Once Popular Words That No One Uses Anymore

Language is a funny old thing. We take it for granted most of the time, but it's incredible to think that countless people have come to almost the same understanding of what some randomly ordered letters refer to. It's even stranger when you start looking at things like slang words, or words that were once on the tip of every tongue that no one even remembers anymore. Some of these words need to be brought back. Others need to be forgotten. Hard. Let's take a look at some of the best ones and expand your vocabulary a bit.

We're not entirely sure where damfino came from, but we do know it makes an excellent PG-rated curse, and people need to use it more.

According to Passing English of the Victorian Era, it's a shortened version of "I am damned if I know." If you're in a situation that calls for that particular curse, "damfino" is the way to say it with a verbal shrug and an eye roll. That's especially true in the chaos of today's world, when you can drop gems like: "Damfino how they didn't see that advertisement was horribly racist."

In spite of Victorian roots, the word was hugely popular through the 1920s thanks to Buster Keaton. According to the International Buster Keaton Society, Damfino was the name of a boat associated with him, mostly because it's a ready-made punchline just waiting to be delivered after the boat sinks. Humor has changed a lot, too.

There's no reason crapulous should have fallen out of favor because it describes an unpleasant state we've all experienced, and one we've all lied to someone about. Dictionary.com defines it as the feeling you have after you've gone a bit overboard indulging in either alcoholic drinks or just plain old food, and you know you've been there. You know precisely the feeling it describes, even if you never knew there was a word for it.

Trust the ancient Greeks and Romans to have us covered. The word dates back to around 1530, and has roots in ancient words meaning pretty much the same thing. If you wake up with a nauseous sort of headache and not a little bit of regret after a night of drunken debauchery, feel free to call in with a scary-sounding diagnosis of crapulence. Technically, you can even say it's contagious.

There are a few different versions of the word Abraham-man, but Abram, Abram-cove, and Abram-man all mean the same thing. You know what it is, too, because he's still a pretty popular character in a certain type of movie. If you've seen any period piece with a shady-looking, scruffy beggar spouting a whole lot of lunacy, that's an Abraham-man.

According to A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English, Abraham started out as a 16th-century term for a used clothing store, then turned into a reference to hard work that didn't pay well. An Abraham-man was then a man who wore ragged clothes and roamed the Elizabethan countryside, but he was more than just a beggar. He was someone who was putting on an act that had some kind of falsehood about it, whether he was stealing as he begged or acting like a nutter to get people to offer handouts in exchange for his disappearance down the road. Hey, at least he was his own boss.

That's air-hole, stop giggling. It's actually pretty depressing, too, and once you know what it is, you'll feel more than a bit guilty if you did happen to laugh.

One thing we rarely take into consideration when we say we'd rather go back in time to live in Victorian England is the very big problem of body-disposal. The Guardian looked at just how bad it was, and it was bad. Cemeteries and churchyards were full, coffins were hacked to pieces and more bones were buried in the same plots. There's other stuff you'd rather not know, so let's just say reformers had their work cut out for them when they decided something had to be done.

That's the era of air-holes. It was the name for small public gardens across London, according to archivist James Redding Ware. The catch? They were cemeteries converted into gardens, and there was rarely any effort taken to disguise what they once were. Most even still contained headstones, piled up or standing along the walls. Picnic, anyone?

That's as in, "The town was gripped with the oysterics as people started dropping like flies from the worst case of food poisoning anyone had ever seen."

It's a serious idea with a bit of a tongue-in-cheek wordplay, and archivist James Redding Ware says it's a play on the word "hysterics." At the turn of the 20th century, a very real health scare swept through England. It was believed bad oysters had caused an outbreak of typhoid fever, and the resulting public health panic was dubbed "oysterics." The term was used for years after the original outbreak, and it probably needs to make a comeback because you can never have too much satire in the world.

"Zounds!" sounds like it was invented just for Scooby Doo, but it wasn't. According to Merriam-Webster, zounds was first used in 1592, and it was more polite way of saying "God's wounds." Uttering that kind of blasphemy was just out of the question, but where there's a will, there's a way. People have found all kinds of ways to get their points across without actually blaspheming, and it's a shame we still don't use most of these.

The epic 'sblood dates from around the same time, and refers quite obviously to God's blood. There's gadzooks, a 17th-century curse seen as a slightly more polite way to curse by God's hooks — in other words, the nails used to crucify Christ. There's strewth, which didn't show up until the 19th century and until people were cursing God's truth, and there's 'sdeath, an addition the Collins Dictionary says comes from America. Even the Yanks were getting creative in the ways they cursed to God Almighty ... while still hoping to fly under the radar and not offend too much.