once-common words people don’t use anymore

suet

creosote

chilblains

If your home has a chimney, you're gonna talk about creosote all the time.

We were talking about chilblains a lot over the past two months (as in did the husband have chilblains or covid toe, we decided the latter). Was it ever really common though?

I still frequently buy lamb suet for making DUMPLINGS!

'Creosote' appears in a song by The Clientele that I have played a few times this week.

cor!

Suet is also common in bird feeders.

I'm sorry, Tracer Hand, that we are working so hard to debunk your OP.

I think I say 'Cor'.

desuetude

hwæt

I still use 'hwæt'.

Cobblers

hwæt, sôðe?

There's probably somewhere in Derbyshire or somewhere where people still talk like that.

Sóþsecgendlíce.

lol, I totally use suet, it's what you put in bird feeders.

'Iceland' I think it's called.

2xp

flummadiddle

think West Frisian is supposed to be the closest extant dialect to Old English

It is, but Icelandic is cooler. Besides, Frisian is also closest to modern English.

I buy suet once a year to make Christmas Pudding

if we're talking ilx, i would say RONG never gets used anymore

If you had searched for that, you would have found yourself to be incorrect.

nobody was capitalizing it tho!

The girl group song 'Terry' features the line 'we had a quarrel, I was untrue on the night he died' and every time I hear it I wonder when 'quarrel' and 'untrue' (in that context) fell out of their once-popular use.

Eh?

Tom D: I say 'cobblers' almost literally every day.

And I don't even work at an old-fashioned shoe repair shop.

(xp) Oh I get what you mean about the context for 'untrue', but I think it was old fashioned even then.

Using pop culture as a yardstick, 'untrue' as an analogue of 'unfaithful' seems to have been in fairly regular usage in the '60s. I hear it pop up quite a bit in songs, movies, shows, etc. from that era but not really much thereafter.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/64/BurialUntrue.jpg

Well, it's easy to rhyme, which can never be underestimated in song writing.

Varlet

if we're talking ilx, i would say RONG never gets used anymore

you aren't hearing "shan't" much in the US these days, and "shall" only got a stay of execution from Gandalf

xpost it makes you vintage

When I was six it was very common for kids my age to say "keen" to mean cool, great, awesome. And then it seemed as if overnight everyone stopped saying it. (Absolutely nobody said "awesome" when I was six but by the time I was 14 everyone said it). Granted kids often have their own words, but some older people said "keen" also, I'm pretty sure of it.

"Lumbago" was a pretty common term up to and throughout the 70's, to identify any sort of back pain. Archie Bunker and Fred G. Sanford were all over it! Seems like "sciatica" has taken its place.

The G. is for “grebt.”

does anybody say "kneeslapper" anymore

xp
a Canadianism I enjoy is "keener"

xp to myself

I think it was lumbago that had George Jefferson walking on Bentley's back.

"Lumbago" was a pretty common term up to and throughout the 70's, to identify any sort of back pain. Archie Bunker and Fred G. Sanford were all over it! Seems like "sciatica" has taken its place.

cf the Small Faces, "Lazy Sunday"

TIL that that line in "Lazy Sunday" is "How's old Bert's lumbago?"

Always thought it was "How's your bird's lumbago?"

there are words people used to say in the playground a lot that were conflating being silly/stupid with being mentally handicapped. I don't really want to even say what they were, but it always amazes me that these words were common enough to be learned by children. I'm glad I don't hear them any more.

xp to myself

I think it was lumbago that had George Jefferson walking on Bentley's back.

TIL that that line in "Lazy Sunday" is "How's old Bert's lumbago?"

Always thought it was "How's your bird's lumbago?"

"How's yer Bert's lumbago?" surely?

Hm it does sound slightly more like "your" than "old." I just went by some random lyric site... now I see there's another site that says it's "your old Bert's"!

lumbago was a final jeopardy answer a few years ago and nobody got it. the clue: "Adding “P” to a word for a chronic back condition gets you this synonym for graphite or pencil lead". one of the contestants was a latin teacher.

milliner / millinery

Never heard lumbago used in conversation but come across it all the time in medical coding.

yes it's v old-timey now and mr goldfinger is sadly no longer with us but the other point is that he makes a *distinction* between happenstance and coincidence

i want to put that on a sign in my store window. *Open by chance or by happenstance*.

Restless Leg Syndrome is also known as the jimmylegs. Why would anyone call it anything else?

Henpecked.

― Defund Phil Collins (Tom D.)

kind of a weird one, that. when i was young there was this comic strip called andy capp, who i think was one of those "henpecked husbands". he'd go out to the pub every night and come home drunk and then his wife - flo? was her name flo? would beat the shit out of him. i wasn't really sure why that was supposed to be funny, because it wasn't funny when my mom beat my dad, but i figured maybe it was a british thing. i didn't get why they were always going on about the vicar in fred bassett, either. marmaduke - that was a comic i understood. he was so big! he was an extremely large dog!

anyway maybe there's been a larger cultural shift around how we understand abusive relationships that's led to that word falling out of common usage. i hope so, at least. :)

she was called flo, yes

andy capp's son (who had a separate strip in UK kids' comics) was called "buster capp", which is -- somewhat against the spirit of the thread -- an example of a phrase you think is much more modern than it is (in fact it goes back to the 1860s)

i should point out that i _didn't_ get heathcliff, which is part of the reason i was so gratified when that comic went more or less openly surrealist some years back. that comic never made any fucking sense anyway.

i've love to see some kind of chart where... google has these usage charts where you can see the popularity of a phrase rise and fall, but it's usually over the short term. i'm kind of interested in knowing statistically what words have experienced the most precipitous decline in usage compared to its usage in the previous 100 years. the rust belt of words, if you will.

Though, no ranking - you have to specify the words or phrases you want to track

I should probably have flipped case-insensitive on

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rust+belt%2Cflyover+states%2Cboondocks&year_start=1600&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true

Cool. I noticed massive spikes in the use of "henpecked" ca. 1850 and 1890. I wonder why?

Though, no ranking - you have to specify the words or phrases you want to track

― Alba

yeah _that_'s what i'm looking for, leveraging big data to locate emergent blah blah blah :)

just came across something i thought was a typo but no... teapoy

I don't hear "corpulent" much anymore

in some 19th century novel I saw a character's paunch described as his "corporation," that one seems due for a revival

in some 19th century novel I saw a character's paunch described as his "corporation," that one seems due for a revival

― Brad C.

"yo mama so fat that left-wing economists have identified her as one of the most significant causes for the sharp spike in her country's gini coefficient over the past 20 years"

Lol

There's a whole thread on here about using the formulation "out of", as in "him out of Simply Red".

I've lived in London for over a decade now and have never heard anyone use it.

"tuchus"

^ feels like this word had its day when older borscht circuit comedians like Milton Berle began to graduate into television.

I can't differentiate whether you hear this more if you hang out with more Jewish people, versus hanging out with Jewish people who are also older/a prior generation when Yiddish was more prevalent.

I like when "et cetera" used to be abbreviated "&c."

Me too!
But I never use it 'cos I'm never sure if other folks will recognize it or just think I mistyped...

Don't remember seeing &c, does look useful. Was it prevalent. In books or magazines or what?

Victorian novels

“&” originating as a ligature of “et” which makes it a literal equivalent

I recall an English teacher telling me to "show more spunk", as if this was a completely normal request. The class sniggered.

Admittedly, this was last century.

My coworker has chilblains and it made me think of this thread.

Everyone knows at least one thing about chilblains, right?

I didn't find out "tuchus" was Yiddish until recently. I'm pretty sure my Southern Baptist grandfather used that word.

I don't hear "corpulent" much anymore

in some 19th century novel I saw a character's paunch described as his "corporation," that one seems due for a revival

(my dad and all of his brothers have paunches, fwiw, and this is gentle joking amongst family— not meant to be shaming or anything)

To try to explain the Scottish word "gallus" the other day I used the word "cocksure", which I don't think I've heard in a while.

(it's not actually a very accurate equivalent anyway)

“gallant” used to mean you were a bit of a rascal with the ladies, is that closer to it?

Irish people use "bold" about people in a similar way to gallus I think. Obviously bold is used in England but more just as courageous and clear, not with the edge of cheekiness

It seems mad that the link isn't 'gall' (bold, impudent), but the etymologies appear different.

I think of Goofus and Gallant, the comic strip from Highlights magazine

"'gallant' used to mean you were a bit of a rascal with the ladies, is that closer to it?"

I was reading about obituaries a while back, and this reminds me of a chap called Hugh Massingberd, who used euphemisms so as not to speak too ill of the dead.

"Thus we have one dissolute old lord, widely acknowledged to be a borderline rapist, described, in homage to one of Massingberd's finest confections, as an 'uncompromisingly direct ladies' man'. ... 'He tended to become over-attached to certain ideas and theories' - fascist. 'Gave colourful accounts of his exploits' - liar. 'She did not suffer fools gladly' - foul-tempered shrew."

It also mentions Antony Moynihan, 3rd Baron Moynihan, who "provided, through his character and career, ample ammunition for critics of the hereditary principle. His chief occupations were bongo-drummer, confidence trickster, brothel-keeper, drug-smuggler and police informer".

i thought gallant was more towards courteous etc in dealing with the ladies of the court

Now it does

In fact “gallant” is one of the entries in this thread, proposed by me, many moons ago

The suggestion that it's from "gallows" as in "he's fit for the gallows, that one" is more entertaining.

I just think of suspenders (which makes sense as coming from gallows; they are literally for hanging).

Goofus and Gallows didn't test well

Gallant I think was borrowed from the French? Anyway, there was a mid-18th century substyle of Classical music in Germany they called “galant”, as it was smoother and more poised/less emotional than the high baroque which came before.

iirc, gallantry was a later manifestation of ye auld style chivalry

The suggestion that it's from "gallows" as in "he's fit for the gallows, that one" is more entertaining.

protestantism took a dim view of both chivalry and gallantry bcz they were both centered on the idea that women were to be greatly admired and female sexuality was incorporated into its ideals, rather than viewed as inherently foul and sinful

And Catholics don’t? What with Mary being a perpetual virgin and whatnot

Victorian Britain was both Protestant and enamored with Arthurian mythology.

Also simultaneously patriarchal and so dominated by a woman that I just referred to an entire time period using her name.

I don't have a point really (I usually don't, as a rule). I am musing idly.

protestantism took a dim view of both chivalry and gallantry bcz they were both centered on the idea that women were to be greatly admired and female sexuality was incorporated into its ideals, rather than viewed as inherently foul and sinful

It's really nothing to do with that though, it's about someone being cocky and with attitude and liable to end up in trouble as a result of it.

cybernetics