Category Archives: language

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The Year of the Rooster words

Rooster

Get your firecrackers and red envelopes ready, the Lunar New Year is almost here!

As you may know,  the Chinese zodiac rotates on a 12-year cycle, with an animal representing each year. This time around it’s the hardworking and ostentatious rooster, which got us thinking about the origin of rooster words. Here’s a brief history of those terms that go cock-a-doodle-doo.

Cock versus rooster

The word cock, referring to an adult male chicken, is quite old, originating in the late ninth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It comes from the Old English cocc, “male bird,” and is imitative in origin.

The more salacious meaning of cock arose (ahem) around 1618. Rooster, perhaps a euphemistic shortening of the older roost-cock, is from the 1770s. The OED describes the term as chiefly used in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, while the Online Etymology Dictionary says rooster became “favored in the U.S. originally as a puritan alternative to cock (n.) after it had acquired the secondary sense ‘penis.’”

Chanticleer

Another name for a rooster, chanticleer is a 14th-century term that started as proper name and comes from animal fables. Other such animal names include bruin for bear, grimalkin for cat, and Reynard for fox. Chanticleer comes from the French chanter, “to sing.”

Cockatrice

A cockatrice is mythic serpent that hatches from a cock’s egg, has “the power to kill by its glance,” and has characteristics of both a snake and a rooster. However, the word doesn’t come from the Old English cocc but the Latin calcāre, “to track.”

Cock-a-doodle-doo

This onomatopoetic word for a rooster cry is attested to 1573, says the OED. Other languages have their own versions. In French it’s cocorico; in German, kikeriki; and in Russian, kikareku. Check out this post for a list of cock-a-doodle-doos from around the world.

Cock-and-bull story

This useful phrase referring to “an absurd or highly improbable tale passed off as being true” might be allusion to Aesop’s fables, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, and their “incredible talking animals.”

Want more fowl words? Check out this list. Happy Year of the Rooster!

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A close look at some “cozy” words

cozy

By now you might have heard about the Danish phenomenon, hygge, a kind of cozy contentment, which sounds heavenly on chilly winter days like these. That got us wondering about the English word cozy, where it comes from, and about other cozy words and expressions.

Some not-so-clear cozy origins

While we all know what cozy means, it’s not clear where the word comes from. The Online Etymology Dictionary says it started out as colsie, which is Scottish dialect, and might ultimately be of Scandinavian origin. For instance, the Norwegian kose seg means “to bask” or “be cozy.”

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), on the other hand, doesn’t mention the Scandinavian connection. While it agrees the word is originally Scots, “and perhaps northern English,” it proposes a possible connection with old meanings of cosh, “neat; snug; quiet; comfortable,” or “a cottage; a hovel,” or the Gaelic còsagach, “full of holes or crevices; sheltered, snug, warm.” But then it immediately shuts these theories down, saying neither “seems tenable.”

Regardless, the earliest meaning of cozy, again according to the OED, is in regard to people —  “Comfortable from being warm and sheltered; snug” — with the earliest citation from 1665 in a sermon by a minister named William Guthrie: “When Israel was Colsie at Home.”

The next oldest meaning is about place: sheltered and warm, or that which is warm and comfortable. The earliest recorded usage is from Scottish poet Robert Burns in 1786: “Then canie, in some cozie place, They close the day.”

The newest meaning of cozy is from the 1920s: “warmly intimate or friendly,” but also the pejorative sense of “complacent, smug.” The earliest citation is in a 1927 letter by English essayist Max Beerbohm: “We liked her very much. She isn’t exactly cosy, but she’s very spirited.”

More “cozy” words

How to keep that pot of tea warm? With a tea-cozy of course (or if you prefer your beverage warmers British, tea-cosy). The earliest recorded usage is from 1863 by scientist John Tyndall in his book Heat: A Mode of Motion: “It is not unusual to preserve the heat of teapots by a woollen covering, but the ‘cosy’ must fit loosely.” An egg-cozy is a similarly quilted covering but for, you guessed it, a boiled egg.

A cosy seat (1876), says the OED, is “a canopied seat for two, occupying a corner of a room,” while a cosy corner (1894) is “an upholstered seat which fits into a corner of a room,” or “such a corner, cosily furnished.” Cosy stove was a proprietary name for “a free-standing enclosed stove.”

One of our favorite cozy words is coze, “to be snug, comfortable, or cozy,” or  “anything snug, comfortable, or cozy; specifically, a cozy conversation, or tête-à-tête.” The term might have been coined by Jane Austen  in her 1814 novel Mansfield Park:

Miss Crawford appeared gratified by the application, and after a moment’s thought, urged Fanny’s returning with her in a much more cordial manner than before, and proposed their going up into her room, where they might have a comfortable coze. . .

One night say that cozy mysteries, also known as cozies, are Austen-like — light, humorous, and quirky, unlike darker and more violent traditional crime fiction. When and where the term originated, however, is, well, a mystery. This blogger uncovered some of the same findings we did, including this 1992 article in The New York Times: “Thrillers like Thomas Harris’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ have incited a new wave of polite, ‘cozy’ mysteries, remarkable for their nonthreatening content and nonviolent characters.”

Earlier is a use in a 1986 magazine, San Francisco Focus (“Winn cites Christie as the doyenne of cozy mystery writers”), and a 1987 issue of Kirkus Reviews: “A sluggish attempt at writing a modern thriller in the style of an old-fashioned tea-cozy mystery, full of stiff upper lips and bracing cups of tea.”

Some “snug” sleuthing

A cozy word that might give coze a run for its money is snuggery, a British term for a snug, warm, comfortable place or position. The OED describes it as a small and cozy room, “into which a person retires for seclusion or quiet; a bachelor’s den.” Another meaning is “the bar-parlour of an inn or public-house.”

The word snug, like cozy, might be of Scandinavian origin. The sense of “compact, trim” is from the 1590s, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, and was originally a nautical term, especially meaning “protected from the weather.” This might have come from a “Scandinavian source” such as the Old Norse snoggr, “short-haired,” or the Old Danish snøg, “neat, tidy.”

The sense of “in a state of ease or comfort” was first recorded in the 1620s while “fit closely” is from 1838. And in case you were wondering, the the expression snug as a bug in a rug originated around 1769. Before then you’d have said snug as a bee in a box, which we’d argue sounds far less cozy.

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A ‘Basket of Deplorables’: Exploring the origins

ct-hillary-clinton-trump-supporters-basket-of--001

Hillary Clinton recently declared that half of Donald Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables.” In other words, they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.”

The Democratic presidential candidate has since expressed regret over the statement, but that hasn’t stopped us from wondering about the phrase.

Steve Katz of Mother Jones asked us if Clinton was the first to utter it:

Katy Tur of NBC points out it’s not the first time Clinton has used “the deplorables”:

But how about the “basket” half of it?

Let’s start with the latter. Nowadays deplorable is mostly used as an adjective. It originated in the early 1600s, says the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), to mean “lamentable, very sad, grievous, miserable, wretched,” and comes from the French déplorable. The verb form, deplore, “to weep for, bewail, lament,” is about 50 years older.

Around the mid-1800s, the verb form gained the meaning of regarding something “as scandalous,” or “to feel or express strong disapproval of.” The OED’s earliest citation is from Herman Melville in Moby-Dick: “It is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with..crow’s-nests.”

It was around 1828 that deplorables was first used as a noun. Referring to “deplorable ills,” it was perhaps first used by Sir Walter Scott: “What better is an old fellow, mauled with rheumatism and other deplorables?”

Another early instance of deplorables appears in a September 1901 issue of The Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness, referring to some unsavory individuals: “He turned to the east and took a Third avenue car down town. It carried a load of deplorables; all uninteresting, some offensive.”

Now, how about that basket? We couldn’t find any uses of “basket of deplorables” from before Clinton’s. But we did find a couple of new-to-us “basket of” idioms.

There’s basket of currencies, an economics term meaning “an agreed range of currencies, goods, etc. whose combined values can be used as a basis for calculating an average or comparative value.”

Then there’s basket of chips. According to the Dictionary of Regional American English (DARE), the idiom is used in comparisons — for  instance, “as smiling as a basket of chips” means “showing great happiness.” The OED’s earliest citation of basket of chips is from 1788: “He grins like a basket of chips.” DARE also cites “polite as a basket of chips,” meaning “extremely or obsequiously polite.”

Could Clinton have been channeling basket of chips when she came out with basket of deplorables? Perhaps: DARE includes Arkansas, Clinton’s longtime home, as a region where one might hear a “basket of chips” variation.

We admit it’s a bit of a stretch. What we do know is that basket of deplorables is sure to give binders full of women a run for its money.

Be sure to also check out Ben Zimmer’s Language Log post on the phrase.

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The language of roller coasters

Rollercoaster

Earlier this summer was the 132nd anniversary of the opening of the first roller coaster in America. A main attraction of Coney Island, the Gravity Switchback Railway traveled at a whopping six miles an hour and cost all of five cents, says History.com. (Coney Island’s famous wooden coaster, the Cyclone, opened in 1927.)

Of course the roller coaster is hardly just an American phenomenon, which got us wondering how one might say roller coaster in other languages. Let’s take a ride and see.

The origin of ‘rollercoaster’

While the first roller coaster in America opened in 1884, the first instance of the word, says the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), was the year before in a September 30 issue of the Chicago Tribune: “A curious structure is now in course of construction… It will be known as ‘The Roller Coaster’, and the objects claimed for it are health and amusement.”

As for where the name comes from, linguist Barry Popik says the structure is “said to have originated from an early French design where slides or ramps were fitted with rollers over which a sled would coast.” While the design changed to that “of fitting the wheels to the sled or other vehicles,” the name roller coaster stuck.

A Russian ancestor

According to How Stuff Works, “direct ancestors” of modern-day roller coasters were ice slide rides popular in 16th and 17th century Russia. The wooden slides were long and steep, “some as high as 70 feet,” and sliders rode on “sleds made out of wood or blocks of ice” and crash-landed in sand piles.

In addition to sounding absolutely terrifying, this might explain why the roller coaster is known as “Russian mountain,” or some variation thereof, in so many languages. In French it’s montagnes russes; in Spanish, montaña rusa. The Italians say montagne russe while the Portuguese use montanha russa.

Icelandic calls it like it is: rússíbani, which translates as “Russian death” or “Russian killer, bane, slayer.”

American influence

So if roller coaster is “Russian mountain” in all those languages, what is it in Russian? “American slides” (amerikanskiye gorki) of course. In Urkainian it’s also “American slides” (Amerykansʹki hirky) while in Latvian it’s “American coaster” (Amerikāņu kalniņi). In Estonian and Kyrgyz it’s “American mountain” (Ameerika mäed and Amerika toosu, respectively).

A mountain high enough

Speaking of mountains, some languages stick with that theme. The Uzbek word translates as “merry hills attraction” (quvnoq tepaliklar attraktsioni). In Bosnian and Serbian it’s “mountain railroad” (brdska željeznica and brdska železnica, respectively) while in Czech it’s “mountain path” (horská dráha). Swedish rolls with berg och dalbana or “mountain coaster.”

A different kind of eight track

In some languages the roller coaster is named for the figure eight design of some tracks: achtbaan in Dutch, Achterbahn in German, and Achterbunn in Luxembourgish.

The need for speed

And sometimes it’s all about velocity. The Indonesian kecepatan roller coaster translates as the rather redundant “speed roller coaster” while in Japanese it’s jettokōsutā, or “jet coaster.” As you might have guessed, roller coasters are big in Japan.

And medium in Mongolia

We’re not sure what’s more surprising, that sparsely-populated Mongolia has an amusement park or that roller coaster translates literally from Mongolian as “crazy mouse” (galzuu khulgana).

Why crazy mouse? It appears to be a brand name gone generic. The Crazy Mouse is a type of roller coaster, of which China is the leading manufacturer. Hence, the import of the crazy mouse roller coaster to the Ulaanbaatar National Amusement Park.

Take the fast train to Luna Parksville

Our favorite translations have to be from Turkish and Greek. The Turkish Lunapark hız treni translates as “speed train to Luna Park” while the Greek trenáki loúna park is “the train to Luna Park” — direct references to Luna Park of Coney Island.

Luna Park opened in 1903 along with Coney Island’s other amusement parks, Sea-Lion Park and Steeplechase Park. Decked out with 250,000 lights, Luna Park soon garnered the nickname, “Electric Eden.” While it closed in 1946, the park reopened in 2010.

Want even more roller coasters? Check out the Roller Coaster Database.

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Coffee Talk: Regional Idioms to Describe Coffee

Chuck wagon of the Ole Southwest, plenty of meat, potatoes, frijoles and coffee about to be consumed

You might be aware that we at Wordnik love our coffee. In a classic post we explore caffeinated language from around the world, from the Italian espresso to the French café au lait to the Australian flat white.

Today we’re delving into how we talk about coffee in the U.S., and to help us are the editors at the Dictionary of American Regional English, also known as DARE. In case you didn’t know, DARE is a fantastic resource of language specific to states and other regions. For instance, what you call a frying pan might be called a skillet elsewhere. What you call pancakes might be flapjacks or griddle cakes in other parts of the country.

But we’re here to talk about joe. Pour yourself a mug and drink in these regional terms.

Strong enough to walk

Why call a bold cup of java strong when you can call it blackjack? Blackjack is a term used in Wisconsin and in “lumberjack lingo” in New England and the Great Lakes. Another lumberjack term for strong coffee is Norwegian or Norski in states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, which have long histories of Norwegian settlers. Norwegian coffee also refers to coffee with an egg in it.

Shanty coffee seems to have originated in the New York area and is so-called as it was made by fisherman who lived in shanties, or little cabins or huts. Cowboy coffee is named for, you guessed it, the cowboys who boiled it. Six-shooter coffee is a cowboy term that comes from the idea, says DARE, that “it’s thick enough to float a pistol or because there’s six tablespoons for a four-cup pot.”

Strong enough to walk could refer to any strong-flavored food or drink but especially coffee, and centers in the South and Midland regions of the U.S.

Weak as water

Descriptions for weak coffee percolate across the U.S. as well. In Texas you might hear it called duck coffee, perhaps with the idea of a liquid a duck would swim in, i.e., water. In Pennsylvania it might cambric coffee, after the fine, thin fabric. In scattered regions, it might be dishwashy or dishwater.

In the Southwest, weak coffee might be derided as black water; as coffee-water in Georgia, Kentucky, and Mississippi; and as pond water in the South and South Midland. Also in the South and South Midland is branch water, from the original meaning of the term, water from a stream rather than a well, perhaps due to the light brown color often associated with streams.

In the Inland South and Appalachians there’s stump water, originally rainwater collected from tree stumps and used in folk magic and home remedies for ailments such as skin conditions. Perhaps by extension, stump water also means anything weak, often coffee. In other regions, the term water bewitched is used to describe highly diluted coffee or tea, often in the phrase water bewitched and coffee (or tea) begrudged.

Slumgullion, referring to a weak or disgusting beverage, was perhaps first used primarily in the western United States but now can be found in other regions as well. In his 1915 book, Travels in Alaska, John Muir describes a cup of coffee as “muddy” and “semi-liquid…which the California miners call ‘slickens’ or ‘slumgullion.'”

How do you take your coffee?

If you take your coffee black, you could call it black, or you could call it naked like they do in Mississippi and Texas, or stark naked like in Massachusetts. Or you could make like those in the Middle Atlantic, Central Atlantic, and Ohio Valley regions and call it barefooted.

Conversely, coffee with milk or cream would have its socks on, as they might say in parts of the south, or be seasoned, as they say in Pennsylvania and Kansas. Coffee and might refer to coffee and a donut or roll, or coffee with milk or cream. (Cider-and, by the way, is cider with alcohol or other ingredients, says the Oxford English Dictionary.)

Boston coffee is half cream, half coffee (perhaps named after the Boston cream pie?) in Louisiana, Texas, Illinois — but not in Boston.

What exactly do you mean by ‘regular’?

A regular coffee is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.

In Boston and Massachusetts, a regular coffee will get you one with cream or milk. In Rhode Island, it’s cream or milk and sugar. In Chicago it’s black while in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Virginia, regular is caffeinated rather than decaf. Finally, in New York, a regular coffee has milk or cream, and possibly sugar (or two sugars, as Gothamist insists).

Coffee, figuratively

We’ve discussed idioms about a literal cup of coffee, but how about idioms with the word coffee? Coffee coat is another name for a housecoat used in Wisconsin. Grinding coffee is a way of jumping rope in Tennessee and perhaps elsewhere: one jumper stays in place while another jumps around her, like the wheels of an old-fashioned coffee grinder.

Coffee cooler is a military term for an idler or shirker, perhaps with the idea of an untouched hot beverage cooling off, while a coffee-strainer is nickname for a bushy mustache.

Be prepared if someone invites you to a coffee-drink in Louisiana: they’re talking about a wake. If someone in the South Midland or Texas says you don’t know split beans from coffee — in other words, you’re stupid or ignorant — you might consider giving them a drink of black coffee, or a severe reprimand, as they say in Pennsylvania.

How do you talk about your coffee?

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8 Old-Timey Words for ‘Doctor’

Laryngoscope

In The Secret Language of Doctors by Dr. Brian Goldman, medical practitioners go by many names. Surgeons are cowboys while internists are fleas. ER physicians are triage monkeys and obstetricians are baby catchers. Urologists are plumbers and anesthesiologists are gas passers.

But how about those old-timey words for doctor? Today we look at eight such terms and the stories behind them.

alienist

“All alienists are agreed as to the greater frequency of mental alienation in the summer season.”

Henry Morselli, “Suicide,” The Academy, Volume 20, 1881

Alienist is an old term for psychiatrist, especially one that acts as an expert in a court of law. The word comes from the French aliéné, “insane,” which also gives rise to alienation, “emotional isolation or dissociation.” Alien meaning “strange” or “foreign” comes from the Old French alien, also meaning strange or foreign.

chirurgeon

“When Barnaby True came back to his senses again it was to find himself being cared for with great skill and nicety, his head bathed with cold water, and a bandage being bound about it as carefully as though a chirurgeon was attending to him.”

Howard Pyle, Book of Pirates, 1921

The Online Etymology Dictionary says this hard-to-pronounce word is a “failed Renaissance attempt to restore Greek spelling to the word that had got into English as surgeon,” and is  “now, thank the gods, archaic.”

The much more accessible surgeon ultimately comes from the Latin chirurgia, “surgery,” which comes from the Greek kheirourgos, “working or done by hand.”

leech

“There will be a learned young divine with some new doctrine; a learned leech with some new drug.”

Sir Walter Scott, The Abbot, 1820

Which came first, leech the physician or leech the blood-sucker that a physician of the past (and some in the present) might have administered? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says it’s “commonly regarded” that leech the blood-sucker came from leech the physician, where the latter came from Proto-Germanic lekjaz, “enchanter, one who speaks magic words; healer, physician.”

However, the Old English lyce, early Middle English liche, and Middle Dutch lieke suggest that leech the parasite began as a distinct word and morphed into leech due to “popular etymology.”

medicine man

“In our walk through the town, I was accosted by the Medicine Man, or doctor, who was standing at the entrance of a lodge, into which we went.”

John Bradbury, Travels in the Interior of America, 1817

The term medicine man first appeared in English around 1801, says the OED, probably coming from the Ojibwa mashkikiiwinini, physician, where mashkiki means medicine and inini, man.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says the English word medicine was adopted by North American Indians in the sense of “magical influence,” and that they called the U.S.-Canadian boundary Medicine Line “because it conferred a kind of magic protection: punishment for crimes committed on one side of it could be avoided by crossing over to the other.”

mountebank

“The mountebank now treads the stage, and sells His pills, his balsoms, and his ague spells.”

John Gay, The Shepherd’s Week, 1714

A mountebank is a charlatan who sells fake meds, also known as nostrum. The word mountebank comes from the Italian montambanco, which comes from the phrase monta im banco, “one gets up onto the bench,” with the idea of a con artist getting up a on bench to hawk his fake wares.

quack

“It may likewise be observed that as patient who has once been under the hands of a quack is ever after dabbling in drugs.”

Washington Irving, History of New-York, 1809

A quack is another word for a sham doctor. The word is short for quacksalver, which is Dutch in origin and translates as “hawker of salve.” The Dutch quacken means “to brag or boast,” and literally, “to croak.”

sawbones

“I thought everybody know’d as a Sawbones was a Surgeon.”

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837

Sawbones is slang for surgeon, and may have been coined by Charles Dickens. Curious about what an old-timey amputation saw looked like? Check it out.

shrink

“It was Dr Hilarius, her shrink or psychotherapist.”

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1966

This slang term for a psychotherapist is a shortening of headshrinker. The word headshrinker seems to have first appeared in a 1950 Time magazine article about Hopalong Cassidy: “Anyone who had predicted that he would end up as the rootin’-tootin’ idol of U.S. children would have been led instantly off to a headshrinker.” According to Shrink: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, the article noted that headshrinker is “Hollywood jargon for psychiatrist.”

The OED’s lists Pynchon’s as the first use of shrink.

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10 Ultra-Violent Slang Terms from ‘A Clockwork Orange’

Clockwork Stem

In his iconic novel A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess creates a dystopian world in which youths down milk doused with narcotics before committing random acts of ultra-violence.

He’s also created a language. Nadsat-talk, or just Nadsat, is a mix of Russian, German, French, and Cockney influences, as well as almost every linguistic trick in the book, including blends (chumble, possibly “chatter” and “mumble”), reduplication (baddiwad for “bad”), nounification (warbles for “songs”), shortenings (guff, “to laugh,” from guffaw), and pure invention (cables for “blood vessels” and flatblock for “home”).

On what would have been his 99th birthday, we take a look 10 words invented by Burgess in A Clockwork Orange.

clockwork orange

“So I creeched louder still, creeching: ‘Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?’”

In addition to being the title of a book within the book, a clockwork orange refers to someone who has been made to work “like clockwork,” that is, mechanically and without free will.

As for the title’s origin, Burgess himself has a couple of explanations. In The New Yorker, he writes that he first heard the expression “as queer as a clockwork orange” before World War II in a pub in London, and that it’s “an old Cockney slang phrase, implying a queerness or madness so extreme as to subvert nature.” The phrase also juxtaposes “a thing living, growing, sweet, juicy, to a cold dead artifact.”

In Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, Burgess notes that when he “wrote a novel called A Clockwork Orange, no European reader saw that the Malay word for ‘man’ — orang — was contained in the title.” The Malay orang is also contained within orangutan, which translates as “man of the wilderness.”

droog

“There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim.”

Droog, a young hooligan or gang member, is the one Burgess neologism that has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, at least so far. The word comes from the Russian drug, meaning “friend.” It may be no coincidence that drug is also a homograph of the English drug since pharmaceuticals play a large part in the novel.

nadsat

“‘Oh I shall go home. Back to my pee and em.’
‘Your — ?’ He didn’t get nadsat-talk at all, so I said:
‘To my parents in the dear old flatblock.'”

Nadsat is another Russian-influenced invented slang term. Meaning “teenage,” the word comes from the Russian suffix for “teen,” nadtsat.

eggiweg

“I read this with care, my brothers, slurping away at the old chai, cup after tass after chasha, crunching my lomticks of black toast dipped in jammiwan and eggiweg.”

Reduplication is another device Burgess uses in Nadsat-speak. The childish singsong of words such as eggiweg, jammiwam, and punchipunching are a chilling apposition against the depraved ultra-violence of Alex and his droogs.

moloko plus

“I took the large moloko plus to one of the little cubies that were all around this mesto, there being like curtains to shut them off from the main mesto, and there I sat down in the plushy chair and sipped and sipped.”

A moloko plus is milk spiked with drugs. Moloko is a direct translation from Russian for “milk.” (Mesto, by the way, is Russian for “place.”) Like eggiweg and jammiwam, moloko plus sets up the childish (milk) against the depraved (hard drugs).

Moloko plus is also called knify moloko — “There we were, a-waiting and peeting away at the the old knify moloko, and you had not turned up” — or “milk with knives in it,” which is made to “sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one.”

What does all of this mean? Knives refer to amphetamines, according to the introduction of the book, but perhaps also plays on the term spiked, containing drugs or alcohol. Peet comes from pit, the Russian word for “drink,” while being sharp may be an allusion to being hyper-aware and sped up, an effect of amphetamines. Dirty twenty-to-one might refer to gang violence involving sexual assault.

Other fictional drug names in the novel include synthemesc, vellocet, and drencrom. Synthemesc might come from “synthetic mescaline” while vellocet might play on the name of a motorcycle company, evoking speed and velocity. Drencrom might be an alteration of adrenochrome, a drug that causes “thought disorder, derealization, and euphoria.”

hound-and-horny

“Dim put on a hound-and-horny look of evil, saying: ‘I don’t like you should do what you done then.’”

Hound-and-horny seems to be a kind of invented rhyming slang term that means “corny.” Other such terms include, for “money,” pretty polly (“If you need pretty polly, you take it”) and cutter, which might come from bread and butter, meaning livelihood. Luscious glory meaning “hair” (“my luscious glory was a wet tangled cally mess”) might come from crowning glory.

vaysay

“I wanted to be sick, so I got out of bed all trembly so as to go off down the corridor to the old vaysay. But behold, brothers, the door was locked.”

Vaysay is Nadsat slang for the restroom, coming from the French pronunciation of the British English W.C., or water closet. Other French-derived slang terms include sinny, which comes from cinéma or ciné, and tass from tasse, “cup.”

shilarny

“Why this sudden shilarny for being the big bloated capitalist?”

Shilarny, meaning “concern,” seems to be a purely invented with perhaps an Irish influence. Another invented word with an unclear origin is sharp, slang for “woman.”

barry place

“Next it’s going to be the barry place and all my work ruined.”

The barry place, or prison, refers to the bars of a cell. Another slang term for jail is stripey hole, again for the image of prison bars.

Staja

“This is the real weepy and like tragic part of the story beginning, my brothers and only friends, in Staja (State Jail, that is) Number 84F.”

Staja is another term for jail, a blend of “State Jail,” but also reminiscent of Stalag, a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Stalag is a shortening of Stammlager, which comes from Kriegsgefangenen-Mannschafts-Stammlager, which translates roughly as “main POW camp.”

Other German-derived words include shlaga, a club or a bat, which comes from Schlager, to hit, and tashtook (“He’d taken a big snotty tashtook from his pocket”), which comes from Taschentuch, “handkerchief.”