I may have mentioned this before, probably several times, but the Vladivostok-to-St. Petersburg-to-Berkeley Sinologist Peter Boodberg also loved to use little-unknown archaisms, compounds, and neologisms to translate Chinese words with no exact English equivalent. Maybe it's a sort of Russian Formalist affectation.

"Marchmount" and "childe" are the only ones I remember immediately, but you can often tell a UCB Sinologist by Boodbergian shibboleths. Edward Schafer was probably the most eminent of his many disciples.

Not a word that one would want to use a lot nowadays, anyway. The first thing it reminds me of is "pédé".

I grew up with 'chuntering' to the extent that I read the article's title as nothing more than vaguely whimsical. My childhood was spent in the North-East of England in the Eighties, though; perhaps it's peculiar to that region.

I'm familiar with the term chuntering meaning "that thing computer hard drives do where they make a lot of noise". I'm curious, now, as to a) whether this sense is widely recognized (and in what geographical distribution), and b) whether it's the same word as the above or a separate development.

Chuntering, for reasons not entirely clear to me, is frequently used of dissatasfied bowlers in cricket, muttering away angrily to themselves.

Chunter is frequently used in cricket commentary to describe dissatisfied bowlers muttering angrily away to themselves, after a piece of inept fielding, say.

Sounds like the reasons became clear to Tom, sometime between 2:51 and 2:53.

re pedee:

Let me hazard a guess. The quotation is from 1779, and the context suggests that he belongs to a lower class, since he is feeling intimidated by a sharp-tongue 'trollop'. I wonder if pedee could be an adaptation of Italian piedi meaning 'feet', and if the man or boy in question is a kind of footman, in French valet de pied. Looking up the 'footman' entry on Wikipedia, and its (very different) counterpart entry in Italian (as well as an online dictionary), there is no exact translation for either the French or English words but English 'footmen' is explained as corridori a piedi, literally 'runners on feet'. Aristocratic young men doing their Grand Tour of Europe typically travelled with one or two menservants but also hired local staff in cities where they stayed for longer than a few days, and sometimes brought some of them home with them. I wonder whether the pedee could have been an Italian footman brought back to England, where he might have felt in an awkward position in an English-speaking household, for instance not being able to give a suitable reply to a trollop's tirades. Referring to him as the pedee would have differentiated him from English footmen.

I had never heard of chuntering until reading this essay which uses it twice. This item is the second search result other than dictionaries.

When I got to "I am a libertarian, a neopagan materialist, an unabashed Heinleinophile..." my eyes rolled straight back into my head and I found myself unable to concentrate on the rest of the essay in any very focused manner.