The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  Later we also find this: the Captain is speaking to the 1st Lieutenant, about to go below to sleep with his wife (women, ‘legitimate’ or otherwise, being far from invisible onboard in this era): ‘Mr Hurricane . . . bear a hand and get your anchor a cock-bill.’ ‘It already hangs by the stopper. My shank-painter is let go; and I have roused up a good range of cable on deck.’ ‘Then let go the anchor.’ How the knowledgeable must have sniggered. Not only the anchor, which phallically dangles, there is the bob-stay, ‘a rope which holds the bowsprit to the stem’. Captain Grose (of the militia not the navy), writing twenty years earlier, has noted that the word had been grabbed by slang to denote ‘the frenum of a man’s yard’. Now it is the Captain’s turn for connubial pleasures: ‘Come, Cassandra [. . .] let us descend and turn in. If I don’t ease my laniard I shall carry away my bob-stay.’

  Moving beyond specifics there is a good deal more. In literary terms sailors were one of first occupational groups to be attributed a distinctive speech-style. Smollett’s Roderick Random offers Lieutenant Tom Bowling, described as ‘a scoundrel of a seaman [. . .] who has deserted and turned thief’. This is backed up lexically, and Bowling offers such as rigg’d, for dressed, shake cloth in the wind, for hurry up and don’t lag astern you dog’. Slang owes the sea a good deal.

  Other terms include these: to be adrift, loose and turned adrift, all mean to be discharged from work; to bring your arse to anchor, sit down; bring someone to their bearings, to bring them to their senses; cant a slug into your bread room, have a drink; fin, an arm; pump ship, to urinate; smash, mashed potatoes as originally served alongside a leg of mutton; floating academy, the prison hulks; nip-cheese, a miser was first of all a ship’s purser; deadlights, the eyes; shipshape, keelhaul.

  Nor by any means is it all sex, though splice, to marry, is of course based on seaborne imagery. And toplights are brought down from the masthead to stand for human eyes. Jonathan, for an American vessel, usually refers to any United States native (though originally a New Englander) and fits in the taxonomy of John Bull, Lewis Frog and the rest. (Its opposite number lime-juicer, thence limey, appears c. 1850.) Crappo, from crapaud, a toad, is a Frenchman (substituting for the usual frog which during the Napoleonic wars still seemed to refer primarily to the Dutch). The galoot, which is seen as echt ‘Wild West’ and meaning an awkward fool, began life afloat and meant a marine (the awkwardness implicit in his being ultimately a lubberly soldier). The etymology is lost but there are suggestions of the intensifier ker-, and Scots loot, a lout. The deliberate mispronunciation ossifer seems also to have originated on board. Lubber seems to come from old French lobeor, a swindler or parasite and of course leads to land-lubber, a landsman or incompetent sailor. The clumsiness implicit in the nautical use implies a further link to lob, a country bumpkin.

  Some parts are more versatile than others. The buttocks can be the beam-ends, the fantail, the keel, the poop or the stern. Certain bits of kit are popular. Beyond the literary double entendres above, anchor ranges wide. Setting aside anchor and chain, like ball and chain a wife, the noun means variously a pick-axe; a reprieve or temporary suspension of a sentence; brakes and thus drop, put on or slam on the anchors; a stickpin; thus anchor and prop, a stickpin with a safety catch that anchors it to the tie; one’s home, one’s address; a younger relation or other small child who ‘holds one back’ from social life. In phrases, to bring oneself to an anchor was to sit down; to drag one’s anchor, to go slowly or to idle, though the simple drop anchor means to defecate. To swallow the anchor means both to stop doing something and to give oneself up to the police. Meanwhile to drop anchor in bum bay refers to that portion of Churchill’s summary of naval traditions – rum, sodomy and the lash – that dealt in neither drunkenness nor flagellation.

  Let us conclude with food. Here we do step on board, but some things are just too tasty to miss. Sailor’s food irresistible? Only lexically.

  Rations came down to two words: biscuits and beef (though any meat that could be salted, e.g. pork, served muster). The first were of tooth-snapping solidity, the second was salted and not to be confused with what modern America terms corned beef (from the corns of salt used in its curing) and reaches its acme when paired with a bagel. The first were known as hard tack, the second as salt junk. The hard was self-evident; tack comes either from another piece of self-description, standard English tack, a quality of binding or solidity (and is thus linked to tacky, sticky), or from the pleasingly nautical tackle, which in this context is generic for food. Bread, which would be brown (and not only because of its inevitable population of weevils) was tommy or soft tommy (soft that is in comparison to the biscuits), which was a poor pun on Tommy Brown. If you soaked your hard tack in water and baked it with fat and molasses, it became dandyfunk, daddyfunk or dunderfunk and may represent a mixture of dandy, a sloop, and funk, a stench, though the link is unexplained. Salt junk (plus old or tough junk), which was dried and salted beef or pork (often the veteran of several voyages prior to being soaked and then eaten) played on the nautical jargon junk, old or second-rate cable or rope and possibly nodded to standard junk, a lump or chunk. The old rope imagery led naturally to a sailor staple: rope-yarn stew, from rope-yarn, properly used for twisting up into ropes. Alongside this was twice-laid, literally describing rope made from a selection of the best yarns of old rope, this dish was made of the salt-fish left from yesterday’s dinner, and beaten up with potatoes or yams.

  In time – such packaging was launched in 1847 – salt was replaced by tins. The meat, no longer stowed in casks down in the hold where the ship’s rats had been able to take first helpings, now came pre-packed and blessed with a new name: canned willie (the US army, similarly provisioned, called it corned bill). Why willie? The obvious, coarse etymology doesn’t stand up: that willie doesn’t come on stream till the 1960s and this was established by the late nineteenth century. Canned willie remains mysterious. And, memoirs suggest, inedible.

  It might, of course, have been eponymous: perhaps there was a hapless, anecdote-laden Willie. There certainly was a Sweet Fanny Adams, which does not only mean the landsman’s dismissive ‘nothing’ but to sailors denoted tinned mutton. The blackly humorous nickname was based on the brutal murder and dismemberment of eight-year-old Fanny Adams, at Alton, Hampshire, on 24 August 1867; the murderer, one Frederick Baker, was hanged at Winchester on Christmas Eve; 5,000 people watched the execution. There was also a real-life Harriet Lane, borrowed by the US Navy to mean chopped, tinned meat. In this case the reference was to Harriet Lane, the victim and wife of the murderer Henry Wainwright, executed 1875; coincidentally the USS Harriet Lane, launched 1857, was commanded by one Jonathan Wainwright, who was killed on board her during the US Civil War; the ship, however, was named for the niece of President James Buchanan. (The modern Navy offers a single anthropomorphism: baby’s head, a steak and kidney pudding, in which the smooth pastry rises like a shiny infant head.)

  It will not be surprising to find that the solution was stew. Lots of stew in various guises and with names to match. Aside from those already cited were those that, within context, were self-explanatory: choke-dog and dog’s body leading the way. Hishee-hashee presumably went back to hash, itself meaning stew and rooted in French haché chopped. Sea-pie suggested fish, but not to initiates. As defined in Smyth’s Sailor’s Word-book (1867) it was a dish of meat and vegetables, etc. boiled together, with a crust of paste, or ‘in layers between crusts, the number of which denominate it a two or three decker’. It was still being served in 1940s Borstals, as witnessed by a young Brendan Behan who recounted the bad boys’ aphorism: ‘Sea pie today, see fugh-all tomorrow’. It might also be called blanket stew, which applied to all stews that came with a pastry crust.

  There was more. The unappetisingly named slumgullion or slum was defined by the slang collector as ‘mean fish offal or other refuse’, and even more gruesome, ‘the watery refuse, mixed with blood and oil, which drains from blubber’, but even sailors were not e
xpected to consume that. Loblolly can be traced to the sixteenth century: it was a thick gruel, choked down by peasants as wells as sailors, and sometimes doubled as a simple medicine. The word may be no more than echoic; the sound of the thick gruel bubbling in a pot, alternatively, or maybe additionally, it reflects a dialect term lob, to bubble while boiling, especially of a thick substance like porridge and the Devonian lolly, broth, soup or other food boiled in a pot. On shore the word has also meant a country bumpkin, a weakling, a mudhole and a fat child (both in the US). The loblolly boy was a junior crew-member, irrespective of weight, who ran errands for his seniors.

  Burgoo and skillygalee, are the equivalents of Scotland’s porridge and Ireland’s stirabout: in all cases oatmeal boiled in water. The former sailor and novelist Captain Marryat called it ‘very wholesome’. More enterprising cooks threw in meat and veg. The literary publican Ned Ward, in 1704, cited it along with red herring and dried whiting as the Dutchman’s favourite food and once picked up by landsmen in Kentucky, burgoo became the basis of nineteenth-century ‘burgoo feasts’; British soldiers used it as a synonym for porridge. The roots lie in Arabic burgul, cooked, parched and cracked wheat. As for skillygalee, it defeats the etymologists, and reached a greater fame as the echt-workhouse/prison sludge, skilly, often paired with toke, i.e. bread. It was this that no doubt induced poor Oliver to make his celebrated request. Jack London described it as ‘a fluid concoction of three quarts of oatmeal stirred into three buckets and a half of hot water’, while a tramp told Orwell that it was A can o’ hot water wid some bloody oatmeal at de bottom.’ Lob-dominion –‘two buckets of water and an old shoe’ – was equally tasteless, and equally disinclined to confess to an origin.

  Some of these probably tasted good, or at least served to mask the basic ingredients, where lack of flavour was balanced only by a garnish of unwanted species of insect life. One definitely didn’t. This was soup-and-bouilli, thus characterised by William Clark Russell in his lexicon of Sailors’ Language (1883): ‘Soup-and-bouilli [. . .] taking it all round, is the most disgusting of the provisions served out to the merchant sailor. I have known many a strong stomach, made food-proof by years of pork eaten with molasses, and biscuit alive with worms, to be utterly capsised by the mere smell of soup-and-bouilli. Jack calls it “soap and bullion, one onion to a gallon of water,” and this fairly expresses the character of the nauseous compound.’ It is, however, the same bouilli that graces the traditional French kitchen, pieces of beef being simmered with vegetables to create a savoury stock, and that which lies behind bully beef, itself a variation on canned willie. More palatable – surely – was pillau, made of salt beef, fowl, rice, and onions, all cooked together. Indeed it sounds almost too good for the tars, and may have been officers only. It comes, just as does that featured in your local Taj Mahal, from Persian pulaw and Hindi pulāv, a dish of rice and meat.

  There were relatively few sweets. To steal from Russell again, ‘“Duff” means a large lump of flour and grease boiled in a bag; “doughboys” – pronounced “doboys” the o broad – are the same flour and grease in small lumps. Dough jehovahs are a Yankee pudding, and worthy of the people who first taught the British sailor to eat pork with treacle.’ The cowboy’s (dough god, a form of bread baked over an open fire (and thus kin to Australia’s damper) can’t be that dissimilar.

  Someone, of course, had to cook these savoury messes. The cook was the slushy, a name that came from his perk, the selling of slush, the refuse fat from boiled meat. The name, if not the job, has been picked up in Australian shearing camps; sometimes it means his assistant. The original slush fund was what he made from his enterprise. If he was not slushy, then he had another occupational title: drainings.

  Like a small child, forcing down the vegetables to reach the chips, let us save the best till last. The best: so they do say, even if not often at the time. This is lobscouse, best known this side of the North Sea as scouse and as such generic for native Liverpudlians and their dialect. The cultural commentator Jonathan Meades explains that ‘Lobscouse is labskaus in the Baltic, specifically in Schleswig Holstein, Lubeck, Hamburg, southern Denmark. It is beef and potato hash, the beef sometimes salted/corned. Unvinegared beetroot is sometimes added. It’s often served with a matjes herring and a fried egg.’ In his TV series Magnetic North (2008) he watched it being prepared: it looked like thick pink slurry but allegedly tasted just fine. The modern recipe seems somewhat more generous than the sailors’ version, though that boasted salt meat, biscuits, potatoes, onions, and spices and must have been a good deal tastier than the usual mush.

  The naming tradition has continued. An online list of ‘Navy Scran’ (from Scottish scran, ‘food, provisions, victuals, especially inferior or scrappy food’) notes these. Adam and Eve on a raft, eggs on toast, which has been used since the late nineteenth century in US short-order caffs; the addition of ‘and wreck ’em’, turns the eggs scrambled. There is hammy cheesy eggy topsides, a seaboard special, which may be a product of Far East pidgin; and there are such dubious delicacies as labrador’s arsehole (‘Sausage Roll – look at one end on and imagine’), bollocks in blood (‘meatballs in tomato sauce’) or Satan’s suppositories (‘Kidney Beans in Red Hot Chilli Con Carne sauce’). All are undoubtedly slangy, and such as shit on a raft (‘kidneys on toast’) are echoed elsewhere in America’s shit on a shingle (chipped beef on toast, usually found in prisons or messhalls) but they are best left on board, even if it may be that former matlows bring them into civvy street.

  No one, other than fiction’s Popeye the Sailor-man, seemed to eat spinach.

  Doctors & Nurses

  BUTCHERS, BAKERS AND candlestick makers . . . other perhaps than clergymen (such as bollockses, devil-drivers, tickle-texts, God-botherers, hymn-slingers, mumble-matins and pulpit-pounders) and lawyers (among them ambidexters, ambulance-chasers, pentitentiary agents, sons of prattlement and shysters) and others whose uniform contains the slabbering bib, the job (at least the legitimate variety: from commercial sex alone slang can come up with 914 whores, 235 pimps, and 29 bawds) is not that well catered. Fair enough, slang is hardly the language of legitimacy, let alone employment.

  There were a couple of formulas for job titles, both popular between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.There were brothers: among them a brother of the blade, a swordsman or soldier, of the mawley or bunch of fives, a prize-fighter, of the brush, both artist and housepainter, of the sock and buskin, an actor (a generic use of names for the low and high boots worn by classical Athenian actors), of the quill, a writer, of the whip, a coachman or cabbie (a brother of the whip and spur was a huntsman) and of the bung, a publican. Or there were knights: of the grammar, a teacher, the hod, a brickie, the napkin, a waiter, the rainbow, a footman (from his often colourful uniform), the pigskin, a jockey and the satchel a bookie. Brothers suggested the once powerful London guilds; not all knights were exactly ‘employed’ and many of the names suggest something of a joke: the knight of the black jug or of the brush and moon (a generic tavern sign) were topers, of the elbow, a card-sharp, of the collar or halter, a victim of the hangman, the jemmy, a burglar and the pit, a fan of cock-fighting.

  One profession stands out (other perhaps than the hangman amongst whose fifty-plus synonyms are Jack Ketch, the fluffing cull, the dancing master, the scragger and Nosey Bob). We’ve enjoyed the drink, the drugs, the debauchery, so what we do we need? Yes. The doctor.

  Slang’s medical interventions are irreverent, but nothing like the stuff that the hospital professionals create themselves, the true jargon of the profession. The classic term is the mid-twentieth-century gomer: a patient who is whining and otherwise undesirable. This has rival origins, the best-known being ‘get out of my emergency room’. Others include the ‘Grand Old Man of the Emergency Room,’ American TV’s echt-incompetent Gomer Pyle, gummer, one whose toothless mouth chews on its gums and gomeral, an Irish term for lout. Such patients may well receive an SFU 50 dose: this is the amount of a sedative o
r anti-anxiety medication that, in 50 per cent of the cases, causes a patient to ‘shut the fuck up’.

  There are many more. Among them the scalpel-happy cowboy, who operates first and thinks later; plumbers, urologists; gas passers, anaesthetists; and flea, an acronym for ‘fucking little esoteric asshole’ and applied to an intern. A child with a genetic or congenital condition is labeled FLK (‘funny little kid’), while frequent fliers are those who turn up continuously at an emergency room, whether they need care or not. Harpooning the whale is to give an obese mother-to-be an epidural; mother herself is also known as fluffy. There is a Hollywood code (or Slow Code): rather than the rush to the dying patient so beloved of TV drama, this is the reverse: come what may the patient will not live and the doctor simply strolls in, goes through a variety of rote procedures but is really playing for time until he or she can declare the unfortunate individual dead. Those who die have been discharged up or sent to the ECU (the ‘eternal care unit’).

  There is watering the rose garden, changing the drips on the geriatric ward. Finally, patients who exaggerate their symptoms, are dying swans (from the celebrated ballet) or Camilles, recalling the Dumas novel La Dame Aux Camélias, the highpoint of which is the heroine’s protracted death.

  These are slang, but localised, and unheard outside the ward or ER. (For those who want to pursue the lexis, I recommend the excellent http://messybeast.com/dragonqueen/medical-acronyms.htm

  This has a vast list including vet-speak, e.g. DSTO: Dog Smarter Than Owner). But slang’s own medical vocabulary is equally brusque, and the good bedside manner is not required.