once-common words people don’t use anymore

I think once you reach a certain age it’s harder to be a twerp. Elon Musk can still be a twerp and a twat. Kelvin MacKenzie is just a twat.

I was told a prat was a pregnant fish.

Twerp definitely much gentler* than twat, and essentially floats free of any meaning beyond 'a bit of a wally' (see also 'numpty').

*certainly when deployed by my mum.

tubular (Also, do you live in a country other than France that uses a comma as a decimal point? Do you know how this difference came to be?)

Does anyone say full stop anymore or was that just from the age of telegrams?

I used "full stop" at the end of an article last week!

https://www.stereogum.com/2191562/baroness-yellow-and-green-turns-10/reviews/the-anniversary/

Always assumed”twunt” was an ilx portmaneau, but now words don’t “mean” anything

i think twunt might come from b3ta or possibly before that. it's not from ilx though, just general UK internet

full stop is just British for period so yes it's used all the time

maiden/maid (the latter for anything other than a housecleaner, and even for that becoming less common).

You still hear maiden all the time if you're a cricket fan!

don't forget about twit

twit was roughly equivalent to dipshit afaik

There were plenty of slang words for pudenda that I would've used as a teenager. Fanny, minge, radge, snatch, axe wound...anything but twat.

^^^ revived by the first Avengers movie in 2012!

https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=all&q=facepalm

what happened to smdh. bring it back.

not come across a 429 error before. JUst got one there. So think I might need to start using an alternative to google.

lmao still hanging on but rofl is in really bad shape these days, sad to see. when was the last time someone even roflmaoed?

I miss pmsl which I thought had real potential but afaict it never spread much beyond UK teens on bebo and myspace

I am very glad the cutesy internet speak of late 00s / early 10s (interwebs etc) seems to be almost extinct though because that shit got unbearable for a while

I was struck by this article a couple of days in the newspaper about a feud between George Best and Bobby Charlton:
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/aug/10/the-feud-between-best-and-charlton-that-shattered-manchester-united

Quoth Bobby, "so many young people on the ‘scene’ have the attitude that nearly everything and ordinary people are ‘sick’. They behave as if the peak of senility is reached at the age of 25 and they must wring every drop out of life by then whether they offend other people or not.” (Bobby) goes on to attack those who insist on being “cool”, “gas” and “with it”."

It's interesting how "sick" has come full circle.

Did people use "vouchsafe"? Shakespeare loves it.

Reminds me of a Proust translation where the literal "He did not respond" became "He vouchsafed no answer" in English.

“beetling” to mean looming, jutting up etc most commonly used with eyebrows but have also read it in conjunction with hills, cliffs

Jordan Peterson seems to be the only person in the world who still says "up yours"

Not really the right thread but I couldn’t find a better one:

“Invincible” is pretty common word but in all my 43 years, despite being a big reader, I’ve never heard or seen the word “vincible” until today.

dasn’t

I love dasn’t, and talked about it on some other thread once. It was one of my grandma’s common admonishments.

Never heard of it. What does it mean? How was it used?

It’s a contraction of “dares not.” Grandma used to say, “you dasn’t do that!”

oh! i spell it like dursn't

ppl do still say durst (if they're pretending to be gandalf)

or dissing Christina Aguilara

time for an RIP Fetterman thread

Dasn't is a contraction of dare not [...] "Ah," you say, "but where in the world does that s come from?" Well, for one thing, dare had an old past tense form durst (still occurring in some dialects), and a second person singular present-tense form darst, pronounced (dairst).

'When you durst do it, then you were a man'.

lady macbeth pretending to be gandalf (the core of her motivation IMO)

I remember that previous thread with the mentions of dasn't! It seems to me I spoke up about remembering seeing it in "Tom Sawyer" or "Huckleberry Finn"

I don't hear about people getting "perturbed" anymore. I guess anything less than a seething rage isn't worth mentioning.

Yeah, I can't remember the last time I was properly miffed...

I'm in a constant state of miffage

“There, there.”

When I was a child, everyone knew what a chesterfield was.

Contraband

mien

“Blow”

as in “scram”

"Jive" had a good 10-year run, from roughly '75 to '85.

I said perturbed today! I wasn't angry or irked, just concerned in a way that made me feel frustrated. Was I using this word incorrectly?

My contribution to the thread: any variation on "hey, what's the big idea?" or "what is this, a gag?"

resolved to start saying "i daresay" instead of "i guess" or "i suppose"

it's been a long, long time since I heard anyone called a wally.

also hoping for a chance to tell someone "you can shove it up your jacksie"

gonna say that to the next wally i meet

Henpecked.

“Blow”

as in “scram”

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand)

hey buddy, go screw