snowdropping

This is not a new word but a very old one, an item of the London dialect that fetched up in Australia with the convicts. The snow element is defined in the glossary of the Flash Language (the language of the criminal fraternity) by James Hardy Vaux as ‘clean linen from the washerwoman’s hands, whether it be wet or dry’.  Vaux was himself a convict so we can trust his glossary.  He also lists drop meaning ‘to deliver stolen goods to a receiver’.  So a snowdropper steals the linen (in the early 1800s this was commonly white) and takes it to a receiver of stolen goods.

By the early 1900s snow referred to women’s underwear (not necessarily white) hanging on the line.  The term stuck around through the Depression.

The surprising thing is that there are still some of us who know it.  In the days when most washing is done in a washing machine and dryer, and very little of it is hung out on the line,  and the opportunities to enter a backyard to steal it are very limited, you would think that snowdropping was a thing of the past. But when a friend lost the top half of her swimsuit that was hanging over the verandah, snowdropping activity was suggested as the solution.