Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Podsnappery

Now isn't podsnappery just the most delightful-sounding word you've seen in a while?

But what does it mean? Care to guess?

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According to this Mental Floss post, podsnappery is a bit o' Victorian slang describing a person who has a "willful determination to ignore the objectionable or inconvenient, at the same time assuming airs of superior virtue and noble resignation." 

Talk about specific!

Merriam-Webster Online defines it as "an attitude toward life marked by complacency and a refusal to recognize unpleasant facts." Podsnappery shows up on an Ngram plot with a peak around 1870 and appears 12 times in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (which also features a character named Podsnap).  In fact, according to Wiktionary, Dickens coined the word.

I guess I should make time to brush up on Dickens. Probably lots of Slang-o-rama possibilities lurking in those books...

The podsnapper-ish milieu of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
 https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14594577827/Source book page: https://archive.org/stream/ourmutualfriend00dick/ourmutualfriend00dick#page/n146/mode/1up, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43086366





 

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