A mudslide in Enniskillen uncovered last night an unsuspected archive dating from St Columba’s time which revealed more Gaelic, Saxon and Icelandic gerunds and rare nouns on faded parchments dedicated to ribald gossip from Arthurian, Plantagenet, and even post-Tudor eras.
Among these were ‘crabb’, a pubic irritant of the mighty which in the time of Henry VIII the Master of the King’s Stool would on Queen Katharine’s orders add to the monarch’s nether bristles during his morning anal ablutions in order to infect, some say, his mistress Anne Boleyn with what became known as ‘the annabel’, a pustulant sore which Wolsey held to be God’s wrath on beautiful, adulterous red-headed women; ‘shanahan’, a tedious, bumbling lackey of low peasant origins keen and able to say over and over what his master had said the day before as if it were his own opinion, the term becoming synonymous in King John’s time with ‘unwelcome grovelling social climber at the Hunt, forever falling off his horse’; similarly, ‘muldoon’, a sort of hectic stowaway, ofttimes clutching the king’s stirrup and dragged thus willy-nilly on his journeys; ‘akerman’, a venemous toad-like swamp creature distinguished by the ugliness of its nocturnal mutterings, a term that in Queen Anne’s time became slang for ‘ugly Dutchman wanting sex at inconvenient hours’; ‘savva’, a pretense of being informed or ‘in the know’ among elderly chambermaids reputed to have serviced a monarch forty years before on two occasions; or, in pre-Norman times, the smug and lofty demeanour of one who affects to have mastered Latin and Greek and can barely get by in pidgin; and ‘salusinski’, in the original Polish, one addicted to salacious fabrication who hopes to rise in the king’s court by describing the bed-tricks of the king’s mistress to his queen and is thereafter amazed to find himself with his own testicles in his mouth awaiting the fall of the headsman’s axe; or, in the underworld slang of medieval Gdansk, a sexually boastful eunuch, a drunkard who preaches against strong drink, a Pope with a love-child, a railer against brothels with a gold pass to twins on Thursday night, a thundering hypocrite, in short, often underpaid for his turbulent midnight iniquities.
Further discoveries will be posted as the surviving sodden manuscripts are dried out and decrypted. The difficult Old Gaelic word ‘cassidy’, which may or may not mean ‘impressive rock-like false oracle with chin of clay’ is undergoing further study.
Name:
Cost/’ello, the imaginary price a nation must pay for greeting the early retirement of one with an overreaching ambition and a small crepuscular heart. Lacking testicles, usage: “Look how he smirks, despite his lacking a pair of Costello’s.” “Two brothers one pair of Costello’s”.
New usage: a crumpled ink faded note carried in a valise or wallet for more years than one would care to remember. I’ve got change of a twenty and a Costello. adjective Empty Promise.
hockey : unlike the game played with sticks and balls, this middle eastern variation has neither.
The wikipedia entry ends by describing it as “a loosehead prop”, and many would agree.