The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human
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Jonathon Green is a lexicographer, that is a dictionary maker, specialising in slang, about which he has been compiling dictionaries, writing and broadcasting since 1984. He has also written histories of lexicography and of slang. After working on his university newspaper he joined the London ‘underground press’ in 1969, working for most of the then available titles, such as Friends, IT and Oz. He has been publishing books since the mid-1970s, spending the next decade putting together a number of dictionaries of quotations, before he moved into what remains his primary interest, slang. Jonathon’s slang work has reached its climax, but he trusts not its end, with the publication in 2010 of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, a three-volume, 6,200-page dictionary ‘on historical principles’ offering some 110,000 words and phrases, backed up by around 410,000 citations or usage examples. The book covers all anglophone countries and its timeline stretches from around 1500 up to the present day. An online version, which is regularly updated, was launched in 2016. For those who prefer something less academic, he published the Chambers Slang Dictionary, a single volume book, in 2008.
Website: http://jonathongreen.co.uk
The Dabbler: http://thedabbler.co.uk/ (as Mister Slang)
Twitter: @misterslang
The Timelines of Slang: http://thetimelinesofslang.tumblr.com/
Green’s Dictionary of Slang - Online is available at
https://greensdictofslang.com.
All the words included in Stories of Slang are listed there, with
full definitions and etymologies, and can be accessed for free.
Also by Jonathon Green
Green’s Dictionary of Slang (also online)
Language! 500 Years of the Vulgar Tongue
Odd Job Man: Some Confessions of a Slang Lexicographer
Chambers Slang Dictionary
The Stories of Slang
JONATHON GREEN
ROBINSON
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Robinson
Copyright © Jonathon Green, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-47213-967-2
Robinson
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk
www.littlebrown.co.uk
Contents
Introduction
Carry on Barding, or, Much Ado About Pistol’s Cock
Pugilism: The Noble Art of Milling
Jack’s a Lad: All Aboard the Oggin
Doctors & Nurses
Sweety Darling: Carrying the Torch for Love
Mystery Tour: Far Away Places
Cities: Smoke & Mirrors
On the Road: Tramps & Hobos
The Body: Only Man is Vile
Pox: Knocked by a French Faggot-Stick
Funny Foreign Food
Mixed Drinks
Pulp Diction: ‘A roscoe coughed’
Tell Me a Story: Proper Names
Nudge-Nudge, Wink-Wink: The Pun
Now ’ere’s a funny thing . . . : Catchphrases
MLE: A Speech of Many Colours
Index
Introduction
A SK ANYONE, SLANG is all about fucking. Fucking and rhymes. Words and phrases for sex and the human giblets with which we do it, and that much-loved but somewhat tired phenomenon: rhyming slang, which however valid its mid-nineteenth-century origins, has long since become more of an intermittently amusing sideshow than part of the mainstream slang vocabulary.
I have written extensively about them both, and while they will undoubtedly push their way in here, the purpose of what follows is to take a look at what we might call slang’s reserve team. It is a good reserve team, members jostling to reach the heights and quite capable of stepping up, but as I suggest, not always what people immediately think of when they say ‘slang’. But there are 130,000 words and phrases in my database, and even if around 10,000 are in some way linked to sex, that leaves room for quite a number more. It’s time, I suggest, to give these ‘understudies’ their own show.
I have divided the material into simple sections: people, places and things, plus language itself. Within those groups we shall meet doctors and the pox, foreigners and their funny food, life in the big city (slang’s necessary partner in crime), anecdotes and catchphrases, slang’s version of a mystery tour, the language of pulp fiction and of UK slang’s current cutting edge, Multicultural London English, and among other things some of those body parts that remain vital even if they are not obviously required for the old in-and-out (much popularised in Clockwork Orange but actually used since 1635). I have moved a little outside the mainstream to include a selection of catchphrases, often pretty slangy, too.
Look at the slang vocabulary: this is not a feel-good environment. The compassionate, the empathetic, the kind of heart need not enter here. In a world where aggression – one-to-one, international, screaming from the foetid underside of social media – is the go-to emotion, slang, never one to mind its language, seems the go-to way of speech.
Slang is an unsafe space. It has no time for political correctness, none for true belief. Neither is it that pious product of Victorian muscular Christianity, Mrs Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By, nor does it turn the other cheek, other, perhaps than shifting a buttock all the better to deliver a noisome fart. Racist and nationalist, all-purpose-sexist, variously phobic, if it lacks micro-aggressions then it is because such piffling teases in turn lack sufficient antagonism. It is contemptuous of the special snowflakes and their identity politics and if it tosses snowballs, they are lined with stones. It is filled with stereotypes – how else to define the necessary ‘other’ against whom it aims its weaponry – but it lays down no laws, no diktats, no ukases. It is neither naive nor optimistic, it does not demand that things be otherwise, it knows too much. It is, in other words, real. Too real?
So some complain, but slang, with its emphasis on sex, drugs and at least in a figurative sense, all the self-indulgences that can be labelled rock ’n’ roll, represents its users not as they should be, but how they are. But as the comedian Lenny Bruce noted; everybody wants what should be, but what should be does not exist. There is only what is. Slang is. Call me a cynic, but to me slang paints a picture that shows ourselves at our most human. Which doesn’t, unfortunately, mean nice. Slang is an equal-opportunity vilifier. Look at those words: to steal from the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who was talking about human beings, nasty, brutish and short.
Let us not get too gloomy. Slang may suit the times but it also defies them. Unlike the demagogue it does not lie. It lives to deflate pomposity. It’s subversive, mocking, in short, it takes the piss. Critics of the great American essayist H.L. Mencken, eviscerator of every brand of his countrymen’s infinite worship of charlatanry – read him now, his heyday was the 1920s, but all Trump is there – denounced him for lacking ‘the sentiment of reverence’. Slang follows suit and always did.
Like us, slang saves itself through a love of humour and a ca
pacity for wit. It may be somewhat dark-hued humour, and the wit a little cruel, but the aim holds true; you gotta laugh. It is my intent that via the overview that follows, there will at least be moments when you shall.
So what are slang’s stories? They work on two levels; the theme and the etymology. The stories that slang tells itself, one might say, and those that lie behind the words and phrases that make up its vocabulary. To put it another way: the general and the specific. The intention of what follows is to take a look at both.
Compared with standard English, slang covers a narrow waterfront – it offers a few slogans, most of them sexual, but doesn’t philosophise; it doesn’t ponder abstracts, preferring the hard-edged concrete. On the other hand it digs deep: its primary themes number less than thirty, but it mines them for every possibility. As offered in the OED, standard English offers 102 synonyms for ‘have sexual intercourse’ and of these seventy-two ’fess up with their label ‘slang’. Slang itself offers 1,600 more, though in fairness, since such is the way of a good deal of slang, this in turn has a certain circularity since many will play with standard words to achieve its seditious and counter-linguistic effect.
So what do we have? Five thousand terms for criminals, four-and-a-half for drinking and drunks, and four thousand for drugs. Three thousand for women (almost invariably considered negatively or at best congratulated only on their sexual allure), twenty-five hundred fools, twenty-two hundred men (of various descriptions, not invariably, but often self-aggrandising). Twelve hundred homosexuals and another twelve hundred whores, a round thousand police. There are seventeen hundred terms for fucking (plus 240 for oral sex, 180 for anal and sixty-five for STDs), fourteen hundred apiece for penises and vaginas, six hundred and fifty for the anus and buttocks, three hundred and fifty for promiscuity. And on it goes: death and dying, 831; violence and assault 728 and outright murder 521; madness 776; shitting and pissing 540; ugly 279; fat 247; vomiting 219. Will that do?
As for etymology, those stories are offered by the words themselves. In truth the bulk of the slang vocabulary is based on standard origins. Often the pleasure is in the manipulation of those well-known words for manipulation’s sake – playing, punning, tweaking, twisting, turning inside out and round about. Dog, for instance, is good for two hundred-plus reinter-pretations. Such playfulness, I like to think, is another very human trait. But while there are tales to tell, and my aim is to tell them when they are on offer, they are not always to be trusted. We may have chapter and verse for sweet Fanny Adams but only a selection of theories for Betty Martin (she of all my eye and . . . ). And even when the slang collectors believe they’ve nailed a given story, they are not invariably trusted, given the Internet’s open-all-areas access and disdain paraded by what Mencken would have termed ‘the plain people’ for ‘experts’, who at all costs must not be seen as knowing ‘better’. Who needs ‘truth’ when you’ve got popular etymology. Fuck from fornicate under command of the king, shit from store high in transit, nitty-gritty as the detritus of a slave-ship hold . . . that sort of thing.
With all that in mind Stories of Slang makes no claims for narrative, let alone plot (other than, being slang, there will be no happy endings, other than the – literally – tacky pun enshrined in that phrase). This is not The Story of Slang, of which I have written elsewhere and which might be seen as a lengthy and never-to-be-finished race in which the hare-like coiners and users try to keep ahead of the slow-but-steady linguists and lexicographers. What you have here is far more random (in the standard sense). The exploration of some of the themes that are listed above, and of the individual words and phrases they have, and continue to throw up. If that offers something of an olla podrida, even a gallimaufry, so be it. No one ever pretended it wasn’t a messy world.
Carry on Barding, or, Much Ado About Pistol’s Cock
THE NATURE OF slang – seditious, obscene, impertinent, too often lacking, we have to admit, the supposedly necessary seriousness of tone and depth of topic – means that many of its keenest users are not rated among the lit. crit. pantheon. That isn’t to condemn them to mere hackery. But in the end, however much we revel in Seth Morgan, Helen Green van Campen, such best-sellers as George Ade or Irvine Welsh, and others who run glorious riot with the lexis, there just aren’t that many superstars. Not a good career move? Low on creative writing sinecures. Yet for all those who opt to steer clear, some of the giants do nod in slang’s direction.
Thus the greatest of them all, Shakespeare, uses, at my count, just over five hundred ‘slang’ terms, of which 277 are currently the first recorded use of a given term. Among these are every mother’s son, fat-headed, heifer (for woman), pickers and stealers (hands), small beer (insignificant matters), what the dickens, and many more.
The Bard (which naming seems to have been made first by the actor David Garrick in 1769) is not alone.
There is Dickens, for instance. No one then or possibly even now could claim to know London as did he, and that meant knowing its language as well. Slang, in context, gives authenticity and Dickens was happy to draw on it. So too did such contemporaries as Harrison Ainsworth or Edward Lytton, but where they seemed to have the dictionary in one hand and the quill in the other, hunting and pecking for juicy syllables, with Dickens the seams never show.
The slang in, say, Oliver Twist, is one more way in which the novelist displays his mastery of the environment. Fagin the fence, Bill Sikes the swell mobsman, the Artful Dodger, that downy cove (though not Nancy, who for all her actual profession – a whore, and not a very classy one; the world would have called her a tuppenny uprighter – is female and as such sacrosanct and speaks standard English) are all imbued with cant, the language of the professional criminal. One does not ring a bell but jerks the tinkler, the handkerchiefs the gang steals from juvenile kinchins (i.e. German kindchen, a child) are fogles (from Italian foglia, a leaf or French slang fouille, a pocket), and Fagin, hoping for a lagging (from lag, to carry away, in this case in the form of transportation to Australia) will end his days scragged (from scrag, the neck), or hanged on the gallows erected outside the Stone Jug (a jug that contains people rather than liquids), Newgate jail.
Moving forward, no one could have been more loving of slang, and so wondrously productive in his use of it than P.G. Wodehouse, whose one hundred-plus books provide nearly 1,500 examples. Browsing and sluicing (eating and drinking), soup and fish (a dinner jacket), ranny-gazoo (perhaps from dialect ranny, rash and French slang gazouiller, to sing), ‘rum goings on’, and oojah-cum-spiff (oojah defeats research, spiff means first-rate), exactly as required. The fact that Wodehouse blithely intermingled these Edwardianisms with such modern American terms as bump off, chucker-out and four-flusher (from poker) merely ups the humorous ante.
Another example: James Joyce. It may come as a surprise to find that Ulysses, a book often cited as the greatest novel ever written and as such rated as somewhat serious, is a contender for slang stardom, but so it is. Joyce, always a connoisseur of language, was as keen on slang as the rest of the dictionary and his magnum opus has nearly a thousand slang terms. For a book that is celebrated for the recreation of a single day, 16 June, 1904, Joyce is splendidly all-encompassing in his borrowings. There is rogue’s language from 1560 and Kiplingesque soldiers from the Raj, alongside stage Irishmen, English toffs and so much more.
However, as the chapter title should have made clear, what we are discussing here is Shakespeare. So let us do so.
This, for instance, is Shakespeare:
Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.
W. Shakespeare The Tragedy of Hamlet,
This is definitely not:
Dr. Kenneth Soaper (Kenneth Williams): It has been my experience that once young people sample the delights of country life and the wonders of nature they just can’t get enough of it.
Miss Haggerd (Hattie Jacques): Exactly.
Dr. Kenneth Soaper: Well I was thinking of the girls . . .
Miss Haggerd: So was I.
Dr. Kenneth Soaper: Exactly.
T. Rothwell Carry on Camping or
Let Sleeping Bags Lie 1972
Definitely not? Are we sure? It is tempting to ascribe the latter scene to the former, what the lit. crit. world calls intertextuality and what the less guarded among us might see as plagiarism. Not so, and it would be to traduce Talbot Rothwell, the ex-pilot turned Carry On scriptwriter, who surely picked up his double entendres in the wartime RAF messes of which he was doubtless an adornment, rather than from scanning the Bard. In any case, the point is the reverse. Not that Carry On films jam an elbow into your ribs, removing it only to jab it back even harder, but that Shakespeare, that epitome of ‘literature’ was already there so long before.
‘Pistol’s cock is up and flashing fire will follow.’ Is that the late Frankie Howerd drawing an insinuating breath? Or maybe Kenneth Williams. But in fact it’s Shakespeare, in Henry V (c.1600). And do not be fooled, Britain’s most celebrated citizen knew exactly whereof he spoke. Shakespeare is awash with double (and even single) entendres, a veritable Carry On . . . of his era.
Nudge-nudgery has always lain at the heart of British humour. Playing with words is central to slang, and even if not (quite) everything is smut, the double entendre is ever-present. The jolly rustics spouting low humour have a time-honoured place in theatre; indeed the first ever recordings of slang in French are in thirteenth-century passion plays, in which the rib-ticklers are delivered in the very shadow of the cross. Chaucer too can offer piety, but, typically in The Miller’s Tale, he also gives us plenty of bawdy. But Hamlet is hardly a laff riot, and Hamlet’s double entendres – lap: vagina, c(o) untry matters, and nothing, again the vagina, which Francis Grose in his 1785 slang dictionary defines thus ‘( )’, i.e. ‘nothing’ – are delivered reflectively, and shortly after he briefs the Players on the delivery of their play within a play. It is one of Shakespeare’s many great speeches, and there are no rustics here, no nudges either.