Historical Slang; A Study in Butt Synonyms
Do you long for historically accurate slang in your fanfictions? Do you want to know whether to call your OC’s butt a ‘roby douglas’ or a ‘crupper’?’
Green’s Dictionary of Slang is your friend! If you’re a purist for paper copies you can shell out a cool ~$800 for all three volumes. If you’re literally anyone else you can use the entire thing online for free. It’s basically Urban Dictionary for history (but with sources).
I may or may not name my firstborn after this bad boy.
Why is this monster of a historical database significant? Let me tell you. This thing’s search engine is gold. You can search by word meaning, headword, source, time period, etymology, and usage. This is sexy stuff. You know why? Because I can do this.
Every little tally up there is a different instance of usage in published historical text. I can read each quotation complete with source, country of use, and year of publication. I can also use this to sort between 1800 and 1899 to find the exact usage of “butt” I want. This is important - if you’re anal AF and want your historical fanfic to be as accurate as possible (even though literally no one else cares aside from all two of us), you can.
Say we want to talk about butts in our writing. Our story is set in 1899. You pop over to this search engine and sit down to see what’s what.
You can see that around 1882 in England the word changes to mean the butt of a cigarette rather than buttocks, as they were before. Around the turn of the century you can see using “butt” to talk about buttocks becomes the norm again, pretty much all over the world. In 1918 in Australia we can see the definition expands again to now also include it as a definition for the end of a prison sentence in. In 1943 in the USA it means the end of an enlistment period.
Well that’s not helpful for our purpose today. I guess we could still use the word “butt” in our boy-love fanfic set in 1899, but what else can we use? Let’s go back to our sexy, sexy historical thesaurus.
LOOK AT ALL THESE HISTORICALLY ACCURATE WORDS WE CAN USE TO DESCRIBE BUTTS.
We are wealthy, folks. Blessed in the ways of the internet. Go forth and shower the world in historically accurate butt synonyms.
