Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day Forty-Six

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…..

To Bubble

This is defined as “to cheat”, terminology which seems relatively common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then lost in the nineteenth century. Bubble is a made up word, so it doesn’t have any Greek or Roman origins, with the dictionaries saying that it’s a word named after the sound of a bubble bursting. Which, I guess, is where the cheating thing comes from, their trust was burst just as a bubble would be.