Words you don’t often see now.

Bluebell said "I now would say ‘her cupboard under the stairs’ to avoid confusion with its new meaning".

My daughter would say the cupboard under the stairs 'has the decorators in' (for a female monthly event)!

Took grandson 5 to the pictures for the first time. He was puzzled because the auditorium wasn’t like a picture gallery, asked where all the pictures were. Older brother 8 said, “Just sit down there and be amazed!

😂
Bless his little cotton socks

Oreo

Splendid!
When did you last hear or see that word?

My son uses it!

He also says marvelous 😂😂

Jolly
Jaunty

Splendid!
When did you last hear or see that word?

Witzend

A really old one - ‘placket fastener’.

My maternal GM once told me that she’d stopped ‘walking out’ with a particular young man, because, ‘…he tried to get his hand down my placket fastener!’ 😂

The mind boggles😁

A really old one - ‘placket fastener’.

My maternal GM once told me that she’d stopped ‘walking out’ with a particular young man, because, ‘…he tried to get his hand down my placket fastener!’ 😂

Greenfinch

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?

I always thought a housecoat was a quilted nylon version of a dressing gown. With buttons.

Thus .
Spell check didn't know it but is getting the idea now.

Thrice and even Twice seems to be dwindling.

Bobby socks
Brothel creepers / beetle crushers

'in a jiffy'. An American friend of mine was surprised I used the word 'whilst'.

Lest! I don’t know where the ‘n’came from.

Since I’ve just seen it in a novel*, ‘nlest’.

*A Penelope Lively one, written a few decades ago.

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.

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.

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.

Charlie’s dead 😵 ( petticoat showing)

Galoshes. (Have I spelt that right?)

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

Pearl necklace is another with a dodgy meaning now!

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

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

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?

Trainers, not trailers!

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.

Winching ( came from the word wenching) as in courting