Words you don’t often see now.

BlueBelle: I made exactly the same mistake in younger company a few years ago when I happened to say, “Everyone has a gloryhole!”
Cue much smirking and giggling from DS and DSIL2! And a distraught exclamation of, “Mum!” from DD2!

To call someone a square
Pullover..as in a jumper
Tank top..sleeveless jumper,woolen waistcoat

To call someone a bean pole.. meaning they were very thin

Also saying a tranny meaning a transistor radio( in the eighties)

Parlour.

Swinging and Dodgy

Cavorting! I used the word yesterday and my DH said it was such an old-fashioned word that no-one uses it anymore. I still find it quite descriptive!

Gloryhole to me still means cupboard under the stairs.

I lived on the coast as a child, we didn't say we were going to the beach but going on the sands.
Roll on was a girdle not a deodorant

I have never heard this word again but I remember my Dad when I was very young calling me a 'little twerp'.
Hope it never had a bad meaning, I was always well behaved. Honest.

My mum used to say she was jiggered, meaning tired out.

Wazzam

I have never heard this word again but I remember my Dad when I was very young calling me a 'little twerp'.
Hope it never had a bad meaning, I was always well behaved. Honest.

He was most likely saying it in a light-hearted way, as in "ya daft so-and-so". I doubt for one minute it will have been said with any malice whatsoever.

Which reminds me, I haven't heard 'daft 'apeth' for years. I heard it regularly at home as a kid.

Anorak
Great coat ( often referred to in Jane Austen's time but never heard now).
Corsets
Shoe horn
Inkwell
Blue stocking

Courting

Winching ( came from the word wenching) as in courting

fancyflowers

Anorak
Great coat ( often referred to in Jane Austen's time but never heard now).
Corsets
Shoe horn
Inkwell
Blue stocking

I bought my first ever shoe horn just recently, to help with a pair of particularly stiff trailers. Game changer.

Trainers, not trailers!

Housecoat. When I looked up the definition AI described a dressing gown but this is not what it was.MiL had one that was far more practical than a dressing gown and was worn over clothes (a bit like an overall with buttons)to do household jobs. Perhaps she made it herself?

Bluebell....couldn't stop laughing, going to use it tonight on my grandkids with a straight face

Pearl necklace is another with a dodgy meaning now!

A neighbour who pretends to be posh often uses 'sufficient' and 'perspiration'

Galoshes. (Have I spelt that right?)

Enid Blyton always had people wearing them. Why didn’t they have wellies, I wondered?

Charlie’s dead 😵 ( petticoat showing)

NittWitt

A lot of apparently innocent expressions had reprehensible origins.
Quite right to correct her on cutlery! 😁

At work, a few years ago, a young woman didn't know what a dozen was.

A few years ago, I was giving a seven-year-old beginner a piano lesson. The little piece he was playing was a counting song, which finished with the words: “nineteen, twenty, that’s a score.” I asked him if he knew what a score was, which he didn’t, so explained that it was an old-fashioned word for the number twenty. I went on to say that there were other words for numbers: dozen for twelve and gross for 144. He thought this was very interesting. When his mother came to collect him at the end of his lesson, the first thing he said to her was “in the olden days….” 😅

We used the words twerp and twit interchangeably when I was a child. I still say fortnight and twice.

Some words and phrases I think are not used very often are:

Ninny, cubby hole, gumption, good grief, oh, my giddy aunt, gosh, flipppingheck, dishy.

Also, if used to be common to hear people talking about five-and-twenty past or five-and-twenty to the hour - often the same people who referred to the wireless. There are very few references to bachelors and spinsters these days, either.

polomint

To call someone a bean pole.. meaning they were very thin

Tranny had another meaning but is not used either way very often now. In the eighties, we used to say AC/DC to mean someone who was bisexual and how often do we hear bats for the other side these days? I think we used euphemisms a lot more in the past.