dick v. to watch or to keep under surveillance. Editorial Note: There are also, of course, a wide variety of sex-related slang homonyms that are well-covered elsewhere. Etymological Note: The Historical Dictionary of American Slang attributes this verb to the English Romani dik “to look, see,” in turn said to be from the Hindi dekkhna, but its latest cite is 1935. The cites below show that the verb is still in current use. Also related are dick ‘detective’ or ‘police officer’ and to keep dick, defined in the English Dialect Dictionary as “to keep watch” and attributed to County Antrim, Northern Ireland. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A physician in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, shares some of the vocabulary of his patients from Appalachia. There, a misery is anything painful, such as a misery in my jaw if they have a painful tooth or a misery in my back if they have lumbar pain...
Katie in Everett, Washington, is curious about the expression If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no need for tinkers. What is a tinker? She heard this phrase on the television series The Gilded Age, in response to a character who...