Are You Suffering from Uhtceare? by Vivien Teasdale

 

 

    Probably the answer is ‘yes’, even if you don’t know it. In fact, we’ve all suffered from it, probably since the Stone Age. It was the Old English, as against the old English person who is writing this blog, who not only suffered from it, but named it. It means ‘dawn-care’; those moments when you wake up at dawn and can’t get back to sleep because you are too busy worrying about all the things that do worry us at that time in the morning, like not being able to sleep.

    And what about that lovely word Golopshus? No, I hadn’t heard of it either, but if we lived near Norwich, we’d probably be using it all the time. “What a golopshus day it is today?”, “We had such a golopshus meal at that new restaurant last night”, and, provided the person doesn’t overhear or you know them very well, you could say, “cor, he (or she) is rather golopshus!” They might (possibly) thank you for it. It’s an old East Anglian word for luscious, delicious or splendid.

    Of course, as well as complimenting people, we could insult them by calling them a Rantipole, a Rattlecap, a Spoffy type who mixes with the Rag, Tag and Bobtail of society. No, not the cute little animals we watched with Mother (Brownie points if anyone can remember what each animal was – without Googling it!)

    In these cases, you may end up having judgement here since you would be calling your antagonist a wild, noisy fellow, a low tattered wretch, a busy-body who mixes with a crowd of low people. Definitely a court-case in the offing.

    So let’s turn to food and drink. Would we enter the portals of a restaurant that offered us Chitterlings? Not unless you have a fancy for fried entrails, which can include such delicacies as the lungs, the heart, and the organs of the digestive, excretory, and reproductive systems of a sheep or pig.

    But if you did enjoy that, your next visit might make you plucky enough to try the Pluck that’s on the menu. That’s the bits that are plucked out of the chest – heart, liver and lungs. Actually, ‘lights’ is the word often used for lungs – as a child, I used to be sent off to the butchers to buy them to cook for the dog.

    Alternatively, why not try Field-lane Duck, straight from the “low London thoroughfare” of Clerkenwell. Not a bird, but a baked sheep’s head. You could follow any of these meals with a night-time glass of White Satin, otherwise known as gin. If that’s not your tipple, try some Bingo (brandy), Bottled-earthquake (Whisky), or Whitewash (Sherry). Too much, though, may leave you All Mops and Brooms, Bright in the eye or Chirping-merry.

    So many of these old words sound much more fun than modern ones. Perhaps we should bring them back, dropping them nonchalantly into our conversation: ‘I like the dress, but it’s a little Tofficky, don’t you think?’ (dressy, showy). ‘I consider all politicians are Quockerwodgers at heart.’ (politicians, whose strings of action are pulled by somebody else).

    We could also introduce it into our writing. Here’s a challenge for you. Try using any of the above – or look up new ones online, in a slang dictionary or do as I did, get a free download of “John Camden Hotten. A Dictionary of Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words / Used at the Present Day in the Streets of London; the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the Houses of Parliament; the Dens of St. Giles; and the Palaces of St. James” from:

     https://www.gutenberg.org/      

and browse that. Especially useful for those uhtceare moments.

Pick one or more words and produce a blog/story/poem etc for YWL based around your favourite discoveries.

  But I bag “Slantindicular”, which may well appear in my next blog. It means oblique, awry and is the opposite of perpendicular. Especially useful to know when you’ve had too much Red Fustian and are feeling decidedly Elephant’s-trunk.