The Public School Word-Book: A Conribution to to a Historical Glossary of Words Phrases and Turns of Expression Obsolete and in Current Use Peculiar to Our Great Public Schools Together with Some That Have Been or Are Modish at the Universities

A journey into the secret linguistic world of Britain's most prestigious institutions. Compiled by John Stephen Farmer in 1900, this glossary documents the peculiar vocabulary that flourished within the walls of Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, and their peers. Here are the words, phrases, and turns of expression that marked a boy as belonging to a particular tribe: the slang of the changing room and the classroom, the coded language of hierarchy and hierarchy-testing, terms that carried weight in ways no outsider could fully grasp. But Farmer insists this is not merely a dictionary of schoolboy slang. It is something far more rigorous: an analytical, historically-minded resource that traces how terms evolved, compares usage across institutions, and illustrates each word with quotations from sources both contemporary and obsolescent. For anyone curious about how the British elite learned to speak, how tribal identities were linguistically constructed, and what vanished world this language once described, this book is a singular time capsule. It captures a social ecosystem in decline even as Farmer wrote, the argot of an era when these schools held absolute sway over British society.