Definition of "gardyloo" in Anglais

interjection

1. (Scotland, obsolete) Used by people in medieval Scotland to warn passers-by of waste about to be thrown from a window into the street below. The term was still in use as late as the 1930s and 1940s, when many people had no indoor toilets.

   • [A]ll the chairs in the family are emptied into this here barrel once a-day; and at ten o'clock at night the whole cargo is flung out of a back windore that looks into some street or lane, and the maid calls Gardy loo to the passengers, which signifies, Lord have mercy upon you! and this is done every night in every house at Haddingborough; so you may guess, Mary Jones, what a sweet savour comes from such a number of profuming pans […]

noun

1. (Scotland, historical) A cry of "gardyloo".

   • […] I began to round up the scattered empties which, without so much as a ‘gardyloo’, I chucked from the window into the backcourt.

2. An act of discarding waste or some other substance from a height. Also attributive and figurative.

   • I believe the auld women wad hae greed, for Lucky Mac-Phail sent down the lass to tell my friend Mrs Crombie that she had made the gardyloo out of the wrang window, out of respect for twa Highlandmen that were speaking Gaelic in the close below the right ane. […] Mrs Glass, who had been in long and anxious expectation, now rushed, full of eager curiosity and open-mouthed interrogation, upon our heroine, who was positively unable to sustain the overwhelming cataract of her questions, which burst forth with the subliminity of a grand gardyloo […]
   • Siobhan Clarke looked like she'd stepped under a gardyloo bucket. She tried not to show it, and smiled whenever she saw him looking in her direction, but there was definitely something up with her.

3. (figurative) Caution, warning.

   • And now, to be usherhandled up the aisle, my ear pincered excruciatingly, my dear sweet Granny kvetching along behind, intoning half-Yiddish gardyloos about my certain future as either a demented hunchbacked bell-ringer, or a Cossack love-slave ... how ignominous!