Given today's general bias towards euphemisms (cf. Arif, 2015), the topic of this paper may seem embarrassing and ill-chosen. However, it makes sense to find out to what extent the spoken language of dialects in former centuries correlated with one of the dark sides of everyday reality. In Britain up to the second half of the 19thcentury, traditional dialect was the common linguistic medium of the large majority of people (the lower and middle classes), just before the norm of ‘King's English’ and, in linguistics, ofsystème, started playing a dominant role. We may assume that the English dialects of the Late Modern English (LModE) period (1700–1900) were a correlative of people's everyday life.