Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day Eight

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

Autem

Not particularly a vulgar word, but this word was used between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries as a slang word, and rather informally and negatively, for a church. It’s not known, but the word may have been derived from Yiddish and the phrase ‘autem bawler’ is another word for a parson.