"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 24/08/17 (he'a a geezer, cheap)

I have to thank Paul McFedries. He is a graet linguist and loves looking at new words in particular. But he was also looking the other day at the word geezer, which means something very different in the US to in Britain. So I was saying to Martin (guest), "What do you think of if I said, "He's a little bit geezer?"" And Martin's definitoin was, "A rough diamond charmer and a bit of a lad". Which is perfect, I think, very pithy definition. Whereas in the US, it mean a senior citizen, often a quite cranky and crotchety old man, particulary. So, very, very different, but the origin is the same for both of those senses. And it goes back to the word "guise". So, a pretence, as we would still use it today. And it really was a disguise or a mask. Cos around the 15th century, the noun guise became a verb that meant to dress in the fantastic way - fantastic in the sense of using your imagination, slightly grotesque sometimes - to go about in masquerade dress. And people who would do this kind of thing became known as a guisers. And by the 19th century, the pronunciation and the spelling of this word had changed to geezer. And it reffered originally to anyone who was a bit of a charecter. So that kind of chimes, really, with hiw we view somebody today, but in America it stayed with the sort of oddity, this sense of fantastic dress and something slightly eccentric about them. And from there it developed to mean, as I say, a slightly cantakerous old man. The other possible word that goes along with geezer is chap, which I always enjoy with origin of and the story behind this one. That's very much linked with the word cheap. London's Cheapside use to be a market, and cheap meant a marketplace. If you got a really goob bargain at the marketplace, you would have had a good cheap, and of course that gave us the sense of cheap today, something that you've got actually at a good price. But the person who was selling at this market was the chapman. He was a market trader who would be giving those good cheaps, etc, at Cheapside and other markets up and down the land. And the chapman eventually got a shortened to chap and it became not just a market trader, but an ordinary man on the street.