Jesse James. A police magistrate.
Kidney-buster. A hard-riding truck.
Line load. A mixed cargo so stowed that its contents may be delivered in a straight line across town.4
Load of post-holes. No cargo.
Long nose, or rubber heel. A company inspector or spotter.
Men. The police.
Pension run. A short, easy one.
Punctured lung. A leaky radiator.
Scow. A very large truck.
Sleeper, or pajama wagon. A truck with sleeping accommodations, usually over the cab.
Soft coal burner. A Diesel truck.
Soup jockey. A waitress at a roadside stand.1
Spook. An insurance or safety inspector.
Sweat-shop. A bullet-proof cab with bad ventilation.
Swinger. A heavy load.
Wobbly hole. Neutral gear.2
The lingo of taxi- and bus-drivers differs a bit from city to city, but some of its terms seem to run through the country, e.g.:
Angel. A passenger who takes a cab for the evening, stopping at bars to drink.
Blimp. A worn-out car; a large bus.
Coolie. A driver who works long hours.
Damper. A taximeter.
Donkey. A traffic policeman.
Hack, or rig. A taxicab.
Hod, or scuttle. A Negro passenger.
Hot fare, or stiff. A passenger who fails to tip.
Hungry. Applied to a driver who cadges a tip by pretending to have no change.
Ink. Gasoline.
Jerk. A short trip.
Jockey. A passenger or friend who rides in front with the driver.
Liner. A passenger who asks to be directed to a brothel.
Long-haul, or run. A trip yielding a fare of more than $1.
Neutral, or newt. Silly, brainless.3
Tiddly. Smart or superior, as in tiddly uniform, tiddly sailor.
The lingo of deep-sea sailors (including whalers and fishermen) has produced so large and so accessible a literature1 that there is no need to deal with it here. Many of its terms have got into the common speech and are familiar to everyone, e.g., above-board, three sheets in the wind, Davy Jones’ locker, on the beach, bilge (buncombe), to pipe down, to be taken aback, plain (originally plane) sailing, ship-shape, half seas over, to give a wide berth to, to run afoul of, to keel over and to stand by.2 Coastwise, lake and river mariners base their talk upon the lingo of the deep sea, but the pseudonym of Samuel L. Clemens is a sufficient reminder that they also have some terms of their own.3 The argot of canalboatmen is now almost forgotten, but in its day it showed some picturesque terms, mainly borrowed from the speech of the yokels along the way.1 The men who load and unload ships are still a large and rambunctious fraternity, and their talk bristles with words and phrases unintelligible to the outsider.2 A few examples:
Ambulance. A wooden box in which small articles are hoisted.3
Big-money boy. A longshoreman handling explosives.
Boilermaker and helper. Whiskey with a beer chaser.
Captain Blood. A harsh boss.
Carrots and peas. Cronies.
Chain-breaker. A strong man.
Chop. Income-tax deducted from wages.
Crumb, or green pea. A man not trustworthy.
Dark cellar. A job on which men are paid less than the union scale.
Draft. A cargo.
Farm. An open space where freight is stacked.
Flame-thrower. A man successful with women.
For the church. Extra work done for nothing.
Glass arm, ten-ton Jack, lamb chop, or poor steel. A weak, lazy or otherwise poor worker.
Golden hours. Overtime.
Hero. A very diligent worker.
Made the parlor. Dead.
Marry the hook, v. To live and die a longshoreman.
Mission bell. A drinker of cheap wine.
Pick of the beach. A good worker.
Pie-card job. An office job.
Race-track. The route along which hand-truckmen follow one another.
Reindeer. A hand-truckman who works fast.
Riding. Loading.
Save-all. A safety net hung between ship and pier.
Scavenger. A longshoreman who eats the sailors’ leavings aboard ship.
Termite. One who curries favor with the foreman.
Under the hat. Wages under the union scale.
Uphill. The last hour’s work.
Warden. The boss.
To which may be added some terms of the men who build and service ships:1
After-birth. The sliding ways which cling to a ship after launching.
Baloney. An electric cable.
Duke. An inspector.
Furniture. Masts and rigging.
Gold room. A warehouse where valuable parts are kept.
Hat. A diver’s helmet.
Hole. A drydock.
Jesus slippers. Boots.
Kettle-buster. A boilermaker.
Meat-hook. A wire which ravels out when a steel cable is frayed.
Mill. A marine engine.
Pig. A welding machine.
Rig. A pile-driver.
Shrapnel. Bolts, rivets, etc., that fall upon workmen below.
Snake-rancher. An incompetent workman.
Spider. A painter.
Stick. Any timber more than 6 by 6 inches in size.
Third ear. An informer.
Undertaker bait. A man who takes dangerous risks.
Wheels. Propellers.
The automobile and the airship have both brought in large vocabularies of new terms. Many of those introduced by the former have got into the common speech, e.g., to park, back-seat driver, road-hog, to step on the gas, garage, detour, filling-station, gas (for gasoline), chauffeur, stream-lined, joy-ride, hit-and-run, jaywalker, fender, speed-cop, traffic-light, tourist-camp, safety-zone and to thumb a ride, and the meaning of many more is generally known, e.g., chassis, limousine, carburetor, tractor, station-wagon, rumble-seat, spark-plug and clutch,2 but there are others that remain the private property of the men working in automobile plants and of those who sell or repair cars. A few specimens:
Bald-head. A worn tire.
Bare-foot. A car without tires.
Barrel, or hole. An engine cylinder.
Bender, tomato, or puppy. A stolen car.
Canary, or cricket. A squeak in a car.
Chatterbox. A car radio.
Clinchers, or grippers. Brakes.
Firecracker. An engine that misfires.
Ginger-bread. Body trim.
Glimmers. Headlights.
Guess-stick. A slide-rule.
Handshaker. A foreman.
Headhunter. An efficiency man.
Hearse, moose, or steam-roller. A very large car.
Hell’s kitchen. A body shop.
Hide. Electric insulation.
Hoop, rubber, or gum. A tire.
Insect. A small defect in a new car.
Juice box. A battery.
Kalsomimer. A body finisher.
Kick the clock, v. To set back a speedometer.
Lid. A hood.
Liquor. An anti-freeze mixture.
Mill. An engine.
Old Man. A portable drill.
Orphan, or off-breed. An obsolete model.
Pot, strainer, or percolator. A carburetor.
Scalding. Welding.
Slushers. Chains.
Snort-pipe. The exhaust.
Tack-spitter. An upholsterer.
Umpire. An inspector.
Wind-bag. An inner tube.
Windmill. A fan.1
Jalopy is defined by the New Practical Standard Dictionary, 1946, as “a decrepit automobile or airplane” and marked “origin obscure.” Whether it arose among the airmen or the automobile dealers I do not know, nor am I sure about the spelling, for it has appeared variously as jalopy, jallopy, jaloppy, joloppy, jollopy, jaloopy, jalupie and julappi. Wentworth says that it was in oral use c.
1925, but his first printed example is dated 1934. The Winston Dictionary says that it was used by sports writers in 1924, in the form of julappi.1 Wentworth defines it as “an old (battered) automobile” and notes a derivative, sub-jalopy. By 1942 Berrey and Van den Bark had found it in use to designate a racing car and an airplane, and as a verb meaning “to ride in or drive a cheap or small car.” It began to attract the attention of amateur lexicographers in 1937 or thereabout, and one of them reported in 19382 that it had been employed by used car dealers and taxi drivers “for years.” A little before this another reported that he had encountered it in a film starring W. C. Fields, the comedian, “more than seven years ago.”3 In those cradle days it had many rivals, e.g., can, boiler, crate, knick-knacker, Napoleon, klunk, klunker, goat, goat-nest, stone-crusher, tramp, feed-bag, puddle-jumper, rattletrap, chug-wagon, whoopie, china-closet, slop-can, concrete-mixer, coffee-grinder, dog, hoptoad, heap, knockabout and tin. The etymologies proposed for it are numerous and most of them are highly unpersuasive. I offer the following as horrible examples:
1. “Old broken-down Fords were exported to Mexico, many to Jalapa. Hence, in Southern California, any floppy car became a jaiopy.”4
2. “In one of Galsworthy’s books he refers to an otherwise undescribed horse-drawn carriage as a shallop. Shallop is derived from the French challupe.”5
3. “Jaloppy or jallape is of Yiddish-Polish origin and a transliteration of the word shlappe, meaning an old horse.”6
4. “Jalopy … is simply the first three syllables of the Italian word for dilapidated, namely dilapidato, which is pronounced very nearly jih-lah-pih-DAH-taw.”7
5. “Working on the clue that the term is of oriental extraction, we have pin-pointed two possible derivations. One is the Hebrew word yalleph, which means a scabby substance, and the other is an Arabian word, jalab, meaning a leathern shield, skin or steel [sic].”1
6. “In Spanish a tortoise is a galapago.… The word might be used to designate a person or thing having the characteristics of a tortoise, which is noted for its slow motion and the age it attains, some of them living more than 200 years.… It is easy to think of natives near the Mexican border referring to old, slow-moving automobiles as galapagos, and to understand how galapago would become jaloppy.… Americans have always had trouble with the hard g.”2
7. “The readiest explanation is that jalopy is a distorted diminutive form of gallop, a term that was frequently used by collegians among the alliterative names painted on their leaping and bucking old open-air taxicabs.”3
8. “Webster R. Kent, of Memphis, Tenn., suggested in a telegram to Time, June 21, 1937, that jalopy came either from gallop, as mentioned above, or was a euphemistic contraction of dilapidated. A more whimsical attempt would relate it to jollop, a fowl’s dewlap or wattle.”4
Jitney and tin-Lizzie have also engaged the etymologists, but with no more plausible result. The DAE passes over both, but Gilbert Tucker, in his “American English,”5 traces jitney to 1912. On February 4, 1915, the Nation defined it as “the Jewish slang term for a nickel,” but Webster 1934 suggests that it may come from the French jeton, “a counter, token or metal disk,” and the New Practical Standard marks it “etymology obscure.” It must be older than 1912, but it did not come into general use until c. 1915, when it began to be applied to Fords operating as five-cent busses. By 1916 the Legislature of New Jersey and the City Council of Atlantic City were defining jitney in this sense: at the start it meant always a five-cent bus, but by 1922 it was applied also to busses charging ten cents.6 In American Speech, in 1933, p. 73, I noted that the term was already obsolescent,7 but this was presently denied by Miles L. Hanley,8 W. L. Werner9 and Harold Wentworth.10 It is, however, seldom heard today, for high taxes and franchise fees have driven jitneys from the streets of most American cities, and the term is but little used for a five-cent piece, though it retains some vitality in the general sense of paltry. Flivver, in many situations, is synonymous. It seems to have originated in college slang, and at the start meant a failure. In this sense it was used by Harry Leon Wilson in “Ruggles of Red Gap,” 1915. During the same year it was listed by Robert Bolwell as in use on the campus of Western Reserve University1 and four years later it was reported as high-school slang in the Southwest.2 It seems to have been applied to a Model T Ford, then the cheapest car on the market, before 1920; later it was also applied to various other inferior contrivances, including destroyers of 750 tons or less. In 1918 Arthur (Bugs) Baer used flivveritis in the sense of deterioration or ruin, but apparently without any reference to the Ford.3 Lizzie and its daughter, tin-Lizzie, may be derived from lizard, which the DAE traces to 1870 as the name of “a sled-like contrivance for hauling logs or other heavy objects.”4 The cowboys of the West also applied it to the metal horn of a saddle.5 Miss Warnock, lately cited, reported Lizzie and tin-can as Southwestern campus names for a Ford in 1919. Tin-Lizzie followed naturally.
The argot of aviators has been compiled in a workmanlike manner by Fred Hamann.6 “Aviation,” he says, “is less than half a century old, yet no other industry has originated a language as rich in slang, argot, colloquialisms and colorful terms.” Many of them are already familiar to everyone, e.g., to zoom, to bail out, on the beam, to fly blind, air-pocket, blimp, low (or high) ceiling, to hedge hop, to nose-dive and tail-spin. The airmen, like the railroad men, use many derisory terms in speaking of themselves and their apparatus, e.g., truck-driver, chauffeur or throttle-jockey for a pilot; paddlefoot, blisterfoot, ground-gripper or dust-eater for a member of the ground crew; clerk or pencil-pusher for a navigator; stooge or kid for a co-pilot; barrel or can for an engine cylinder; pants-slapper, blower, wind-mill, butter-paddle, club or fan for a propeller, and hut, greenhouse or pulpit for a cockpit. Not a few of these terms show Galgenhumor, e.g., meat-wagon for an ambulance, first man down for a flyer in trouble whose parachute doesn’t open, and funeral glide for a landing out of control. Some are also more or less indecent, e.g., joy-stick for the pilot’s control stick,1 and condom for a wind-cone. The airmen have borrowed heavily from the argot of sailors, e.g., to trim ship, log-book, tail-wind and rigger (applied to a parachute repairer), and also from that of railroad men, e.g., hoghead (the manager of an airport); that of lumbermen, e.g., haywire; that of actors, e.g., barnstormer; that of automobile-drivers, e.g., crate, flivver and hot (fast), and that of hoboes, e.g., hump (a mountain). The workers in airplane plants use many of these terms also, and their vocabulary is otherwise full of the terms in common use in all metal-working plants, but they also have some that I have not found elsewhere, e.g., blue ox, a bombsight; bones, the skeleton of an airplane fuselage (body); Buck Rogers, a rivet gun; bug-chaser, an inspector; knuckle-buster, a wrench; roof-rider, a crane operator; sewing-machine, an automatic riveter or welder; squawk, an inspection; tin-knocker, a riveter or sheet-metal worker, and fisterris and kajody, any indefinite object.2
Radio is even younger than the airplane, but its impact upon American life has been terrific, and so long ago as 1937 a writer on its vocabulary was calling it the fifth estate.3 That vocabulary is now large, but much of it is of very recent date. The word radio itself did not come into general use in the United States until c. 1920,4 and the English still seem to prefer wireless. Until the death of the Hon. Alfred E. Smith on October 4, 1944, there lingered some doubt among American fans as to whether the word should be pronounced ray-dio or rad-dio, and the learned still disagree about the conjugation of to broadcast. The brothers Fowler, in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, give broadcasted for the past tense and broadcast for the perfect participle; Webster 1934 allows broadcasted in the past “in radio senses”; the New Practical Standard ordains broadcast for both past and perfect participle. Many of the terms in use in the studios are loans from the stage, e.g., to ad lib, bit (a small part), blue (indecent), cast, character, cue, to double, dress rehearsal, flack (a press-agent), gag, grip (a stage carpenter), lead, emcee, props, show and turkey, and others come from the argot of
the movie-lots or the jazz-bands, e.g., canary, cliff-hanger, continuity, corny, 88, flesh-pedlar (a talent agent), groan-box, long-hair, schmalz, script and whodunit.1 The following, however, seem to be indigenous:
Across the board. A programme that goes on daily at the same time.
Adenoid. A vocalist with a muffled voice.
Arsenic. A boresome programme.
Beard, clinker, fluff, or kick. An error in a performance.
Belcher. A performer who is hoarse.
Belly-punch, buffaroo, or hup-cha-da-bub-cha. A joke which produces hearty laughter.
Bite off, v. To cut off a line or number while the show is on the air.
Blast. Over-loud transmission.
Bobble, v. To fumble, especially in reading lines.
Burp. An unintended noise.
Chromatics. Emotional acting.
Clambake, or clanaroo. A programme or rehearsal that goes badly.
Clientitis. Trouble with a sponsor.
Cow-hand. One who escorts visitors through a studio.
Crawk. An animal imitator.
Creeper, or mike mugger. A performer who gets too close to the microphone.
Cushion. Music played at the end of a programme to consume time in case it runs ahead of schedule.
Dawn patrol. Performers in early morning broadcasts.
Disk jockey, or pancake-turner. One who changes phonograph records.2
Dog. A time-worn song or gag.
Down in the mud, low level, or not enough hop. Singing or speaking too low.
Ear-ache. An actor who over-acts.
Fish-bowl. The client’s observation booth in a studio.
Frying. A hissing sound caused by defective equipment.
Gabber, or spieler. A commentator.
Gaffoon. A sound-effects man.
Gelatine. A tenor with a thin voice.
Hash session. A consultation before a broadcast.
Hook. “That part of the commercial which urges you to send in the box-tops.”1
Lady Macbeth. An emotional actress.
Line. A network.
Log. A record of a broadcast, required by law.
Madame Cadenza. A female vocalist.
Madame La Zonga. A performer who dances nervously at the microphone.
American Language Supplement 2 Page 101
