While looking up gutter and its derivatives, I found a couple of surprises. Most of my sources agreed with our understanding here of the meaning of guttersnipe (such as, from Webster’s Unabridged: guttersnipe … n one belonging to or characteristic of the lowest social group in a city.), but one source had a different meaning for guttersnipe and related terms.
From Slang and Euphemism Dictionary, Richard Spears:
gut-stick the penis. [British slang, 1800s, Farmer and Henley]
gutter the female genitals. Cf. COMMON SEWER, DRAIN, SCUPPER. [British slang, 1800s, Farmer and Henley]
gutter slut a low prostitute; a common whore. For synonyms see HARLOT. [U.S., early 1900s]
guttersnipe 1. a GUTTER SLUT (q.v.) [widespread colloquial, 1800s – pres.] 2. a prostitute. [British 1800s, Farmer and Henley]
Since these slang terms, old as they are, are British, could any of our Brit posters elaborate? Have they ever heard these terms used in these ways?
Also, I wondered at this discussion in Horsefeathers & Other Curious Words, Charles Earle Funk & Charles Earle Funk, Jr.:
guttersnipe He, or quite often she, frequently a child or street Arab, gathers a living from the gutter, or less literally, from discarded rags, trash, or other refuse, including food. His mode of living, that is, resembles that of the snipe which pokes its bill into the mud lining a body of water for its food. The term, originating as slang, is not quite a hundred years old.
Has anyone ever seen the term “street Arab” before? I’m guessing that it has gone the way of other racial and ethnic invectives, but apparently was in common use at least until the 1950s, when the source was published. The term suggests a nomadic existence, I think?
I was also amused to learn that two diseases owe their names to the same gutter cluster.
From Origins A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, Eric Partridge:
goiter, goiter; ajd goitrous.
1. The adj derives from F goitreux f goitreuse, from goiter, adopted by E and Americanized as goiter. The EF(-F) goiter, borrowed from a dial of the Rhone valley, is a b/f from OF-EF goitron, throat, gullet, which in the MF of SE France, took the sense “goiter”, a thyroid-gland protuberance on the neck. OF goitron derives from VL *gutturionem, acc of *gutturio, from L gutter, throat.
gout (whence, gouty), orig as :gout of blood”, later in Med sense, OF-MF goute, var of OF-F goutte, from L gutta, a drop of water, blood, etc; r gut-, ? akin to the syn Arm kat’n (E & M); prob imitative.
2. OF goute, a drop, has derivative OF-MF gutiere, goutiere (F gouttiere), lit a receptacle (connoted by –lere, F lere) for drops of water, a course – an open pipe – for rainwater on a roof or in a road; hence ME gotere, later gutere; hence E gutter (whence “to gutter”). Hence the at first sl guttersnipe, a “snipe” of the roadway gutters.
It interested me to observe that both goiter and gout came to us through French. Is this because French was the language of medicine at the time these diseases were first described?
