Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day 112

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….

Dutch Feast

Another in the series of phrases, such as Dutch Concert, which were meant as insults against the Dutch, the dictionary defines this as “where the entertainer gets drunk before his guest”. Underlying the phrase was the typecasting of the Dutch as bad drunks, whereas perhaps the British at the time considered themselves as rather well-behaved drunks. The phrase was used from the late seventeenth century, but then had pretty much died out by the mid-nineteenth century.