Il n’oubliera!
Richepin, La Mer.
Pontonnière, f. (popular), prostitute who plies her trade under the arches of bridges.
Les pontonnières fréquentent le dessous des ponts ... toutes ces filles sont des voleuses. Le macque qui joue ici un rôle plus actif que le barbillon ne quitte sa largue ni jour ni nuit.—Canler.
[Popotte], f. (familiar), table d’hôte. Faire la ——, to cook. Etre ——, is said of a very plain, homely woman. (Military) Popotte, military mess in a small way.
L’unique cabaret de Hanoï le vit donc à l’heure de l’absinthe, mêlé aux uniformes, et il connut les réunions de table par “fractions de corps,” les popottes où les officiers dévoraient joyeusement les vivres ferrugineux des boîtes de conserves.—P. Bonnetain, L’Opium.
Popotter. See [Popotte].
Populo, m. (familiar), populace, or “mob.” Swift informs us, in his Art of Polite Conversation, that “mob” was, in his time, the slang abbreviation of mobility, just as nob is of nobility at the present day.
It is perhaps this humour of speaking no more words than we need which has so miserably curtailed some of our words, that in familiar writing and conversation they often lose all but their first syllables, as in mob, red. pos. incog. and the like.—Addison’s Spectator.
Burke called the populace “the great unwashed.”