C
from The Liverpool English Dictionary
Summary
Cabbage Hall Yank (n.): would-be American. ‘Cabbage Hall Yank: A Youth who tries to behave like, or pretends to be, an American. Also called a Wells Farthole type’ (Lane 1966: 16). *NR; the Cabbage Hall Picture House stood on Lower Breck Road, but derivation is unclear.
Cabbaged (adj.): exhausted; intoxicated; confused. ‘Me ead's cabbaged. Very confused’ (Spiegl 1989: 53). ‘Half fucking cabbaged from zero sleep and endless nightmares’ (Sampson 2001: 266). ‘Ploddin along without words, absolutely cabbaged’ (Griffiths 2002: 174). Recorded from l.20c.; an extension of m.20c. ‘cabbaged’, ‘mentally incapacitated’, from m.19c. ‘human cabbage’, ‘a dull-witted or unambitious person’.
Cabbaging (n.): stealing. ‘Cabbaging. Pilfering’ (Spiegl 1989: 20). Recorded from e.18c.; drapers’ usage referring to the pilfering of off-cuts; derivation unknown.
Cack (n.): excrement. ‘I'll get me grandson t’ come an’ kick the cack out of yer’ (Bleasdale 1975: 26). ‘My First Morning with cacked kecks’ (Simpson 1990: 33). ‘We've got the fucking cack all over ourselves’ (Sampson 2002: 132). Recorded from 16c.; retained in its original sense in Liverpool, though categorised as obsolete elsewhere except in the extensions ‘nonsense’ or ‘worthless, useless’; from Latin ‘cacāre’, ‘to void excrement’.
Cack (v.): to defecate. ‘Cack. To defecate. Liverpool’ (Howarth 1985: n.p.). ‘How many cacked their knickers’ (Sinclair 1999 [1930s–e.40s]: 75). Recorded from 15c.; glossed as obsolete or dialectal; see cack (n.).
Cack-handed (adj.): clumsy, awkward; left-handed. ‘Winnick, if yes ask me, cack-’anded’ (Shaw 1957a: 12). ‘Gammy-anded; cack-anded. A left-handed person’ (Shaw et al. 1966: 29). ‘That may strike one as a right cack-handed way of doing it, but it works!’ (McClure 1980: 385). ‘Saws, planes/that I'm cack-handed with’ (Simpson 1990: 100). Recorded from m.19c.; dialectal, probably from ‘kay’, as in ‘kay-fisted’, ‘left-handed’ (coined too early for the extended sense of cack, ‘worthless, useless’).
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- The Liverpool English DictionaryA Record of the Language of Liverpool 1850–2015 on Historical Principles, pp. 49 - 73Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017