A cocktail is an alcoholic mixed drink. Most commonly, a cocktail is a combination of one or more spirits mixed with other ingredients, such as juices, flavored syrups, tonic water, shrubs, and bitters. Cocktails vary widely across regions of the world, and many websites publish both original recipes and their own interpretations of older and more famous cocktails.
Pierce Egan (1772–1849) was a British journalist, sportswriter, and writer on popular culture. His popular book Life in London, published in 1821, was adapted into the stage play Tom and Jerry, or Life in London later that year, which became the first play to have a continuous run of 100 performances in London while at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End.
A dozen is a grouping of twelve.
"Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face" is an expression used to describe a needlessly self-destructive overreaction to a problem: "Don't cut off your nose to spite your face" is a warning against acting out of pique, or against pursuing revenge in a way that would damage oneself more than the object of one's anger.
Welsh rarebit or Welsh rabbit is a dish consisting of a hot cheese-based sauce served over slices of toasted bread. The original 18th-century name of the dish was the jocular "Welsh rabbit", which was later reinterpreted as "rarebit", as the dish contains no rabbit. Variants include English rabbit, Scotch rabbit, buck rabbit, golden buck, and blushing bunny.
In Australia, a swag is a portable sleeping unit. It is normally a bundle of belongings rolled in a traditional fashion to be carried by a foot traveller in the bush. Before motor transport was common, foot travel over long distances was essential to agriculture in the Australian bush. It is sometimes referred to as a "backpack bed". Swags have been carried by shearers, miners, the unemployed, and many others, some of whom would have been happy to have been called swagmen and some not.
The Garrat Elections were a carnival of mock elections in Wandsworth, Surrey, England in the 18th century. The events were organized around 20 May and would see crowds of tens of thousands travelling five miles (8.0 km) from London to take part. The elections were held for at least fifty years before declining after the death of Mayor "Sir" Harry Dimsdale in 1796.
Francis Grose was an English antiquary, draughtsman, and lexicographer. He produced A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) and A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (1787).
Walking the plank was a method of execution practiced on special occasion by pirates, mutineers, and other rogue seafarers. For the amusement of the perpetrators and the psychological torture of the victims, captives were bound so they could not swim or tread water and forced to walk off a wooden plank or beam extended over the side of a ship.
A humbug is a person or object that behaves in a deceptive or dishonest way, often as a hoax or in jest. The term was first described in 1751 as student slang, and recorded in 1840 as a "nautical phrase". It is now also often used as an exclamation to describe something as hypocritical nonsense or gibberish.
A slang dictionary is a reference book containing an alphabetical list of slang, which is vernacular vocabulary not generally acceptable in formal usage, usually including information given for each word, including meaning, pronunciation, and etymology. It can provide definitions on a range of slang from more mundane terms to obscure sexual practices. Such works also can include words and phrases arising from different dialects and argots, which may or may not have passed into more common usage. They can also track the changing meaning of the terms over time and space, as they migrate and mutate.
Docking is the intentional removal of part of an animal's tail or, sometimes, ears. The term cropping is more commonly used in reference to the cropping of ears, while docking more commonly—but not exclusively—refers to the tail; the term tailing is used, also. The term has its origins in the living flesh of the tail, commonly known as the dock, from which the animal's tail hairs grow.
Figging is the practice of inserting a piece of skinned ginger root into the human anus in order to generate an acute burning sensation. Historically this was a method of punishment, but it has since been adopted as a practice of BDSM. The term "figging" comes from the 19th-century word "feaguing."
A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew is a dictionary of English cant and slang by a compiler known only by the initials B. E., first published in London c. 1698. With over 4,000 entries, it was the most extensive dictionary of non-standard English in its time, until it was superseded in 1785 by Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. B. E.'s New Dictionary was used as a source by many subsequent dictionaries.
The Ancient Noble Order of the Gormogons was a short-lived 18th century secret society formed by expelled Freemason Philip Wharton. It left no records or accomplishments to indicate its true goal and purpose. From the group's few published articles it is thought that the society's primary objective was to hold up Freemasonry to ridicule. During its brief existence it was accused of being a Jacobite-leaning group, perhaps because the first known Grandmaster was Andrew Michael Ramsay of Ayr, Scotland, a Jacobite of strong convictions. It also appears to have been a charitable organization, at least according to its surviving bylaws. There are also some surviving pendant badges, bearing their sign.
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words. By another definition, an idiom is a speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements. For example, an English speaker would understand the phrase "kick the bucket" to mean "to die" – and also to actually kick a bucket. Furthermore, they would understand when each meaning is being used in context.
Anilingus is an oral and anal sex act in which a person stimulates the anus of another by using the tongue and lips. It is also called anal–oral contact and anal–oral sex.
The tail of the horse and other equines consists of two parts, the dock and the skirt. The dock consists of the muscles and skin covering the coccygeal vertebrae. The term "skirt" refers to the long hairs that fall below the dock. On a horse, long, thick tail hairs begin to grow at the base of the tail, and grow along the top and sides of the dock. In donkeys and other members of Equus asinus, as well as some mules, the zebra and the wild Przewalski's horse, the dock has short hair at the top of the dock, with longer, coarser skirt hairs beginning to grow only toward the bottom of the dock. Hair does not grow at all on the underside of the dock.
Numerous procedures performed on domestic animals are usually more invasive than purely cosmetic alterations, but differ from types of veterinary surgery that are performed exclusively for urgent health reasons. Such procedures have been grouped together under the technical term 'mutilatory' by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in a report describing the reasons for their being conducted and their welfare consequences, and by others.
A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words is a dictionary of slang originally compiled by publisher and lexicographer John Camden Hotten in 1859.
