CHEEKS!

June 7, 2007 by languagehat 5 Comments

It’s too late to get this into my curses-and-insults book, but I have to share it with you all: looking for something else in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, I noticed the following entry:
cheeks! excl. [mid-late 19C] a coarse and insulting excl.
Just before it was:
cheeks n. [late 18C-late 19C] an imaginary person, usu. used in a rude reply to an irritating question. [note synon. 19C naut. jargon Cheeks the Marine. In both cases the phr. refers to the buttocks and equates with ASK MY ARSE!]
And just after it was:
cheeks near cunnyborough phr. [mid18C-early 19C] a coarse rejoinder to what the speaker (invariably a woman) categorizes as a stupid question (cf. ASK MY ARSE!). [CHEEKS + CUNNY]
Naturally, I checked the OED; none of these delightful usages were there, but definition 1.c. read “Used like beard, teeth, etc. in defiance, cursing. maugre thy (his, etc.) chekes” (Langland, from 1377: “We wil haue owre wille, maugre þi chekes”).
And now that I have your attention: for Pete’s sake, somebody get Helen DeWitt an agent! I want to read her next novel, dammit.

Comments

Irene Grumman says

June 7, 2007 at 11:59 pm

Send this entry to the scriptwriters for those damned pirate movies.
Chris Waigl says

June 8, 2007 at 3:31 am

Oh, this is lovely! I’ll start using this immediately.
Paul says

June 9, 2007 at 5:42 am

You are going to tell us the title, publisher, etc, of the book ? Please …
language hat says

June 9, 2007 at 8:59 am

All in good time.
espen says

July 30, 2007 at 5:58 am

hey… what meens: eu t place???

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