You won't find these terms in the Urban Dictionary.

This week's quiz was taken mostly from Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1811 edition. It was a sort of Regency Urban Dictionary. With that link, we have now assured hundreds of gleefully wasted h2g2 hours.

Here are the answers.

1. In the Regency Period around 1800, 'hunting the squirrel' was a term for:
   
   • Playing chicken with carriages (We don't know the Regency term for 'road rage'.)
2. In the 17th and 18 centuries, Abram men were a public nuisance. What did they pretend?
   
   • To be insane (They pretended to be let out of the hospital on day passes, and annoyed people until they paid them to go away.)
3. Soldiers were often a source of bad public behaviour. Around 1800, what did a soldier mean by demanding his 'Act of Parliament'?
   
   • He wanted his free pint of beer (The Act of Parliament allotted them five pints of small beer per diem, to be served in pubs. This gives new meaning to 'supporting the troops'.)
4. Conversational bullies were around even before Faux News. What kind of conversation-grabbing technique was called 'firing a gun'?
   
   • Pretending to hear a gun in order to introduce a story about a gun (Forced topic changes were not invented by politicians during televised debates.)
5. We know people from the US are often called 'yankees'. In the US South, people from the North are called 'yankees'. But 'yankey' was a real insult in the 18th Century. What did it mean?
   
   • A country bumpkin (You know, the kind who thought a feather in his cap was 'macaroni'?)
6. Irish jokes may be revenge for something. In the 18th Century, some Irish called the English 'bugs'. What were they implying?
   
   • The English brought insects to Ireland (Yep: they got blamed for the bugs as well as the snakes.)
7. Criminality is certainly bad behaviour. What did a 'pad borrower' do that was illegal?
   
   • Stole your horse (Grand Theft Dobbin was a serious crime.)
8. Back in the 19th Century, people might have described some of these political ideas as being 'as queer as. . . ':
   
   • Dick's hatband (Nobody knows who Dick was, or what it was about his hatband, but there are people alive today who remember Greatuncle So-and-So saying this.)
9. Politicians this year have called each other many names. We will not repeat them here. But if one called the other a 'napper of naps', what would the politician be accused of?
   
   • Stealing sheep (Sheep rustling: the national menace.)
10. Fashion victims: unfortunate public behaviour of great antiquity. In the 1790s, if a male personage showed up sporting a 'Nazakene foretop', what exactly was on his head?
    
    • A wig that was supposed to make him look like Jesus (That's what the dictionary said. We are having trouble visualising this, but it sounds worse than a mullet.)

We're not sure whether all this means that people behaved worse back in 1800, or just had funnier terms for their bad behaviour. It does give us an idea involving a politician, a gag, and a time machine.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

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