Dragaera

wot?

Thu Apr 15 18:13:36 PDT 2004

There is a different, much older definition of wot.  It used to mean to 
know:  "I wot not what it might be."  "A garden is a lovesome thing, God 
wot."  See http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem239.html for 
the entire poem.

Cheers!

Mia

Andrew Barton wrote:

>'Wot' in Britain is a lower-class term, most often seen in the caption to a
>'Chad' - a stylised cartoon of a face looking over a wall, with the caption
>'Wot, no X?' where X could be any commodity.  It originated in the 1940's
>as a comment on wartime shortages, and is still sometimes seen.  The
>spelling suggests a Cockney pronunciation of 'what'.
>
>Adding 'What?' to the end of a sentence is a British upper-class
>affectation, and I'd have thought unrelated.
>
>How it got into a Calvin and Hobbes strip I don't know.
>
>Andrew
>
>  
>