The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  With its emphasis on trains, the individuals good and bad one might encounter on them, and begging, this offered much of the core vocabulary. Though jungle, an area usually outside of town where vagrants gathered to jungle up, swap information and stories, sleep and eat, is not found until 1914.

  One term London uses is bo, usually found as hobo’s abbreviation, but for him hobo described not the man but the small-town jail cell in which he was imprisoned. London’s definition was anomalous: hobo almost invariably meant tramp and the first recorded use to date comes in the Morning Oregonian of 14 September 1888: ‘I see by your puzzled look you do not understand what a hobo is. I will tell you what we mean by the term. It is a word used to classify all tramps and vags. The word first originated with the Independent Order of tramps, and was used by them as a sort of password. One tramp walking along the street seeing another whom by his general appearance he thinks belongs to the order says “hobo”. If the party thus addressed recognises the word, he stops and an acquaintance is struck up. Again, this tramp walking alongside a lot of freight cars stops at one in which he thinks there is a brother and repeats the magic word. It is a sesame and if this surmise is correct, the car door is drawn back and the man outside is received within.’ The greeting of ‘ho bo!’ (i.e. boy) implied here is undoubtedly one of the proposed etymologies, but there is as yet no concrete solution. What mattered to the hobos themselves was the precise status that ‘hobo’ gave them – he was not a bum, nor even a tramp. Mencken, in The American Language (3rd edn, 1936) understood the nuances: ‘Tramps and hoboes are commonly lumped together, but in their own sight they are sharply differentiated. A hobo or bo is simply a migratory laborer; he may take some long-ish holidays, but soon or late he returns to work. A tramp never works if it can be avoided; he simply travels. Lower than either is the bum, who neither works nor travels, save when impelled to motion by the police.’

  London was not the first to write of hobos. Josiah Flynt (1869–1907), a university-educated sociologist who, a little earlier than London, had spent several years on the road in the 1890s, had published Tramping with Tramps in 1899. It offered a glossary of ‘Tramps’ Jargon’. In a brief introduction he noted that the language was quite indigenous. There was no Hebrew, Romani or other European input. Hobos were as self-sufficient in vocabulary as in life: ‘They think that a good word is as much the result of inspiration as is a successful begging trick; and they believe, furthermore, that America is entitled to a cant language of its own.’ Even if as ever, the underlying requirement was the same: the need to talk in public ‘without being understood by others than those intimately connected with the life.’ He added that it was a mutable language, but always a simple one. ‘The main rule of the grammar is that the sentence must be as short as possible, and the verb omitted whenever convenient. [. . .] Hoboes say in two words as much as ordinary people do in four’, a pattern that he suggests reflects their continual onward movement, but seems a characteristic of much general slang and cant. He claimed some three thousand terms for the hobo vocabulary (though he offers barely 125 in his glossary) but many of them, as seen in his writing and that of his successors, are not especially hobo-centred but are drawn unchanged from general slang or cant.

  Flynt’s hobo glossary predictably overlapped with London, but offered various extras, which focused more on begging than on transportation: ball (a silver dollar), beef (an act of betrayal, also used verbally) and thus beefer (an informer), blanket stiff (a hobo), break out (to take up tramping), dead (either professing ignorance or having abandoned the road), dump (a lodging house or restaurant), flicker (to fake a collapse), Galway (a catholic priest), hoosier (used generically for a farmer), jigger (a fake sore or wound), mark (a good place to beg; a generous donor), moon (a night), Pennsylvania salve (apple butter), peter (knockout drops), repeater or revolver (a veteran), shove (a gang of hobos), sinker ($1) slop up (to drink heavily), snipe (a cigarette or cigar butt), square it (to rejoin the respectable ‘square’ world), tomato-can vag (the lowest order of hobo ‘who drains the dregs of a beer barrel into an empty tomato-can and drinks them’), and toot the ringer (ring a doorbell).

  In 1917 hobo life gained a best-seller and a star: From Coast to Coast with Jack London recounted, or claimed to do so, stories of the author’s adventures crossing America with the celebrated London during his tramping days. He signed himself ‘A-No 1, The Famous Tramp.’ It was not A-No 1’s first book: between The Life and Adventures of A-No. 1 (1910) and Here and There with A-No. 1 (1921) he wrote thirteen, and died a rich man on his royalties. Leon Ray Livingston (1872–1944) had been born in San Francisco and took to the road and rails from the age of eleven. He supposedly gained his monica (slang for a tramp’s nickname and subject to a good dozen spellings when it was written down) from a veteran vagabond who informed him ‘You’re OK, you’re A-No 1, kid.’ The books were published for a few cents each and on the cheapest of paper (today’s researcher has the invidious choice of leaving them untouched, or very likely snapping off every page that is turned); they were very successful. Thirty years after his death Lee Marvin played an approximate (and much more violent) version of the ‘famous tramp’ in Robert Aldrich’s Emperor of the North.

  Livingston, who carved his monica everywhere he went (plus an arrow indicating his next direction) claimed that his intention was not making money but pursuing a lifelong campaign to keep young people, generally adventurous boys, from the perils of the road. As he put it in The Curse of Tramp Life (1912), a book ‘absolutely suited to be read by the most delicate child as well as the most dainty lady,’ his primary object was ‘to prove to boys and men of restless dispositions, that by their heeding the “Lure of the Wanderlust,” they not only wreck their own futures, but very often the lives and happiness of their parents, and sometimes those of their families as well.’ Secondarily: It shows to intending runaways ‘what terrible punishment they must expect, should they be caught beating their way upon railroad trains’. And added ‘DO NOT Jump on Moving Trains or Street Cars, even if only to ride to the next street crossing, because this might arouse the “Wanderlust,” besides endangering needlessly your life and limbs. Wandering, once it becomes a habit, is almost incurable, so NEVER RUN AWAY, but STAY AT HOME, as a roving lad usually ends in becoming a confirmed tramp.’

  For those who listened, many did not; and setting aside the spirit of adventure, the hobo ranks were inevitably swelled by circumstance; soldiers returning jobless from World War I, and the thousands of those who lost their jobs in the Depression.

  One term common to Flynt, London and every hobo writer was gay-cat. In 1921 Patrick and Terence Casey made it the title of their hobo novel. The term has a number of meanings pertinent to hobo life: a young or inexperienced tramp, a hobo who accepts occasional or seasonal work and a tramp’s younger, homosexual companion. While a concrete etymology is unknown it is possible that this use of gay may suggest a transitional role between heterosexual gay, meaning immoral, and gay in its homosexual use. That said ‘The Kid’ who appears in The Gay-cat is not openly homosexual, although this too may be contemporary self-censorship by the author. Certainly the implication in much of the literature suggests that these younger companions may have had a sexual relationship with their older peers. There are a number of synonyms: lamb, punk, gazooney and road kid. Defining the widely used prushun, also found in Flynt, A-No 1, the Caseys and others, Irwin (1931) states: ‘A boy enslaved by an older tramp or “jocker.” The boy is forced to beg and at times to steal for the jocker, and is often forced into unnatural practices. Those “prushuns” who stay with their “jockers” for any length of time find themselves absolutely at a loss when the older tramp dies, unable to think or act for themselves. On the other hand, if the “jocker” fears that the “prushun” may betray him to the law, or if the boy grows so large that he is a danger to the older man, the “jocker” has little compunction about “losing” [i.e. murdering] the luckless “prushun.”’ The etymology of prush
un is unknown too. It is sometimes found spelled as Prussian, but the relevant national stereotype is one of kadavergehorsam (discipline that would make a corpse stand to attention) rather than playing the catamite.

  The Caseys added an Appendix to their novel, laying out the core vocabulary over a few pages. Calling up a century-old name they describe it as ‘the flash language, that peculiar argot or slang of the thief and hobo. It is as old as history and has been used as a means of safe communication in public for years.’ They suggest that ‘in this country today’ some three thousand ‘flash’ terms may currently be in use.

  The hobo, whether fiction or as an object of research, plays a major role in the books of the 1900s–30s. Among the prominent titles are by The Hobo (1923) by Nels Anderson (which includes a glossary) and Anderson’s pseudonymous Milk and Honey Route (1930) by ‘Dean Stiff’ (a given name that perhaps contributed to Kerouac’s adoption of ‘Dean Moriarty’, his fictional recreation of the endlessly peripatetic Neal Cassady), The Hobo’s Hornbook (1930) by George Milburn, Adventures of a Supertramp (1908) by W.H. Davies, Hobohemia (1956) by F.O. Beck, Boxcar Bertha (1937) by Ben Reitman, Adventures of a Woman Hobo (1917) by Ethel Lynn and Boy and Girl Tramps of America (1934) by Thomas Minehan. The Chicago novelist Nelson Algren, who put in his time on the rails, often touched on the hobo world, notably in such Depression-era pieces as ‘Thundermug’, ‘So Help Me’, ‘If You Must Use Profanity’ and ‘A Place to Lie Down’ written in the Thirties and issued posthumously in the collection Texas Stories (1995).

  Across the Atlantic the London section of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) laid out his experiences among the tramps. The book has a variety of slang, but it is not especially that of tramping; as he explains his topic is London slang (or as he describes it, ‘cant’) and swearing. Lying in the spike, the down-and-outs’ hostel, he notes such terms as he hears, but the list is short and nothing like that special language of the hobo. Other British tramp studies include and Travels of a Tramp-Royal (1932) and Tramp-Royal on the Toby (1933) by Matt Marshall, but again here there is relatively little compared with the wide-ranging US vocabulary. As the British beats would find twenty years later, one might yearn for the romance of travel but even Lands End to John O’Groats bears no comparison to New York to San Francisco or Chicago to New Orleans. And the language that they and their successors the hippies would use was pure-d American-made.

  Nonetheless, the British tramp did have some lingo. Examples on offer include these: atch (to arrest, i.e. catch), b.d.v (i.e. bend down Virginia, a cigarette stub), bimp (a five-shilling piece), black and white (tea and sugar), boat (penal servitude, which presumably harks back to transportation), bottom road (that which leads south from London to the coast), brass knocker (leftover food), camphor and moth (rhyming slang for broth). Carriage drag (a one-month sentence) expands on drag, which had meant a three-month sentence since 1833, chant (to sing for alms), chice or chis (nothing, and linked to the synonymous shice, a version of shit), chuck-bread (waste bread), click (money acquired through begging or trickery), and clods (copper coins). Cock-broth (strong, nourishing soup) was coined in 1661. There was crow (a lookout), semi-doss (a penny bed, extending the simple doss, first found in 1839), dolly (a candle) and dolly up (to heat water with a candle), on the downright (wandering as a beggar), feather (a bed), fiddling (selling matches), finish (methylated spirits) and flappers (the boards carried by a ‘sandwich-man’).

  Hallelujah was a Salvation Army hostel for the homeless; and slang added hallelujah garment, a swallow-tailed coat, as worn by preachers, also known as hallelujah peddlers, hallelujah-hawking, working as a door-to-door evangelist, thus hallelejah-hawker, the hallelujah lass, a young female Salvationist, and the hallelujah stew, which was served in hostels. The odd one out is hallelujah masher, defined as a second-rate dandy; the example suggests that the heaven he was proclaiming was strictly mercenary.

  Other tramping terms include galtee (to spend), gorm (chewing tobacco), hole (one shilling), huey (a town or village), jack off (to leave), jib (the tongue, from Romani chib, the tongue and earlier Hindi tschib, language), kill-me-dead (rhymes with bread), kite (a cigarette paper), knocker (an arrest), lettary (a lodging, from Italian letto, a bed and doubtless linked to Polari’s synonymous letty), lunan (a female), mashing (a portion of tea leaves and sugar, enough for one cup of tea), mickey (the casual ward, which was rhyming slang and ran mickey = mike = spike), monkery (countryside, from the Irish tinker slang Shelta: munk’ri, the country), reesbin (a prison and also Shelta), and mooch it (to live as a tramp; one of a number of terms found in pan-European slangs meaning concealment and/or cheating; these in turn suggest an old Germanic word meaning darkness or mist).

  Nark (a beggar who works part-time and lives permanently in a common lodging house), seems to be part of a group that, based on Romani nak, the nose, includes an informer, a miser and a generally irritating person. W.H. Davies in The Adventures of Johnny Walker (1926) explains ‘These three men were “narks”. In other words they were town beggars: men that had lost their homes and had to take refuge in a common lodging-house’ and adds ‘All true wanderers hate him.’ The implication is that he doesn’t move often enough to be trusted.

  The two penny rope was generic for a casual ward, a development of a primitive (and cheap) sleeping arrangement in which two ropes were strung across a room, with rough bedding (usually sacking) strung between them, on which bedless tramps could lean and fitfully sleep for a 2d. payment. Dickens gave it a walk-on in The Pickwick Papers (1836–7): ‘’Ven the lady and gen’lm’n as keeps the Hot-el, first begun business, they used to make the beds on the floor; but this wouldn’t do at no price, ’cos instead o’ taking a moderate twopenn’orth o’ sleep, the lodgers used to lie there half the day. So now they has two ropes, ’bout six foot apart, and three from the floor, which goes right down the room; and the beds are made of slips of coarse sacking, stretched across em.’ Come the morning the ropes would be untied; it was a rough awakening.

  A final group include the Romani motto (drunk), mousey (cheese), Mrs Greenfields (the open air, thus sleep at Mrs Greenfields, to camp out), props (trousers), raclan (a married woman, from Romani rakli, a girl), ruffer (a bed outdoors, possibly tied into old cant ruffmans, the bushes, though one should note simple ‘rough sleeping’), saddle (an overcoat), shackle-up (a midday meal cooked on the road). Shamrock tea is weak (it has only three leaves in it), a sinker (one shilling), skimmish (alcohol), slush (lodging-house tea or coffee), squealer (a pork sausage), tea and sugar man (a casual labourer), toby (to tramp the roads, from Shelta tobar or Romani tober, the road), two-ender (two shillings), whale and whitewash (fish in white sauce), and work the noble (to beg from an upper-class person).

  The hobo persists, as does the tramp, but in common with so many once independent areas of slang, the unique language seems to have faded.

  The Body: Only Man is Vile

  IF WE LOOK at what makes slang tick, the image we get is something like one of those pictures which draw a man on the basis of those physical bits and bobs that matter most. The picture we get starts off with disproportionately outsized genitals, pretty big arms and hands, maybe a substantial mouth, all balanced by an insignificant head and brain. Though the face, given human vanity, may be reasonably large as is the mouth within it. Science terms this image a cortical humunculous, a neurological ‘map’ of the body; the counter-language is less sophisticated. If you work from slang’s priorities, it’s all about sex and the physical appendages that make it happen. And although those pictures have also been conjured up to show off female priorities, slang remains overtly male. Or, if gender-neutral the default tends to assume a man (it rarely says ‘a male arm’, though it might, men’s point of view being ever-paramount, note a ‘female leg’).

  For our purposes here, let’s do a bit of gelding. Let’s resist it, as both varieties of down there stuff are so conveniently called. Tits and arse? Maybe, but frankly they’r
e pretty well represented elsewhere and it’s time to bring in the less celebrated parts. Slang isn’t an especial devotee of equal opportunity, other than in its no-holds-barred nastiness, but let’s go for a little affirmative action. Let’s look beyond those toys for boys and those dark, forbidding passageways. Let’s look instead at the head, face and mouth, at the arms and legs and the hands and feet. This not all-inclusive – I have had to resist the 101 terms for nose (foghorn, leading article, sensitive plant, trumpet . . . ) and those for ears (listener, hearing-cheat, lug, ginger-beer . . . ). Space is not helpful and slang remarkably encyclopaedic. So let us start at the top, and make our way down. Well, as I have explained, down-ish.

  The Head

  The head is well supplied by rhyming slang and those terms may as well be disposed of now. In some ways they’re an uninspiring lot, not much wit on the lines of such classics as saucepan lids and trouble and strife which had some kind of relevance to the word you were looking at. Just rhymes.

  So there’s ball o ’lead, cherry red, crust of bread (which is ‘on the top’), penn’orth of bread and gingerbread plus the slightly arcane twopenny which expands to twopenny loaf, and thus loaf of bread, which rhymes itself but actually comes a little later. There is lemon spread, which at least suits all that bread, lump or pound of lead, which given rhyming slang’s urge for self-abbreviation comes as lump ’er. There are rosy red and ruby red and the inevitable human beings, notably Uncle Ned, the fictional Judge Dread, and Kelly Ned, i.e Ned Kelly, the Australian bushranger. Rocky Ned was, however, a horse, albeit another Australian: a buckjumper, known as the ‘four-legged fury’. Tile usually stands for a hat, but it can mean the head beneath and rhymes with battle of the Nile, commemorating Nelson’s victory over Napoleon on 1 August 1798. Penny-a-mile is less impressive: it refers to Victorian cab-fares. Finally toffee wrapper, which rhymes with napper, and bundle of socks, which links to thinkbox.