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Some slang becomes part of the American lexicon, while other words slip away over time. ... Slang used to describe: Clumsy person. In the late 19th century this was a “nice” way to say someone ...
A kludge or kluge (/ k l ʌ dʒ, k l uː dʒ /) is a workaround or makeshift solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend, and hard to maintain. This term is used in diverse fields such as computer science, aerospace engineering, Internet slang, evolutionary neuroscience, animation and government.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the 17th century, the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale. [8] The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person. [12]
While slang is usually inappropriate for formal settings, this assortment includes well-known expressions from that time, with some still in use today, e.g., blind date, cutie-pie, freebie, and take the ball and run. [2] These items were gathered from published sources documenting 1920s slang, including books, PDFs, and websites.
soft bread roll or a sandwich made from it (this itself is a regional usage in the UK rather than a universal one); in plural, breasts (vulgar slang e.g. "get your baps out, love"); a person's head (Northern Ireland). [21] barmaid *, barman a woman or man who serves drinks in a bar.
Before the 1980s, "airhead" was general American slang for a ditzy, clumsy or stupid person. [10] With the rise of the valley girl [11] and preppy subculture however, the term was applied to cheerleaders [12] and nouveau riche or middle class hangers-on who imitated the uptalk speech [13] and clothing of the upper class popular girls.
The Czech slang term levárna (roughly 'left business') denotes a suspicious, shady scheme or trickery. In French, droit(e) (cognate to English direct) means both 'right' and 'straight', as well as 'law' and the legal sense of 'right', while gauche means 'left' and is also a synonym of maladroit, literally 'not right', meaning 'clumsy'. Spanish ...
The term patois comes from Old French patois, 'local or regional dialect' [1] (originally meaning 'rough, clumsy or uncultivated speech'), possibly from the verb patoier, 'to treat roughly', from patte, 'paw', [2] from Old Low Franconian *patta, 'paw, sole of the foot', plus the suffix -ois.