Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3281 to 3285 (8-12 August 2016)
Morituri:
My favorite expletive is "slubberdegullion," but hardly anyone knows what it actually means because it's mostly been dropped from the English language.
Seriously, how can you lose a beautiful word like that? I bet no other language in the world even has a word for someone who tries to curry favor by performing oral sex but is so horrifically bad at it that they just make the recipient angry. Can anything else express that in one word?
Tova:
You'll probably be unsurprised to hear that my dictionary does contain the word "slubberdegullion," but not with that definition.
Akima:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slubberdegullion
pwhodges:
Interestingly, the etymology given is "slubber + the British dialectal term gullion (“wretch”)". But how British is "gullion" I wonder, when I find it is in none of my British dictionaries, only in the American Merriam-Webster.
Mr_Rose:
A lot of the old English dialects died after the introduction of printed books; the printers all used the principal dialect of London and the older regional ones fell into disuse as a result. As for how "English" a word like "gullion" is, consider that the Royal Navy once recorded that its sailors, beached in heavy weather on the coast of Cornwall, not more than 150 miles from their home port, were unable to purchase eggs from a local farmer as they could not make her understand what they wanted, she having never heard of "egges" in her life – they went away disappointed while she got back to tending her chickens and their fresh-laid eyeren…
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version