Slang of the 1910s

Just spent an enjoyable if frustrating morning trying to discover the slang of the 1910s. It seems to be a non-subject online. (I thought everything was out there if you looked for it, but the vocab of middle-class young ladies in the 1910s is remarkably absent.)

On the other hand, there's some great 1811 slang in Francis Grose's dictionary of the vulgar tongue. Some of it's still with us: "Leaky. Apt to blab; one who cannot keep a secret is said to be leaky." Some of it has shifted its meaning: " Frosty face. One pitted with the small pox." Some of it's gone: "Clack. A tongue, chiefly applied to women; a simile drawn from the clack of a water-mill." In Sinks of London laid open by an unknown author of the 1800s there's "Black beetles: the lower order of people." and "Box of ivory: the teeth."

There's a whole pot more stuff on slang at the BBC's h2g2. I didn't know there was a gay undercover language in the '50s and '60s that contributed masses to my everyday vocab. And knowing the origins of swearing must be useful too. (Berk is ruder than you think.)

I gave up on the internet and tried fiction. Dorothy Sayers; P.G. Wodehouse; both a bit late really, and Wodehouse, rumour has it, made up a lot of his slang. But immediately something is clear - not only do class and region define your language, but women use a slightly different vocabulary from men.

I have one genuine source of 1910s ladies' middle(ish) class slang: my collection of letters from the First World War. It's not a big collection or a representative sample. It's letters home though, not as informal as speech but closer than published prose. So it's a start. Here are some phrases I don't use much that seem to prevail: beastly cold, tremendous, a budget of letters, the stove is a perfect brute, dreadfully, she's very jolly, she's a lazy hound, topping, we are all very cheery, awfully well, feeling rotten, frightfully excited, rather a character, she's an old tadpole.

I'm going to keep on looking. And I'm going to look at my own language to see if I speak differently from men.