Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A person who lives in or frequents bogs.
- n. Offensive Slang Used as a disparaging term for a person of Irish birth or descent.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. One who trots over bogs, or lives among bogs; especially, a contemptuous appellation given to the Irish peasantry, probably from the skill shown by many of them in crossing the extensive bogs of the country by leaping from tussock to tussock, where a stranger would find no footing, and from the frequent use they make of this skill to escape from the soldiery, the police, etc.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. One who lives in a boggy country; -- applied in derision to the lowest class of Irish.
Etymologies
- bog + trotter (Wiktionary)
Examples
“Hey, Kelly: was your great-grandpappy called a bogtrotter back in the day?”
“Barely ninety minutes after being given the boot by that bogtrotter sergeant, she was sipping coffee in the RTE studios in Donnybrook, yakking to Gaffney while some other guy did sound checks on her mike.”
“April 14th, 2006 at 5:37 pm mfi: ‘OK I’m only a benighted bogtrotter’”
“Yup bobby I’m a real live bogtrotter ‘though my home is in Denmark these days.”
“Tory" was at this time the name for a native Irish outlaw or "bogtrotter," and in fastening it on the loyalist adherents of James's cause the”
“Go to the devil, you Irish bogtrotter!" was the reply.”
“A CONCEITED coxcomb, with a very patronizing air, called out to an Irish laborer, "Here, you bogtrotter, come and tell me the greatest lie you can, and I'll treat you to a jug of whiskey-punch.”
“I contend for it that all our civilisation is higher, and that class for class we are in a more advanced culture than the English; that your chawbacon is not as intelligent a being as our bogtrotter; that your petty shopkeeper is inferior to ours; that throughout our middle classes there is not only a higher morality but a higher refinement than with you.”
“Billy boy, you bloody bogtrotter (oh dear now I'M a racist!) this is simply a marytr play to get a weird kind of sympathy from other the poo 'oppr'ss white chillin's.”
“PS As a bogtrotter from Cavan, I really wish you would slip into a coma and die within the next week ...”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘bogtrotter’.
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Gapeseeds and Muckworms - Compound De...
A list of compound derogatory names such as gapeseed, muckworm and lickspittle. Your one-word contributions to this list are welcome.
See sionnach's list derogatory terms I should use ...gapeseed, muckworm, lickspittle, makeweight, bootlicker, backscratcher, apple-polisher, backslapper, brownnoser, rakeshame, yesman, freeloader and 293 more...
Tweets
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