These days the term is likely to refer to a young man with a pair of sugar lips that can sweet-talk the gullible young ladies and once he’s impregnated them he moves on to greener pastures for his next pursuit.
@Raine I knew a lady who’s granddaughter got pregnant by one of those. By the time he was 22 he had impregnated at least 20 girls. No way in hell he could support all those children....
@cherokeepatti we had one who kept going on TV here boasting about it, even though he didnt know the 20+ kids names. While the presenter turned his back to ask someone else a question, this breeding machine handed a girl in the audience his number.
A knocker-up, sometimes known as a knocker-upper, was a profession in Britain and Ireland that started during and lasted well into the Industrial Revolution, when alarm clocks were neither cheap nor reliable. A knocker-up's job was to rouse sleeping people so they could get to work on time. By the 1940s and 1950s, this profession had died out, although it still continued in some pockets of industrial England until the early 1970s.
@Glossy I like the use of the word 'profession'. I'm not sure how many years they studied for and what professional body formally recognised them. I certainly remember being taught about them in school.
