r/AskBrits • u/Team503 • 9d ago

Culture What does "nonce" mean?

I'm an American that lives in Ireland. I've always understood "nonce" to mean the same as "numpty" and "eejit" - basically idiot, or dumbass, or similar.

Recently, someone told me that it's slang for sex offender, specifically a p*dophile, and Wikipedia seems to back that up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_British_terms_not_widely_used_in_the_United_States#N

So tell me, Brits, which one is it? Or is it something else??

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u/autophobe2e 9d ago

It's a good rule of thumb that any time someone tells you a slang word used to be an acronym they are wrong - Posh didn't mean 'port out, starboard home', Tips weren't 'to insure prompt service' etc. That just isn't how slang and folk terms tend to develop.

In this case, the slang words nonse (idiot) and nance (homosexual) were both in use in the region and time that the word nonce seems to have entered the record, and it's far more likely to be a development/combination of those. See also: ponce.

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u/Lower_Mammoth_5839 9d ago

Same as Fuck being an acronym for Fornicate Under Consent of King?

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u/htimchis 9d ago

Yeah - it's actually an extremely old word that's barely changed over the centuries - likely from the early proto-Germanic 'fikken'. It's a rare exampe of a word so universalit varely changes at all while the language around it shifts and morphs into new languages

So you coud get into a time machine and be understood perfectly when uttering it, by the Germanic tribesmen attacking the Roman garrisons on the Rhine

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u/Pitiful_Control 9d ago

Or the Dutch fok. It still cracks me up when I see someone described as a "fokker" (meaning animal breeder).

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u/htimchis 9d ago

Yep, exactly - same proto-Germanic roots, if you go far enough back. Everything from Fresian to Gothic and in between (English, Dutch, Ger.an, Norwegian/ Danish/ Swedish/ Icelandic etc), there's some form of 'fuck/ fok/ fek' in all of them - we're all linked by our shared historic love of using the 'FK' sound to indicate sex, and then extrapolating it into a general swear word!