The OED’s June set of New word entries is particularly full of good things, although there are, of course, boring items like “Anglo-Dutch, adj.: ‘Of, belonging to, or involving both England (or Britain) and Holland (or the Netherlands)’” — how did that not make it in until 2025? Some that caught my eye:
asweddumize, v.: “transitive. To prepare (fallow or disused land) for cultivation, esp. for the growing of rice.” (It’s Sri Lankan English, from Sinhala asvedduma ‘cultivation (of land),’ whose origin is unclear.)
Avurudu, n.: “The first day of the Sinhala and Hindu New Year, occurring on the spring equinox.” (The pronunciation is unexpected: British English /ˈaʊrᵿduː/ OW-ruh-doo, U.S. English /ˈaʊruˌdu/ OW-roo-doo, Sri Lankan English /ˈaurud̪u/ or /ˈaurud̪ə/.)
bag of dicks, n.: “Coarse slang. In various expressions used to convey hostile or contemptuous dismissal, esp. to suck (or eat) a bag of dicks (frequently in imperative).” (First cite: 1995 “Doesn’t the food suck the biggest bag of dicks you’ve ever tasted?” New York Magazine 19 June 54/3)
baggywrinkle, n.: “A material used to prevent rigging from chafing, made by weaving many short strands of rope, the edges of which are left to fray, across two long strands.”
bagus, adj.: “Of high quality; excellent, splendid. Also as int., expressing approval or assent.” (This is Southeast Asian, from Malay and Indonesian bagus ‘good, fine, beautiful, nice, excellent’; the stress is on the second syllable: British English /bɑːˈɡuːs/ bah-GOOSS, U.S. English /bɑˈɡus/ bah-GOOSS, Singapore and Malaysian English /ˌbʌˈɡus/.)
bee’s dick, n.: “Slang. A very small distance or amount.” (First cite: 1988 “If I was a second out it would have been easier to accept but I was only a bee’s dick out.” Sydney Morning Herald 21 May 28/3)
And that’s just the a’s and b’s; click the link for many more. One that startled me was gunzel, n.: “A tram or train enthusiast”; it turns out to be Australian slang and, according to the etymology, is in fact from the gunsel I was thinking of: “Among vagrants: a boy, a youth; a young male companion of a vagrant, esp. one who is made use of as a sexual partner. Hence: a young man who is made use of as a sexual partner by an older man.” They say “The U.S. slang word was probably transmitted to Australia via American popular culture; compare e.g. its use in the film The Maltese Falcon (1941) and in the book on which this was based,” but the semantic transition is not clear to me.
So “bagus” is in fact an antonym of “bogus”?
to hazard a guess on “gunzel” (which is how i originally got here, many a year ago):
hammett’s publisher/censor-trolling use of “gunsel” led to the word being used by hard-boiled-detective writers who didn’t have any actual knowledge of underworld cant (or yiddish) it as if it meant “young gun-toting assistant”, with some eventual shifting towards “over-enthusiastic gunman”. i could see the (over)enthusiasm part being taken up as the important element, allowing a transplantation to trains/trams, especially with a little help from someone who (like hammett) knew the actual original meaning of the word and found the whole thing funny. that would make the newly-canonized usage a sorta mirror-image of the use of “trainspotter” to refer to enthusiasts in other realms of esoteric taxonomy (there was a (apparently now defunct) “Leftist Trainspotting” blog that was very useful on the splitting and lumping of u.k. sectarian parties, for those of us who find that sort of thing fascinating).
Out of entirely scholarly interest, I would also mention “smoke a pack of dicks”.
Green’s treats “gonsel” as the canonical spelling while acknowledging considerable variation: “also ginzel, gonsil, gonzel, guncel, gunsel, gunshel, gunsil, guntzel, gunzel, gunzl.” Some of those spellings make the word look more transparently like a Yiddishism than others. Although I suppose it was in substantial part transmitted through various Gentile-dominated hobo and criminal subcultures where no one really knew Yiddish-as-such and no one was motivated to maintain the orthographic purity of a loanword.
Green’s also offers “gazooney” as a synonym (although with some extended senses of its own) for the core tramp-culture “catamite” sense of gunsel, giving the etymology “Anglo-Irish gossoon; ult. Irish garsuin, a boy, a lad.”
The Australian sense of gunsel seems approximately synonymous with BrEng “anorak,” which is one of very few lexemes more common in BrEng than AmEng whose ultimate etymology runs back to Proto-Inuit (*atnuʀaaq, via Greenlandic annoraaq).
to me, 1995 seems late for “bag of dicks”, but perhaps it didn’t break the mouth/page barrier til around then.
how did that not make it in until 2025?
Many items on the list made me ask the same question, mostly compounds: bagless, batteryless, beat-down, busy bee, glue gun, glue stick, good-heartedly, graph paper, grim-faced, groundbreaker, hidden depths, hitchhiking, hitmaker, holy fool, HR, J-stroke, Louisiana French, menstruation hut, sinking ship, and others; but also Baghdadi and Hermeticism.
Scottish hoaching ‘swarming, thronging, crowded; (figurative) turbulent’ is lovely.
It is indeed; I had missed it, so thanks. It’s from hotch ‘To move or progress jerkily up and down, to jog; to shift about with discomfort or impatience; to fidget; to swarm; (of a place) to be crowded or thronged’ (1997 “I hear the rigs are hoaching with dope. Did you ever see any?” I. Rankin, Black & Blue 186), from French hocher. Cites:
There are lots of others (again, typically compounds) that are much older than I am, such as “Dutch-American” and “Four Horsemen.”
They date “Daisy Dukes” to 1992, which is quite a while ago now, but I can’t say that’s too late. The earliest example in Green’s is from 1993, and when I was in high school a decade earlier than that both the garment and the tv-show character were well-known but the latter’s name had not as best as I recall been applied to the former even though the association was obvious. I’m not sure what the garment was called (if you wanted to differentiate unusually short “shorts” from generic “shorts”). “Hot pants” had a somewhat dated hippie-era sound by then, and I think also presupposed a fabric other than denim.
as of 1957, “short shorts” (i’ve always assumed “short-shorts”, but apparently not); and more particularly for denim but with less specificity as to length, “cut-offs” (to me, the semantics are bimodal, with shorter-than-the-hip-pockets and just-above-the-knee being equally central to the meaning).
The 1957 “Short Shorts” song had an antique “Happy Days” (and/or Dr. Demento?) sort of vibe for my generation of teens, but OTOH it was routinely featured (not in the original Royal Teens recording) in tv ads for Nair, which was and perhaps still is a hair-removal product potentially relevant to female wearers of skimpier-than-usual clothing.
Re rozele’s hyphen-assumption, there seems to be a 2007 NYT story headlined “Depilatory Market Moves Far Beyond the Short-Shorts Wearers.”
But there it’s a modifier, so would have a hyphen in any case.
To me, cut-offs are jeans shortened by scissors (presumably after the rest of them is worn out). Daisy Dukes are short cut-offs worn specifically by women, never by men, gay or straight. Short-shorts (I go with rozele; it’s a plural noun, not an adjective+noun compound) include extra-short cutoffs, but also shorts manufactured like that to begin with, of denim or a similar fabric. Hot pants are of a similar length to short-shorts, but are made of a thinner fabric, and cut to be form-fitting and tight throughout.
The “hot poverty” style goes back to Daisy Mae of Li’l Abner and far beyond.
Re gonsel,
גענזעל
is the only Yiddish form I find online, i.e., the expected form with umlaut, although Gansel (without umlaut) is a surname. Is there an eastern dialect which undid umlaut but is not represented in the texts I have seen online?
First OED cites for hot pants in the sense ‘Very tight, brief shorts worn by women’:
In the sense ‘Lustful, having a strong sexual appetite; sexually aroused’ it goes all the way back to 1927 (“When you had him all hot pants you married him” K. Nicholson, Barker ii. ii. 112).
Cites for short shorts:
Gotta love “‘Oh,’ said the senator. ‘Short shorts.’”
“Leftist Trainspotting” blog that was very useful on the splitting and lumping of u.k. sectarian parties, for those of us who find that sort of thing fascinating)
@rozele:
No doubt you are familiar with
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/sullivan/As-soon-as-this-pub-closes.pdf
I did not immediately recognize the allusion in the title of the historical pamphlet to which David E. linked, but thanks to the wonders of the internet I am now better-informed. https://www.unionsongclub.co.uk/lyrics/lyrics03.html
The taxonomic description offered is several decades old so I hope that by now the lack of any Hoxhaites and/or devotees of Comrade Gonzalo Thought has been rectified.
Ah, that’s a fine song — thanks for digging it up.
@DE: i’d seen excerpts, but not the full zine! what a tour de force!
@JWB: may i offer you an update? (to the song, not the zine) (also now a few decades old)
(parenthetically, i was just talking with a younger friend about the leninist tendency to operate in the name of the grandfather, and to elide the name of the father – “marxist” meaning “leninist”, “marxist-leninist” meaning maoist, “marxist-leninist-maoist” meaning “gonzagoist”, etc. i have no intention of reading more lévi-strauss unless sorely provoked, but i feel like he ought to have something to say, even from beyond the grave, on the subject.)
@rozele: it just goes to show you that everyone who isn’t an overtly self-identified Hoxhaist lacks theoretical rigor. Or perhaps rigour, depending on what Albanian-English translation software they use.
I appreciate the song link, although I note that blaming a “negro” for the failure of the Revolution to manifest is itself part of a venerable tradition running back to at least the Last Poets c. 1970 and possibly much further to some radical cell trying to figure out whether Pres. Coolidge’s exercise of executive clemency in favor of Marcus Garvey was a trick of some sort.
FWIW, the only hits in the google books corpus prior to 1995 for “bag of dicks” are obviously-self-published volumes with a corrupted-metadata publication year of 1900, several of which (maybe all of which if you put in more time than I have …) were pretty likely written well after 1999. By contrast, you can find genuine hits for “sack of shit” published prior to 1970 and maybe (this would require more due diligence and quality control on my part) prior to 1960.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Sack
“Sad Sack is an American comic strip and comic book character created by Sgt. George Baker during World War II. …. The title was a euphemistic shortening of the military slang “sad sack of shit”, common during World War II.”
Archive.org full-text search is often better for slang than GBooks, especially since it includes more lowbrow and independent publications. Anne Enright’s The Portable Virgin (Ireland, 1991) has “I wouldn’t go near her with a bag of dicks.” The next-recent source is a 1995 Maximumrocknroll.
Jenny Mollen’s I Like You Just the Way I Am (U.S., 2014) has “Tell this guy to eat a hundred-calorie pack of dicks.” This is the earliest instance I found of the collocation, not referring to a group of detectives.
I wonder what qualifies a collocation to have its own entry. “Bag of dicks”, “glue gun”, “hidden depths”, etc., strike me as transparent combinations.
Interesting. I would have guessed that ‘infested with small creatures’ was the primary meaning of ‘hoaching’, and that being crowded with other things was an extension (like ’emmet’), but the OED doesn’t give that sense at all.
The DSL says 5. To swarm, to be infested, to seethe, to be overrun (with), to abound; fig. to be in a ferment, to be angry., but although the first quote is about headlice (Lnk. a.1779 D. Graham Writings (1883) II. 106: Our Sannock’s head is a’ hotchen, and our John’s is little better.) the second already sounds figurative.
wikipedia gives “Awurudda” (or more fully Aluth Awurudda) for what the OED has as Avurudu. Google translate transliterates අවුරුද්ද as “avurudda” although gives its general meaning as just “year.” The OED does have recent examples from English-language Sri Lankan newspapers with its preferred spelling. I don’t know if there’s just a lot of random variation because of lack of standardization in transliterating Sinhalese, or whether different romanized spellings have as it were factional connotations.
It looks like “Puthandu” (no doubt also existing in various romanized spellings) is what the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka observes on the same day.
RE: “Anglo-Dutch, adj.: ‘Of, belonging to, or involving both England (or Britain) and Holland (or the Netherlands)’”
Holland and the Netherlands are not the same thing, nor are England and Britain. Anglo-Dutch mostly is used to refer to the nations Britain and the Netherlands, for example, “Shell, the Anglo-Dutch petroleum company.”
To quote wikitionary’s usage note: “Outside the Netherlands, and even sometimes in the Netherlands itself, the term _Holland_ often refers to the Netherlands as a whole. This use is often regarded as incorrect by Dutch people and may sometimes be considered insensitive, especially by residents of the other provinces of the Netherlands. It is somewhat similar to referring to the United Kingdom as ‘England’. In the context of sports matches, people from the Netherlands do often use Holland themselves for the country as a whole.” So perhaps the “Anglo-Dutch” definition is trying to capture that metonymic and controversial sense of “Holland.” And/or that metonymic and controversial sense of “England.” Of course using “the Netherlands” to refer to only part of the once-synonymous “Low Countries” can lead to other possibilities of confusion.
Here in the former New Amsterdam, the posh-to-nerdy society for the descendants of the original settlers has the metonymic-or-narrow-scope name. (I would qualify for membership but have never felt sufficiently incentivized to deal with the paperwork.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_Society_of_New_York
It’s interesting that with Belgian independence, the new nation-state chose a very old ethnonym for the country. A more natural-seeming choice might have been Flanders, although it obvious why that wasn’t chosen in light of the country’s cultural division.
Why not go the Macedonia route and call the country Burgundy?
Threads combine once again. Lloegyr, mentioned recently in a thread I can’t currently lay my hands on, is described in a wikipedia footnote as ‘that part of ancient Britain, which was inhabited by the Belgians, properly speaking’.
Well, “Walloon” and “Welsh” are supposed to be synonyms (at a sufficiently high level of generality …), so that should get you some Belgians amongst the ancient Britons right there. Or vice versa. I recently had the experience of an online auto-translation of a news story in Dutch about a long-ago Belgian political-corruption scandal* explaining to me in English that both Flemish and Welsh office-holders had been implicated in it. A glitch, some would say, but perhaps one revealing a deeper truth?
*L’affaire Agusta, alias het Agustaschandaal.
saith the Holland Society, introducing the surname list they use (dated january 1992): “For the purposes of this list, Flemish have been referred to as Dutch and Walloons as French.” no amount of pluckiness, it seems, will save a civic-nationalist belgian from partition.
i’ve got some ancestral surnames on the list, but like JWB i can’t really imagine doing that paperwork any more than i can the version the D.A.R. use (who i suspect would be more fun to troll, if i felt like joining a far right organization to do that).
@rozele: the way to minimize (relatively if not absolutely) paperwork burden is to have a comparatively recent ancestor who was a member and did the paperwork documenting their own descent – that way you only have to trace to her/him not all the way back to the qualifying ur-ancestor of the 18th or 17th century. So e.g. if either of my daughters wanted to join the D.A.R. they could just do so by documenting linkage to their paternal grandmother’s paternal grandmother (1873-1968, I think – there’s a photo of me as a very small person seated on her very ancient lap), because her file in the D.A.R. archives covers the more distant and harder-to-document-from-scratch links back to the actual ending-in-1783 A.R. In that particular chain. There are plenty of other chains of descent they could truthfully claim through me but I don’t know of any others where you wouldn’t have to go farther back to connect with what they’ve already got on file.
I don’t know of an ancestor of mine in the Holland Soc’y. Although that same great-grandmother of mine (among others) could have qualified unless perhaps it was still an all-male affair in her lifetime. (It started all-male in 1885 and most recently loosened membership criteria in 2021, but I don’t off-hand know all the intermediate steps.) If that wasn’t the issue than I suspect it was more that it was always just an NYC-area thing than a national thing and she never really lived in or super-close to NYC.
those D.A.R. stud books are amazing – i’ve found some great historical gossip in there! as far as i know*, though, nobody in my direct line’s ever been interested in joining either organization, so the legwork would be substantial.
.
* which is a bit limited on account of my great-grandmother having fled the burned-over district for greenwich village as soon as she’d read everything in her hometown’s carnegie library – i only met her a few times, but she made a vivid impression even 70ish years later.
@rozele: It should be “dam books,” surely. And I heartily encourage you to go for the hazard-class trolling of joining the D. A. R.
(My daughter also has a great-great grandmother who was in the D. A. R.)
it should, but the “of the revolution” part means that what matters is your great^n-grandfather, and whether he is documented to have toted a musket under the pine tree flag (or local equivalent).
wikipedia gives “Awurudda” (or more fully Aluth Awurudda) for what the OED has as Avurudu. Google translate transliterates අවුරුද්ද as “avurudda” although gives its general meaning as just “year.”
Sinhala අවුරුද්ද avurudda is the nominative/oblique singular, ‘year’. (The oblique of inanimate nouns, like avurudda, is the same as the nominative.) Sinhala අවුරුදු avurudu is the base form of the same noun, and the nominative/oblique plural of inanimate nouns is usually (always?) identical to the base. I think the paradigm for this noun would run as follows:
(In constructions that require an animate noun to be in the genitive case, an inanimate noun is put into the locative case.)
The base form is also the form taken by the modifying element in nominal composition, as in අලුත් අවුරුදු උත්සව alut avurudu utsava ‘New Year celebrations’, or in the අලුත් අවුරුදු උදාව alut avurudu udāva ‘New Year dawn’ (‘dawn of the New Year’) given in the etymology section of the OED entry. Such nominal composition is very productive in Sinhala and is of general and extensive use, on the order of English and German and Greek and Sanskrit. I suspect that English avurudu ‘the first day of the Sinhala and Hindu New Year, occurring on the spring equinox; a period of celebration marking the start of the Sinhala and Hindu New Year, typically lasting for seven to ten days’ (as the OED defines the word) is extracted from compounds like those above.
From the OED New Words list that was linked to…
The etymology of Australian Aboriginal English Balanda is interesting! The topic of Makasarese loanwords in Australian languages has come up before at LH, here and I think elsewhere.
Another new OED entry from Sinhala is watalappam ‘In Sri Lankan cookery: a custard made from coconut milk (or sometimes condensed milk), cashew nuts, eggs, and spices such as cardamom and cloves, sweetened with jaggery and traditionally eaten by Sri Lankan Muslims during celebrations marking the end of Ramadan.’ The OED’s etymology:
I wonder if this is just ultimately ‘cup-custard’ (i.e. ‘custard cooked in a cup or bowl’) like English cupcake, and the first element is actually colloquial and regional Tamil வட்டல் vaṭṭal ‘cup, bowl, plate’, literary Tamil வட்டில் vaṭṭil (cf. Kannada ಬಟ್ಟಲು baṭṭalu ‘bowl, etc.’). On the ultimate origin of vaṭṭal, perhaps cf. *varta-² ‘circular object’ or more prob. ‘something made of metal’ in Turner.
‘something made of metal’ – a funny gloss. The only word with a similar meaning I can think of is Russian železʲáka < želézo ‘iron’.
I wonder if this is just ultimately ‘cup-custard’ (i.e. ‘custard cooked in a cup or bowl’) like English cupcake,
By the way, English has cup custard.
The etymology of Australian Aboriginal English Balanda is interesting!
It is indeed!
Those final details on the consonants are fascinating, and wouldn’t have been included in a paper version.
cup custard
How did I mess up my link?
The pronunciation page gives BrE /ˈbaləndə/
BAL-uhn-duh, AmE /ˈbɑləndə/ BAH-luhn-duh. The difference is reflected in the recordings, where the /l/ has the higher pitch of the stressed syllable in BrE but not in AmE. That’s a distinction I have not accustomed myself to hearing. TIL, as they say.
It’s interesting that with Belgian independence, the new nation-state chose a very old ethnonym for the country.
IIRC the country was set up by the Brits to annoy the French. The name was probably picked because it was ethnically neutral. I’ve seen New Netherlands called “Novum Belgium” on a 17th-century map.
the new nation-state chose a very old ethnonym for the country
Like Mali and Ghana (in the latter case, the original was also hundreds of miles away …)
“Zimbabwe” seems to be rather like calling the UK “Stonehenge.” Not a bad idea, maybe …
Or Benin, for another (not quite so) old and distant name taken for a country. The motivation for Ghana to change its name is pretty clear—since Gold Coast characterizes it from the point of view of outside exploiters. I don’t know, in the case of Mali, whether there was a reasonable local term for (approximately) the region covered by the country; so it might have made a lot of sense to go back to the name of an earlier prominent West African empire. Benin made the same choice (going back to the name of an earlier empire, if again not a particularly local one), perhaps because Dahomey was eventually decided too closely associated with the particular French-conquered kingdom of that name.
I don’t know, in the case of Mali, whether there was a reasonable local term for (approximately) the region covered by the country
Yes: “Mali” is actually a perfectly good name for the modern republic, which matches the old empire quite well in its extension.
In my dialect – not Yiddish, but closely related to one of its main inputs – diminutives generally trigger so-called secondary umlaut: /ɒ/ turning not into /e/, but into /a/. (In MHG terms: /ɑ/ turning not into /e/, but into /æ/. In Standard German today, these are not distinguished, it’s /a/ to /ɛ/ either way.) So, Gans – Gänschen/Gänslein comes out as /gɒns/ – /gansl̩/.
Viennese mesolect has tons of such diminutives that lack umlaut synchronically because they’re imported from Viennese dialect with this /a/ unchanged.
That was driven to comedic heights: the king is roi des Belges, king of the ethnic Belgae of 2000 years earlier.
Making Leopold* king of the Belgians (under whatever name) freed Parliament from the expense of paying him a lifelong pension. And making a member of the British royal family king emphasized the British commitment to protect Belgian independence.
* Not the horrible one.