HEIFER BRAND _ A handkerchief on a man’s arm at a dance, signifying that he’s prepared to take the role of a woman and accept male dancing partners.
– Dictionary of the American West by Winfred Blevins.
Category Archives: ADOTW
pinguescent (ping-GWES-ent) becoming fat
_an old friend now almost unrecognizably pinguescent
– Endangered English Dictionary: Bodacious Words Your Dictionary Forgot
HAPPY THANKSGIVING
&
BON APPÉTIT!
WHARFINGER, the person who has the charge of a wharf, and takes account of all the articles landed thereon, or removed from it, into any vessel lying alongilde thereof; for which he receives a certain fee called wharfage, which becomes due to the proprietor for the use of his machines and furniture.
– Wm. Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine (1780).
xeres (ZER-es) sherry
_his grandmother’s late-afternoon spot of xeres
– Endangered English Dictionary: Bodacious Words Your Dictionary Forgot
hornbook: A primer which was popular in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Consisting of a single sheet of paper or vellum mounted on wood, on which were printed the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, and Roman numerals, the hornbook derived its name from the protective covering of horn over the sheet.
The term is used by Thomas Dekker in his Gull’s Hornbook
Literary Terms: A Dictionary
POSSIBLES _ Belongings, accoutrements, especially camping gear. Borrowed from Spanish (where posibles has a similar meaning), it is primarily a term of the mountain men, who carried their possibles in a possible sack, described by Lt. George Frederick Ruxton as a “wallet of dressed buffalo skin” for carrying “ammunition, a few pounds of tobacco, dressed deerskins for moccasins, &c.”
– Dictionary of the American West
NUNNERY
(col.) A brothel.
The term is not as popular now as it was in Elizabethan times when nuns had more dubious reputations than they do now.
When Hamlet says to Ophelia ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ (Hamlet
– Wordsworth Dictionary of Obscenity & Taboo
CANVAS All sails and hammocks were made from strong-fibred hemp, the Greek ‘kannabis‘.
_
– The Pirate Dictionary
yest. (1) The foam, spume, or flower of beer in fermentation; barm.
(2) The spume on a troubled sea.
– Johnson’s Dictionary: A Modern Selection
demonocracy. Government by demons. Greek daimon, a ministering spirit; kratos, rule … There is also the form demonarchy (Greek arche, rule), which seems a better word to employ than demonocracy, lest one elide a syllable.
– Dictionary of Early English by the ever-witty Joseph T. Shipley (1955).