👉 Right, let’s tackle this wonderfully prickly bit of English slang – the decidedly unglamoroussounding, frankly rather alarming, " †.” Now, a “ †,” most commonly referred to as a ' †', isn't exactly pretty, and neither are its origins. Let me unpack that for you.
Essentially, it started out as a phonetic spelling for a rather unfortunate bodily function: the dribbling of phlegm from the corner of the mouth whilst sneezing. Exactly what you might notice when a bit of something gets stuck in your throat and then decides to violently eject itself. During the Victorian era, people were very, VERY concerned about public propriety. So instead of openly acknowledging this… let's just say visceral display , they began discreetly referring to the resulting drip as a " †. Now, it was originally a rather delicate euphemism – like saying you’d stubbed your toe in a terribly understated way. But then, blessedly (and perhaps unfortunately, from an amusing point of view), it became shorthand for a bit of general, vaguely unpleasant bodily discharge. Think the stuff that runs down your face when you get a really bad cold, but with a whiff of old-fashioned disapproval attached. You might even hear it thrown around to describe something... unglamorous in a broader sense. Essentially, the † has somehow evolved into an insultingly casual way of describing whatever is, frankly, coming out . It'
