and the Dictionary of the Scots Language group as a sense of the previous adjective but Collins lists as a separate word with a separate origin. From it we have the plural noun wallies for dentures (false teeth) because they were once made of porcelain; a wally close, for the tiled entrance hall to a typical tenement (block of flats/apartment block); and wally dugs, for the china dogs on the mantelpiece typical of rustic Victorian décor.
brill – British slang; ‘excellent or wonderful.’
Like ‘fab’, as in ‘The Fab Four’, here’s an informal word created by shortening, like dozens in everyday use (comfy, delish, glam, admin, info, etc.). I certainly remember using brill – I would say in the late 1980s early 1990s – but the shine soon wore off and it became as stale as last week’s croissants. Even at its height, one felt slightly self-conscious about using it. First attested as recently (in the grand scheme of things) as 1981 (OED [1989]), [I know that’s a dangling or unattached participle, but my meaning is clear] I hadn’t heard or read it for a long time, but it seems to be far from dead. Perhaps it’s just become part of standard language, rather than ‘slang’. if you use the search filter on Twitter (the backslash, \) and enter ‘brill’ you will find quite a few tweets containing the word (apart from the surname). I was quite surprised to find an actor and poet who stars in the long-running radio soap The Archers using it merely days ago (at the time of writing this) and he is certainly not long in the tooth. Moreover, he tells me, it’s part of his idiolect (his personal vocabulary — we all have one) and he doesn’t use it ironically — or even semi-ironically. I must try using it again myself and watch people’s expressions.
I know #TheArchers in COVID mode wasn’t to everyone’s taste but the team did a brill job to keep us on the air.
Ben Norris, ‘Ben’ in The Archers, on Twitter 11 October 2020
Sozzled (40%) – Very drunk
2. Cad (37%) – A man who is dishonest or treats other people badly
3. Bonk (37%) – Have sexual intercourse
4. Wally (36%) – A stupid person
5. Betrothed (29%) – Engaged to be married
6. Nincompoop (28%) – A stupid person
7. Boogie (28%) – Dance to pop music
8. Trollop (27%) – A woman who has many casual sexual encounters or relationships
9. Bounder (27%) – A dishonourable man
10. Balderdash (27%) – Senseless talk or writing; nonsense
11. Henceforth (26%) – From this or that time on
12. Yonks – (25%) – A very long time
13. Lush – (23%) – Very good or impressive
14. Tosh – (23%) – Rubbish; nonsense
15. Swot – (22%) – A person who studies hard
16. Brill – (21%) – Excellent; great
17. Kerfuffle – (20%) – A commotion or fuss
18. Randy – (19%) – Sexually aroused or excited
19. Disco – (17%) – A club or party at which people dance to music
20. Minted – (15%) – Having a lot of money; rich
References
“balderdash, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/14835. Accessed 11 October 2020.
“Balderdash.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/balderdash. Accessed 11 Oct. 2020.
“bounder, n.2.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/22059. Accessed 11 October 2020.
“cad, n.4.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/25902. Accessed 11 October 2020.
“Cad.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cad. Accessed 11 Oct. 2020.
“nincompoop, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/127179. Accessed 11 October 2020.
“Ninnyhammer.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ninnyhammer. Accessed 11 Oct. 2020.
“randy, adj. and n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/157992. Accessed 11 October 2020.
“sozzled, adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/185411. Accessed 11 October 2020.
“tosh, n.2.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September “trollop, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/206628. Accessed 11 October 2020.
“Trollop.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trollop. Accessed 11 Oct. 2020.
“trollop, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/84491097. Accessed 11 October 2020.
“wally, adj.1, n.1, and adv.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/225351. Accessed 9 October 2020.
“wally, n.3 and adj.3.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/225349. Accessed 9 October 2020.
“Wally.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wally. Accessed 11 Oct. 2020.
