Rogue trader

(n) A little known offshoot of the slave trade was the practice of selling prisoners. When British jails became overcrowded in the 17th century, a warden would furtively contact a merchant willing to buy prisoners, known as a “rogue trader”. This practice proved a valuable source of income for the prison authorities and continued for some time after the slave trade had been abolished.

Rogue traders would purchase inmates from debtors prisons, village jails and long-term facilities, usually poor souls without families or those serving severe sentences with little hope of being released, and ship them to the colonies for hard, manual labouring tasks: mining, railway building, prostitution. Rogue traders were cruel, unsentimental men who thought of prisoners as little more than animals. Conditions on the ships were brutal and punishment for anyone trying to escape or disobeying orders could be sadistic. One man was reportedly hung on a meat hook and taught to play the accordion for an entire round-the-world voyage. Rogue traders were therefore feared, despised and vilified throughout society and it was only natural that the phrase should later be adapted to mean someone in the financial sector with a terrible taste in shirts.

Basket case

(n) A fine leather case for carrying a basket. Never caught on, because it could cost five times the value of the object it was holding. It was, therefore, considered a stupid invention and the phrase was adopted to refer to an insane person.

See also: chocolate frying-pan, paper life-saver, soya milk

Humpty dumpty

The rhyme of humpty-dumpty is commonly supposed to have started as a riddle: "Which object tumbles off a wall and, having fallen, thwarts the best efforts of even the bravest souls to restore it?"

But is "egg" necessarily the answer? The clues in the rhyme are actually rather vague. An egg isn’t the first thing that springs to mind in this situation. Leaving an egg casually upon a wall is unusual, unless the work of a distracted cuckoo. And were one’s mislaid egg to tumble off said wall, you’d hardly ask a passing troupe of soldiers on horseback to have a go at restoring it to its former state, would you? Hooves and swords all over the place. The misfortunate egg could as easily be a watermelon, a Ming vase or a balloon full of giblets, any of which would tax the household cavalry’s engineering skills, and have just as much chance of being on a wall to begin with.

Humpty's depiction as an anthropomorphised egg in the Tenniel illustrations to Alice In Wonderland fixed the image which has endured ever since. But let us consider some of the alternative possibilities for the identity of this mystery object.

In Scotland, “lumpty-numpty” is a drunken idiot who keeps hitting his head. In parts of Cornwall, “crumpety-bumpety” is either a randy baker or a clumsy barmaid. There have been suggestions that humpty-dumpty was once a dialect term for: a dandelion clock, a toadstool, a snail or a wasp’s nest, all more natural wall-dwellers.

Humpty-dumpty has also been used to describe someone who fouls themselves during sex. But let's not go there.