The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  Let us start, however, with doctor itself. The word multitasks, though its meanings are far from traditionally medicinal. Standard English doctor means to mix or to adulterate, and slang borrows it for a drink containing milk, water, rum and nutmeg, for alum, when used to adulterate food or drink (thus keep the doctor, to sell adulterated liquor), and for brown sherry, which is a mixture of sherry and wine, thus gaining its darker ‘brown’ tint. Then there are the more ‘medicinal’ uses: as a hangover cure, and as any form of alcohol used as a restorative. To go to (see) the doctor or have a doctor’s appointment are euphemisms for having a drink. The equation of doctor with the final throw in a game of dice or ninepins presumably nods to the medico’s appearance as life ends; he can also be the cook on an Australian sheep station (borrowed from the seaborne doctor, a shipboard cook, or New Zealand’s whalers’ doctor, a Maori slave used as a cook.)

  The UK’s Bingo (US Lotto), where the doctor means the number nine, provides various synonyms: the doctor’s shop or favourite and doctor’s orders. All go back to the military use of pill number nine, the most frequently prescribed medicine in the Field Medical Chest; there is also a reference to the nine months of pregnancy, after which one ‘calls for the doctor’. The final noun use is gay, and refers to a man with a large penis: he gives you ‘an injection’. The doctor’s curse is a dose of calomel and the doctor’s loss is one pound sterling (perhaps referring to a fee which he lost were the patient to die). Australia’s go (through) or look for the doctor was a racing term wherein one rider and his mount move significantly ahead of the field; this was recycled for use beyond the racetrack as meaning to bet all one’s money and after that to go full tilt at something or to commit oneself wholeheartedly. Used in the plural doctors were counterfeit coins or loaded dice. To load the doctors was to slip them into the game and to put the doctors on was to start using them.

  Slang’s default doctor is mendacious, cack-handed, greedy and preys gleefully on the gullible. This is the quack, a term that appears in the mid-seventeenth century and while one might have equated the ‘quack’ with verbosity of the high-pressure salesman, the term abbreviates quacksalver, a sixteenth-century term, which was borrowed from Dutch, where it meant one who cures with home remedies. The snake-oil salesman is similar, but much more recent (snake-oil was seemingly used in traditional Chinese medicine but its modern version – no snakes were ever harmed in its manufacture – was merchandised by a variety of twentieth-century charlatans). The quack toured the country, appearing at fairs and similar rural entertainments, usually accompanied by a couple of clowns. Such gurning, capering entertainers enjoyed a number of names. The jack-pudding and pickle-herring were stock figures (the latter, whose origins were in Holland and also served slang as a nickame for the Dutch, was usually accompanied by his broomstick), and as the Supplement to the Memoirs of Mrs. Woffington, being the atchievements of a Pickle-Herring (by ‘Buttermilk Jack’) put it in 1760, the celebrated actress ‘well knew that a Pickle-Herring or Jack-Pudding gave more Joy to three Fourths of the World than the rolling Thunder of a SHAKESPEAR’. There was the zany, which slang borrowed as sawney and translated as ‘laughing stock’. The name comes from Italian commedia del arte, where zani play servants and act as clowns. Finally the merry-andrew, usually found at London’s annual Bartholemew Fair, which seems to commemorate the performer of a specific sideshow.

  In 1785 Francis Grose could offer another name: the crocus metallorum, usually crocus or croacus. It meant either a doctor, fake or otherwise, or a beggar who posed as one. Originally an army term, the obvious root is a pun on croak, to die or kill, but this is so far first recorded at least twenty years later, and the OED suggests ‘the Latinized surname of one Dr Helkiah Crooke, author of a Description of the Body of Man, 1615, Instruments of Chirurgery, 1631, etc . . .’. The assumption that ‘Dr Crocus’ was a quack adds a further possible link, to hocus-pocus, itself meaning variously a conjuror, a juggler or his tricks and drugged alcohol. For fairground workers crocus remains a doctor or a herbalist, even a self-proclaimed miracle-worker (in market use, where the word played on crocus, the flower, he was a fair-weather trader who only worked during the spring or summer). Metallorum, literally ‘of metals’ plays on the ‘real’ crocus metallorum or crocus antimonii, both of which are more or less impure oxysulphides of antimony, obtained by calcinations. Crocus produced a variety of spin-offs. The crocus-chovey was a chemist’s shop or a doctor’s consulting room (chovey continues to defeat all etymologies); the crocus-pitcher or crocus worker synonyms for the itinerant quack and the crocussing rig the job itself. Crocus-tan remains a hospital for Romanis.

  Other quacks have included the horse-leech (used in standard English as a vet and assumed to be based on the use of bloodsucking leeches in medicine; however it is arguable that the meaning runs in the opposite direction, and it is the worm’s function as a ‘doctor’ that gives it its own name). Vet itself has also been borrowed for human doctoring. There is the med- or medicine-man and the medicine sharp, sharp being an all-purpose and long-established – 1680 – adjective for a wide range of cheats, not merely card-hustlers. Similarly multi-purpose is America’s jackleg, which applies to an incompetent, unskilled or unprincipled worker or professional person, especially a quack doctor, a corrupt lawyer or a hypocritical preacher. Where jack-leg originates is unknown: the current theory is a mix of jack, as in the given name and thus a generic for ‘simple, common’, and leg as a version of the earlier blackleg, a racecourse swindler. Perhaps fittingly, this does not inspire confidence.

  If the quack was not selling a variety of distasteful, but almost certainly useless potions, then his stock-in-trade, bullshit aside, was pills. So too the legitimate physician. An early term for pills (usually large) was bolus and that, or brother of the bolus, meant a doctor or apothecary (a prototype pharmacist: the name goes back via French and German to Greek, where apoteke meant a store-house; the original apothecaries sold spices and preserves as well as drugs).

  Modernity prefers the simple pill or pills, both of which mean a doctor, as do pill-shooter, -slinger, -driver, -masher, -peddler, -pusher and -roller. The pharmacist is a pill-grinder (from an era when pills were created in-house) or pill-puncher. The most recent iteration is the pill mill, a doctor’s surgery, often in a run-down area, in which the bulk of prescriptions are written for drugs which are then sold in the street.

  As well as giving out pills, there are other medical tasks. The piss-prophet, the water scriger (a possible corruption of scriver, a scribe) and a knight of the pisspot (also an apothecary), all reflect the useful role that an analysis of urine has long played in diagnosis. There is the clyster-pipe (from the standard clyster-pipe, a tube used to administer clysters, or enemas) and the squirt which draws on the use of squirts or syringes. Other apothecaries included the mixum, which was what he did, and the gallipot, properly a small earthen glazed pot, especially when used by apothecaries for ointments and medicines (the ultimate root is a pot that has been carried or imported in a galley). The knight of the pestle is another, especially one who prescribes for venereal diseases. (Francis Beaumont’s 1607 play The Knight of the Burning Pestle played with that meaning, among those of other sexual double entendres.) More recently one finds the needle man (also a drug addict), a needle pusher and a needle puncher.

  Dr Draw-fart is another itinerant quack. In standard English a chancre is a syphilitic lesion, but the shanker mechanic is just a doctor, the disease he treats is not necessarily an STD. Nor is the twat-scourer invariably focused on the vagina. A baby-catcher means a midwife as well as a doctor. Finally the US military Band-Aid, a brand-name equivalent to the UK Elastoplast, though the latter has failed to amuse slang.

  If the simplest term of all is the abbreviation doc, then after quack, the best-known is probably sawbones. It must have been earlier, but the first recorded use is still from Dickens’ Pickwick Papers: ‘What! don’t you know what a Sawbones is, Sir? [. . .] I thought everybody know’d
as a Sawbones was a Surgeon.’ There were, if later, bone-juggler and cross-bones and bone butcher. Which leads to Australia’s butch and a number of other terms in which the physician’s role is seen as promoting not so much cure but kill. There is Dr Death, a prison doctor; 007 who is ‘licensed to kill’, a body-snatcher or corpse provider (both of which usually refer to ‘resurrection men’) and the cow-killer who is barely safe with animals, let alone humans. As for croaker, a staple of noir fiction, there are no chronological problems here: the term which appears in 1859 could look back to crocus, but it could equally play on croak, to kill, recorded in 1812. It gives croaker joint, a hospital or surgery; nut croaker, a psychiatrist; a croaker’s chovey was a pharmacy. A stir croaker was a second-rate, barely qualified doctor, assigned to prison work; he was also known as a ford, any generally antagonistic or unhelpful doctor and based on the perceived inferiority of a Ford automobile.

  A few other terms include the rhyming gamble and Proctor, the punning guinea pig (like slang’s lawyers its doctors are always focused on the fee, which was traditionally counted in aristocratic guineas rather than plebian pounds), the cranker (from German krank, sick) and a med.

  Slang seems to have overlooked the nurse. Her earliest incarnation was a gamp, in memory of the fictional Sarah Gamp, created by Charles Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4). Otherwise we have the modern candystriper, Scotland’s milk woman – a wet-nurse (thus the green milk-woman, one who has only recently given birth) and needle queen.

  The references to bones, above, can also describe a surgeon, whose primary task seems to have been equated by slang with amputations. As well as those there are the bone-bender, -breaker, -butcher, -carpenter and -chiseller. He could always be simple bones. His other skills produced little better, e.g. flesh tailor or lint-scraper who was a junior surgeon and capable of nothing more sophisticated. A pintle-smith or pintle-tagger did not in fact focus strictly on the pintle or penis but was just one more hacker. The -smith suffix is as in blacksmith, the tag meant to stitch together. There was also the still mysterious nimgimmer, who specialised in STDs. Finally, suggesting an early disparity between doctors’ and surgeon’s fees, there was the crime of clacking the doctor, impersonating a doctor in order to rob a surgeon. Clack meaning chatter, referred to the spiel thus involved.

  If, as noted, the croaker is a regular in noir fiction it is because he often pursues a lucrative sideline; the supplying of prescriptions for ‘recreational’ drugs, usually narcotics. Such a doctor sails (‘close to the wind’), turns (against professional ethics) or writes, and is known as a writing croaker or an author. In the criminal reversal whereby right equals corruptible, he can also be a right croaker. The hungry croaker is equally amenable and, for whatever reason, is willing to prescribe drugs for any user who asks for them. A prescription is abbreviated as a script: it gives script doctor, another writer, and the modern script mill, a doctor’s surgery where, for a price, one can obtain prescriptions for narcotics, painkillers or whatever hits the mark. The ice-tong doctor was usually employed elsewhere: as an illegal abortionist – absent proper forceps ice tongs were seen as a necessary tool of the trade – but he often compounded one crime with another and was happy to supply illegal drugs. Some doctors resisted: the junkies called them poison. Dr. Feelgood did not. Created by the blues pianist Piano Red (William Perryman) playing in 1962 as ‘Dr Feelgood and the Interns’, the original doctor focused strictly on sex. The doctor was all size-freak, setting out a minimum weight of ‘400 pounds’ and instructing the girls ‘If you don’t weigh what I want, baby, don’t bother to come around.’ There were no drug references. By 1971, the other end of the Sixties, the meaning had changed. The doctor had become one who obliges patients, often showbusiness or entertainment celebrities, with amphetamines or narcotics, which, although the user has no real medical need for them, guarantee ‘good feelings’. The term isn’t used in the lyrics, but the Beatles ‘Dr Robert’ (1966) a real-life Harley Street dentist, fitted the bill.

  Of course you have to ask first. The doctor, however bent, is not usually waving a prescription across the desk as you walk in. Something melodramatic is needed and slang notes several examples of the type: essentially a fake fit – allegedly brought on by the agonies of narcotics’ withdrawal – after which the doctor, possibly quite amenable in the first place, has no choice but to reach for the prescription pad.

  There is the brodie, which honours Steve Brodie, a 23-year-old New York saloon-keeper who on 23 July 1886 allegedly leaped some 45m (135ft) from the city’s Brooklyn Bridge in order to win a $200 wager. He survived the fall and was scooped out of the East River by a friend in a small boat. He was subsequently charged by the police with attempted suicide. Whether he actually made the jump remains unproven (the witnesses, all of them his friends, claimed that he did, but the general consensus was that a dummy was tossed over the bridge and Brodie, hiding on shore, quickly swam underwater to the point where it had hit the river, in time to be ‘rescued’). This scepticism is reflected in theatrical jargon: a brodie, a (much touted) flop. In drug terms, it simply means a fake. Other versions include the circus, a figure-eight, in which a fit is augmented by much tortured twisting of the body, the twister, which one frames, is similar, as is the wing-ding, which one throws. One who performs the latter is a wing-dinger.

  Slang’s dental surgery is small and to the point; all terms focus on the tooth carpenter or snag-catcher, sitting you down in his tooth booth or house of pain doing something unpleasant and nasty to your teeth. There is the anomalous and hard-to-under-stand kindheart, used around 1610–20, but this possible irony aside all else is barren.

  All terms depend on parts of the mouth. There are the fangs, the teeth themselves, which give fang-bandit, -carpenter, -hustler, -man, -lifter, -faker and Mr Fang; plus fang chovey (from cove, a man) or factory, a dental surgery. There is a gum-digger, otherwise -puncher, -smasher, or -tickler. The ivory-carpenter or ivory-snatcher. The jawsmith, jawbreaker or jawbone breaker, jawbone doctor, jawbuster or jaw puller. Last the tusk-hoister or tusk jerker.

  If the ice-tong doctor prefers to hide his gruesome kit, others of slang’s abortionists are less squeamish. Not that any of the associated vocabulary lets you off the hook. Perhaps the least offensive is the angel-maker, borrowed from France’s synonymous and equally euphemistic faiseur d’anges. Otherwise one has the lock-picker, the rabbit-snatcher and the pin artist. If the coat-hanger is mercifully absent, there are intimations in the grim collection around scrape: scrape job, scraping and scrape out. To procure an abortion is to crack an egg, to hoover, to bring it away and, in the Caribbean, to throw away belly. Cemetery, still in the West Indies, refers to a woman who has had (or is suspected of having had) an abortion. To make a woman one is the reverse of fall in two: to give birth, in this case the ‘other’ is no longer there. The seventeenth-century stifle the squeaker was baldly defined as to murder a child ‘and throw it into a House of Office (i.e. a privy)’.

  The ambulance, which slightly paradoxically comes from Latin ambulans, walking, but which came into use via the mobile hospitals invented during the Crimean War, makes its mark on slang. A blood box or blood wagon, a bang box (i.e. carrying those that have been ‘banged’), a bone cart or bone box, a fever cart, a butcher wagon or meat wagon (that which takes corpses to the morgue was a meat rack, nodding to the lack of comforts – why bother – within). The daffy chariot, accompanied no doubt by men in white coats, take the unfortunate eccentric to the mental ward. Similar conveyances included the green cart (an Australianism and not necessarily green, but perhaps reflecting the institutional paintwork) and America’s cookie truck, filled not with biscuits but kooks. At best it was a bus or the nicely punning pick-me-up. In New Zealand a St John’s Ambulance man is a Zambuck or Zambuk, and comes from Zam-buk, a proprietary antiseptic ointment. As explained on the Zam-buk website, ‘The word Zam-Buk originated in New Zealand, and was used to describe someone who administered first aid to wounded spor
tsmen.’

  Ambulances tended to be white, though they’ve turned yellow these days. The black maria is almost always defined as a van taking prisoners either to the police station or a prison but there is at least one example (perhaps in error) that equates it with an ambulance. The earliest recorded use, 1835, is found in New York, although it was well established in London by the 1860s. Its obvious origin was in the colour of the van, but just who was Maria, and for that matter why? Suggestions include an abbreviation of slang’s married, two or more prisoners chained together; a play on the -ria of Queen Victoria’s name (which fails in the face of its origins in the US, although V.R. for Victoria Regina was inscribed on the British vans) and Ephraim Brewer’s suggestion in the 1894 edition of his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable of a derivation from one Maria Lee, a Black madam of Boston, Mass. So large and fearsome was Ms Lee that she was regularly called upon by the local police to help them first arrest and then take criminals to prison.

  Then of course we have the ambulance-chaser, defined less than amicably as a lawyer who specialises in representing the victims of street and other accidents, to whom he offers his services – often appearing at the victim’s hospital bed to promise a substantial claim – which are accepted while the victim is still too shocked to make proper and rational arrangements. By extension the term suggests anyone who tries to benefit themselves by another’s disaster.

  If the ambulance lacks much sympathy, its destination, the hossie or hozzy, doesn’t improve matters. The hospital can be the blood factory, the body shop, the bone factory, -house, -shop or boneyard which, perhaps not coincidentally, can also mean a cemetery (as do the bone and skull orchard). The butcher’s shop is hardly cheering, while inside otherwise refers to imprisonment. The boogie or boogie house may sound fun, but the boogie in question is not dancing, or not directly, but a term for syphilis and is rooted in the standard English bougie, ‘a thin flexible surgical instrument made of waxed linen, india-rubber, metal, etc., for introduction into the passages of the body, for the purpose of exploration, dilatation, or medication’ (OED); the tool was used in the treatment of STDs, although a proposed link to the notorious Tuskegee experiments, clandestinely inducing African-American prisoners with the disease, known in slang as boogie, cannot stand up: the term existed since at least 1926 and the experiments began only in 1932. A hospital specialising in gynaecology is the cat’s meat gaff: gaff as in a place (originally Romani gav, a fair) plus a blackly humorous reference to the lungs and similar animal intestines that are used to feed cats and dogs. A spike, usually a workhouse or similar down-and-out’s hostel, can be borrowed in Ireland for a maternity hospital, the emphasis being on its lack of physical comforts. Laid up in lavender means put aside or pawned, thus in lavender refers to life in a charity ward; the inference being that one has been wholly forgotten. Last, and long gone, is the 1940s Harlem slang, a pad, i.e. house, of stitches.