Thing Not To Do Today: slommack about.

Slommack is a dialect word. Some authorities say it means a dirty untidy woman or slob (though slobs are surely nearly always men), and some say a slommack is a woman no more fastidious in her personal relationships than her undone housework.

So who is right? 

Well, I have referred above to authorities, but with dialect words surely anyone who's come across the word is as much an authority as anyone else, because a dialect word doesn't claim a universal meaning, only one for a particular place and time.

This is jolly convenient because it makes me as much of an expert as anyone, for I spent a lot of my younger days being told by my mother to stop slommacking about.

What my mother meant was never very easy to pin down, but my general impression was that to slommack was to loiter, to be ungainly, to sit untidily, to fail to be useful, or to be in the way, 

I cured myself of slommacking, instantly and miraculously, by leaving home as soon as I possibly could.

And now instead of slommacking I reflect, meditate, cogitate, ponder, and write books.

Thing Not To Do Today: slommack. I haven't been able to discover any derivation for slommack, but it's linked in my mind with slump, which is a Scandinavian word connected with the Norwegian slumpa, to fall, and in Low German means bog.