Here’s a long list of old slang words which the Art of Manliness bloggers think are “beyond awesome,” but still not appropriate or applicable enough to include in their book. (Thanks to SB for the link.) Words like these:
Muckender or sneezer: a handkerchief
“An idle and useless person is often told that he is only fit to lead the Blind Monkeys to evacuate.”
Barking-Iron or barker: a pistol
Bunch Of fives: a fist
Earth bath: a grave
Scandal-water: tea, meaning gossip is often discussed with busybodies over tea.
Wait, I have to look this up. Google has a dictionary of slang, jargon, and cant, edited by Albert Barrère and Charles Godfrey Leland, published 1890.
Scandal-water, according to this dictionary, is a derogatory word for tea devised by heavy drinkers who thought it was effeminate. It comes from the days “when it was fashionable to get drunk, when ‘drunk as a lord’ was a proverbial expression, when a man was accounted the best in a convivial company who first fell senseless from his chair by excess of liquor, and ‘a three-bottle man’ was considered a king of good fellows.” Barrère and Leland write, “the vulgar bacchanals exerted all the ingenuity they possessed to invent feebly contemptuous names for [tea], among others ‘cat-lap,’ ‘scandal broth,’ ‘water bewitched,’ ‘tattle water,’ ‘kettle-brandy.'”