Word Drops: A Sprinkling of Linguistic Curiosities by Paul Anthony Jones

Author:Paul Anthony Jones
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783961542
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

Pimpompet and bumdockdousse were seventeenth-century games whose only aim was apparently to kick other players in the backside.

Kickie-wickie is a Shakespearean word for ‘wife’.

A drachenfutter is a gift given by a husband to placate his wife. It literally means ‘dragon-feed’ in German.

Flapdragon is an old English parlour game in which players have to snatch raisins out of a pool of burning brandy.

[Flapdragon presumably dates back to Tudor England, if not earlier, and was traditionally played on Christmas Eve. Its earliest known references are all from Shakespeare, although unsurprisingly he chose to rework its meaning to refer figuratively to anything small or of little value (‘Thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon’, Love’s Labour’s Lost V.i), or to a sudden swallowing or engulfing (‘But to make an end of the ship: to see how the sea flap-dragon’d it’, The Winter’s Tale III. iii). Flapdragon remained popular right through to the Victorian era, by which time the word had morphed into ‘snapdragon’ and gained an accompanying chant, ‘The Song of the Snapdragon’, recorded in The Chambers Book of Days (1893):

Here he comes with flaming bowl,

Don’t he mean to take his toll,

Snip! Snap! Dragon!

Take care you don’t take too much,

Be not greedy in your clutch,

Snip! Snap! Dragon!]

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