Spill, to throw from a horse or chaise. See [PURL].
Spin, to reject from an examination.—Army.
Spindleshanks, a nickname for any one who has thin legs.
Spin-’em rounds, a street game consisting of a piece of brass, wood, or iron, balanced on a pin, and turned quickly round on a board, when the point, arrow-shaped, stops at a number, and decides the bet one way or the other. The contrivance very much resembles a sea compass, and was formerly the gambling accompaniment of London piemen. The apparatus then was placed on the tin lids of their pie-cans, and the bets were ostensibly for pies, but were frequently for “coppers,” or for beer when two or three apprentices or porters happened to meet. An active and efficient police have, however, changed all that now.
Spiniken, St. Giles’s Workhouse. “Lump,” Marylebone Workhouse. “Pan,” St. Pancras. “Pan” and “Lump” are now terms applied to all workhouses by tramps and costers.
Spinning-house, the place in Cambridge where street-walkers are locked up, if found out after a certain time at night.
Spirt, or SPURT, “to put on a SPIRT,” to make an increased exertion for a brief space, to attain one’s end; a nervous effort. Abbreviation or shortening of SPIRIT, or allusion to a SPIRT of water, which dies away as suddenly as it rises.
“So here for a man to run well for a SPURT, and then to give over ... is enough to annul all his former proceedings, and to make him in no better estate than if he had never set foot into the good waies of God.”—Gataker’s Spirituall Watch, 4to. 1619, p. 10.
Spitalfields’ breakfast. At the East-end of London this is understood as consisting of a tight necktie and a short pipe. Amongst workmen it is usual to tighten the apron string when no dinner is at hand. Hunters and trappers always take in their belts when supplies are short. “An Irishman’s dinner” is a low East-end term, and means a smoke and a visit to the urinal. Sometimes the phrase is, “I’ll go out and count the railings,” i.e., the park or area railings, mental instead of maxillary exercise.