once-common words people don’t use anymore

I get irrationally irritated when I see people claim that "ope" is a thing which is hilarious because... I totally say it irl?

I've never typed it in my life, as far as I can remember. Definitely a verbal exclamation that doesn't map to writing in my brain

I think I'd type "oops" or "welp" instead, which are probably just as laden with cultural weight

i kept "y'all" in my vocabulary after moving away from kentucky - well before it became a preferred form of gender neutral address, it was a regular part of my vocabulary.

I feel like y'all stopped being a Southern thing in the late '80s when LA rappers started popularizing it.

Did "whiz" stop being a euphemism for urination after the 70s, or is it just that I grew out of the age range that uses the term?

i'm personally very fond of "naff", which i saw being used on usenet back in the '90s and has stuck with me.

Very 70s UK.

I just saw the word “toper” for drunkard. I don’t know it’s ever been common, but ngram suggests some dropoff since uh, 1900 with brief relative spike in early 00s. Stay current, moralists and boozers.

I think I'd type "oops" or "welp" instead, which are probably just as laden with cultural weight

― mh

see, i think of "welp" as being specifically the midwestern word for "i am going to take my leave now"

i remember saying "i'm gonna take a whiz" when i was growing up in the '80s, so it lasted at least that long. i don't know what the slang term for micturition is now. i think it's just "piss"?

I have a friend who still uses 'whiz'. 'Slash' is just as popular as ever. No-one under 60 says 'leak' or refers to 'breaking the seal'.

A lot of words we used for a foolish person when I was a kid appear to have fallen out of use, or at least, I never hear anyone use them IRL *or* on TV.

Pillock, twit, wally, prat - that kind of thing.

... a Jimmy Riddle. Seriously though, does anyone do rhyming slang anymore?

I just saw the word “toper” for drunkard

Funnily I have too, as the solution to a crossword clue in the Observer.

Re: rhyming slang, no, probably not, apart from 'butcher's' for a look and a number of words where they don't realise that it is, e,g
'Cobblers' (awls = balls)

when we were kids we would drink koolaid all day and then gather round the ol pepole and just whizz and whizz
― cinniblount (James Blount), Tuesday, April 27, 2004 2:00 PM bookmarkflaglink

pate

words I like that are still in use: mull, hull, cull

null, sully

ruly (the words above are words I like that are still in use)

"i'm personally very fond of "naff", which i saw being used on usenet back in the '90s and has stuck with me."

In the UK naff is indelibly associated with Princess Anne, who was quoted at least once asking photographers to naff off. You have to pronounce it narf orf. It's hard to explain Princess Anne for a US audience.

Naff is one of those words that's still used in print frequently. Albeit that it's mostly used in the "shoddy" sense, e.g. "that's a bit naff". For example this headline from last year:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jul/26/bring-it-all-back-why-naff-noughties-pop-is-suddenly-cool-again

I use it every so often, in a self-conscious way. I would never use it sincerely, though, e.g. if I had to tell someone that their son had been hit by a car and killed. I would say "it was well minging" instead.

Also super, as in "he was super serious" or "this is super simple", seemed to peak a few years ago, but it has been a while since I last saw it deployed in anger. I've always thought that it sounded patronising, as if you were lecturing a small child.

Guy at work had an operation on his eye and said it had left him with a shiner - a word I don't recall hearing in a very long time.

He needed to put a steak on it! Or possibly just some ice, but a cut of meat has more of a Bash Street Kids feel to it.

You have to pronounce it narf orf.

neff orf iirc.

In the UK naff is indelibly associated with Princess Anne

not sure about this tbh. first I've heard of it anyway

I still say naff but I've never said 'naff off'

I also say 'infra dig' but feel more conscious about this.

https://naffco54.com/

Naff was always more common than naff off. In fact wasn't naff off invented by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to replace fuck off in "Porridge"?

Yes, but coming back to rhyming slang they popularised berk as well. Naff's origins are in polari I think.

They certainly didn't popularize berk, berk was always popular! Instead they came up with "nerk", which never really took off.

berk is rhyming slang, short for berkshire hunt

(tho i guess nerk is also rhyming slang) (rhymes with berk)

in the early 90s there was a popular clothing brand called "Naf Naf" and I could not understand how it was fashionable at school to wear clothes that literally said "naff" on the front.

Yes and Naff Co 54, which I posted. It explains they were big in the 90s and relaunched in 2018...
There was a stupid rhyme at our school about it.

berk is rhyming slang, short for berkshire hunt

was originally Berkeley hunt

'Peevish' seems to continue its decades long decline, which is unfortunate as nothing else comes close

don’t be surprised if “Gee whiz, I’m feeling peevish” is on its way to becoming the hot new slang for micturition (a word I learned today) somewhere in the Anglosphere this very moment.

i saw a pic today of someone from their "fragrance launch" and started to wonder if anybody uses "fragrance launch" as a euphemism for farting

lol

Guy at work had an operation on his eye and said it had left him with a shiner - a word I don't recall hearing in a very long time.

― Eavis Has Left the Building (Tom D.)

you say "shiner" i'll say "bock"

I still use "welp" as campy shrug, like "anyhoo," but less irritating hopefully, although think the heyday of "welp" was maybe 2014, when I first went on Twitter, is that right?
Do people still say "hurl" meaning "puke"? I'm a hurlin' churl, sometimes.

moue

"in the early 90s there was a popular clothing brand called "Naf Naf" and I could not understand how it was fashionable at school to wear clothes that literally said "naff" on the front."

That reminded me of SMEG, the homeware manufacturer. I remember seeing a window display of some neat-looking kettles - they were ace - but the design was ruined by the SMEG logo. It's apparently an acronym for Smalterie Metallurgiche Emiliane Guastalla. I can't imagine storing mayonnaise in a fridge with SMEG on the front. Or pouring boiling water into a cup of mac and cheese if the kettle has a SMEG logo.

The thing is that I don't remember smeg, smeghead etc actually being a real insult when I was young, in the 1980s. Smeghead was invented for Red Dwarf, and I can remember seeing that show when it was brand new. I always had the impression it was supposed to mimic rudeness but in 1988 "smeg" was pretty odd (the substance is smegma), so it sounded less rude to the producers at the BBC than it sounded to the audience.

Does that make sense? e.g. one episode of Fawlty Towers begins with the hotel's sign re-arranged so that it says "flowery twats", which is obviously really rude nowadays, but in 1975 twat was pretty obscure. Not just the word but the actual thing. It very rarely appeared on television. You could still talk about "twatting someone about the head" in the 1980s without it sounding rude. Nowadays that would mean hitting someone on the head with a vagina, but in the 1980s it just meant hitting someone with a newspaper or a paper cup or something.

Git, that's another insult that doesn't get used a lot nowadays. There's a wealth of British slang from the 1970s and 1980s that has been largely forgotten today, partially because it was crap, partially because the internet tends to document US slang instead (e.g. "gag me with a spoon", "totally", "grody to the max") as if that was a universal constant, and partially because we're talking about subcultures of an objectively very small culture that no longer had a global reach outside a few small contexts. One of which was rock music, but the few British acts that played up their Britishness - most obviously Madness - didn't have much cultural clout outside the UK.

But perhaps there's a whole generation of people in Egypt and India who grew up with "Night Boat to Cairo" and "One Step Beyond". Who knows.

First of all you tell us "naff" is indelibly associated with Princess Anne and now "twat" was obscure in 1975. I think your imagination is getting the better of you.

Grody rules. No “to the max” reqd.

Pretty sure I first heard what'twat' meant at uni in 1989 or 1990. 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.

I've just remembered it's actually used in "Blazing Saddles"!

"Right foul git" was used in a Harry Potter movie

Sounds like an anagram.

Fanny, minge, radge, snatch, axe wound...anything but twat.

--Johnny Cash, "A Boy Named Twat"

lol

clunge

good story (which some probably know) abt the variable knownness of the word "twat" down the centuries (via etymonline of course)

The T-word occupies a special niche in literary history, however, thanks to a horrible mistake by Robert Browning, who included it in 'Pippa Passes' (1841) without knowing its true meaning. 'Then owls and bats,/Cowls and twats,/Monks and nuns,/In a cloister's moods.' Poor Robert! He had been misled into thinking the word meant 'hat' by its appearance in 'Vanity of Vanities,' a poem of 1660, containing the treacherous lines: 'They'd talk't of his having a Cardinalls Hat,/They'd send him as soon an Old Nuns Twat.' (There is a lesson here about not using words unless one is very sure of their meaning.) [Hugh Rawson, "Wicked Words," 1989]

I first heard it in the late 60s, when mum and dad -- then young adults -- were giggling with one another bcz one of them (almost certainly mum) had said it in my hearing, so they thought, and they had to explain what it meant (poorly explained iirc) and why it was bad for me to say. somehow unlike my mum and my sister i didn't swear much at all as a youngun so i guess the second element they achieved…

then at school as a teen i began hearing it again, used as a mocking insult one lad at another rather than the old nun sense above. curiously at school it was always said to rhyme with "hat" whereas mum and dad said it to rhyme with "squat"…

etymonline also has a strong story abt git, from 1706 in scotland, where one gregor burgess "protested against the said Allane that called him a witch gyt or bratt"

i'd like to know if browning ever realised his error tho

My dad also says it to rhyme with squat. I, like many other people I think, thought of it as akin to twit and didn’t learn THE TRUE MEANING till I went to university, I think.