Wondrous Words Wednesday
Wondrous Words Wednesday is hosted by Bermudaonion’s Weblog. Kathy says: “Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our reading.”
In the past few ragweed-pollen infused days, I read the two easiest books on my TBR stack and managed to find a new word in each of them. Just goes to show that even the most fun novels can teach something.
The first came from Nowhere Near Respectable by Mary Jo Putney on page 266:
“Who attacked you?”
“They were sent by the flash cove.”
From context, I eventually figured out that the flash cove was a person, but not much more than that. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, flash is an adjective “Connected with or pertaining to the class of thieves, tramps, and prostitutes” usually used in combination with other words to make phrases describing places and people in that world. The OED cites Pierce Egan · Grose’s classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue · 1823 for this definition:
Flash Cove or Covess, the master or mistress of the house.
It took a bit of hunting to find this site with a further relevant definition: Modern Flash Dictionary (1835): From the Evolving English Exhibit at the British Library. According, apparently, to the text accompanying the exhibit of this pamphlet, “a fashionable man-about-town was commonly referred to as a flash cove and the meaning survives today in the phrase ‘flash Harry’. ” The actual dictionary which, I learned from a comment to the above post, has been scanned into Google Books has a slightly different definition that fits better with the way it is used in Nowhere Near Respectable:
Flash Cove, the keeper of a place for the reception of stolen goods.
My second word of the week came from All-American Girl by Meg Cabot and was defined in the text on page 92, so I didn’t have to do near as much searching to learn the meaning of frisson:
“I detected a frisson.”
Lucy and I both looked at her like she was crazy. “A what?”
“A frisson,” Rebecca said. “A tremor of intense attraction. I detected one between you and David last night.”
Two very interesting words.
Flash cove is interesting. Thanks for sharing. If you get a chance, my words are here.
Very interesting words! Quite educational today! I love this meme.
http://peggyannspost.blogspot.com/2011/09/wondrous-words-wednesday.html
Thanks for all the work done to explain us what a flash cove is !
I knew frisson because it’s a french word….and I’m French !
It’s interesting that flash cove has so many meanings that are worlds apart. Great words!
I love the word cove, and think it should be brought back into common usage. I’ve not heard flash cove as a term before. Frisson is one of those wonderful words that somehow sounds like the meaning to me.
I just Google’d the term flash cove because I came across it in a book, and wondered what it meant. Imagine my surprise when you named the very book I’m reading! LOL!
That’s fun! I’m glad my research paid off for someone else!
While currently reading “Nowhere Near Respectible”, I decided to Google ‘flash cove’ to help better explain what Mary Jo Putney was referring to. I was delighted that this blog came up on the first page of Google responses. Thanks for the interesting and useful info! Now I can read on…
Yay! Good to know my website is the place to be for at least one thing! The meaning of the phrase “flash cove.”
Happy reading! Nowhere Near Respectable is a fun book!
Thank you for defining Flash Cove for me. I was reading the same book and couldn’t figure it out either. When I typed in the query, yours was the first site to come up! Very helpful.