"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 26/01/18 (to look at: took a butcher's at, a quick gander in something, a shifty)

We had a nice e-mail from Alec Dodd from the butifully named Derbyshire town of Ambergate, and he said, "Whot are the origins of phrases meaning "to look at", especially "took a butcher's at" "a quick gander in something", "a shufty", et cetera?" And it's a nice question so I was going to have a quick wiz around verbs and expressions meaning "to have a look". We have lots of them in English. As well as ones Alec mentioned, we have a squiz, a look-see, a double-O, a Bo-Peep, et cetera. But I/ll start with gander. This goes back to the late 1800s, and it sounds like a rhyming slang, but it is not. The image is simply of the resemblance between an inquisitive person and a goose stretching out its neck to take a look at something. It's the same idea as craning our necks - the idea again goes back to the bird, the crane. Butcher's is a bit of nice rhyming slang - having a butcher's, butcher's hook - look. In Australia and New Zealand, where rhyming slang is even more popular that it is here, going butchers means something very different. That's rhyming slang for being angry, being crook, so butcher's hook - crook. Shufty began in the British military and was brought back from military encounters abroad. It's from the Arabic "shufti", simply, "Have you seen?" And in the same way, having a dekko was harvested by the British Army during the governance of Indi, and its from the Hindu, again meaning simply "to look". So they're just words that we borrowed from other continents. But while we're looking at verbs and expressions meaning "to look', I thought I'd just give you a couple of idioms. One is to keep your eyes peeled, which always used to make me shiver when I was little. That a pretty obvious, really - it's just to take the covers off your eyesand really have a good look for something,  but "peel" actually goes back to "pill" and "pillage" - it was the Vikings word meaning "to plunder". And then the idea of stripping something came along a little bit later. And finally, "to look a gift horse in its mouth", the idea  is that if you were given a horse by a king or a royal, as a present or as a gift, never, ever look at its mouth because if you look in the teeth, you'll be able to see how old it is - that would be considered incredibly rude because horse's teeth change shape, bacame a little bit protruding as they get older - they leterally get longer in the tooth, which is where that comes from as well.