Daddles are hands. In a boxing ring, they are fists.

The word appears on lists of Victorian slang, and the Victorians did use it. J. Redding Ware, in Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909), files it under Pugilistic — boxing slang — and quotes a newspaper report of a fight from 1862: All was in readiness, and the men having shaken daddles, the seconds retired to their corners. Shaking daddles was the handshake before the punching.

But the word was not new in 1862. Half a century earlier the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue had it as underworld cant: DADDLES. Hands. Tip us your daddle; give me your hand. And Green's Dictionary of Slang finds it earlier still, in a thieves' song printed in 1754.

In between, it seems to have lived on in the countryside. When John Camden Hotten published his Dictionary of Modern Slang in 1859, he marked daddles as a Norfolk word, which suggests it had settled into dialect as well as street talk.

So daddles is less a Victorian invention than a long-lived one: thieves' cant in the eighteenth century, a Norfolk word and a ring word in the nineteenth.

The friendly form is the one worth keeping. Tip us your daddle — give me your hand — is about as warm as old slang gets, and it works as well at a reunion as it did in 1811.