Yes, No, Who cares?
Cabell Calloway was one of the great big-band leaders of the 1930s and 40s. He succeeded Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, made ‘Minnie the Moocher’ a hit, travelled around America in a private train in which he kept his green Lincoln car, and, when not drinking and womanising his way around New York, he wrote a dictionary.
Cab Calloway’s Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive went through six editions between 1938 and 1944, and even includes a test section and translation essays. The idea was that the lonely American, exiled in the Mid-West, Deep South or Nameless North, could prepare himself for the lingo of the Big Apple. It can also be used in the office of the present day to startling effect.
A little preparation is required. Physically, you can only speak in hepster jive if you are sitting in the correct posture: slouched in your chair, eyelids half-down, legs stretched languidly under the table. If you have a toothpick, that’s good. If you have a canary yellow suit and a tommy gun, that’s better (although here you should consult the HR department about dress codes and office conduct). Now, suppose you wish to tell the speaker that you thoroughly concur and that you wish to progress their proposals proactively. Click your fingers, show some teeth and say, in the deepest voice you can: ‘I dig your lick, baby, I dig your lick.’
A lick here is, of course, an ostinato phrase played upon the brass or the piano forte, transferred metaphorically to the office, and dig means … well, digging means liking for reasons that nobody is really sure of. In fact, you can go one further than digging and simply exclaim: ‘That’s shovel city, man!’; although this phrase should not be used without careworn consideration, particularly of gender discrimination policies.
You can even be lukewarm and still keep things jive-assed. For example, if somebody is droning on and on about stuff that everybody at the meeting already knows, lean forward intently, stare threateningly into their face and say, ‘We’re all breathin’ natural gas’, thus implying by analogy that the information they thought they were revealing for the first time is already as common as air.
Downright disagreement can be properly imparted with the simple words, ‘I don’t go for that magoo’, and that should put an end to the subject.
So that’s ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Who cares?’, which is all you really need in life, and usually more than you need in the office where two of those will do. You can, if you like, take this principle further. Why stop at 1930s New York when you can go back to Victorian London and act like a sweet-faced orphan or undernourished Dickensian crossing sweeper? Of course, the costume is more demanding, but if your meeting room does have a chimney then you can burst out of it at the vital moment and register agreement by shouting ‘That’s screamin’, mister!’ And ‘I’m breathin’ natural gas’ has its equivalent in the words ‘I’ve seen the elephant, chum’, a reference to the fact that the travelling circuses of Victorian England had made elephants commonplace to all but the most bumpkinish of rustics. ‘No’ can be rendered by the enigmatic expression ‘Saw your timber’.
Mugwumpery
Whatever age or idiom you elect to use, the truth remains that if an argument breaks out everybody will start piling in. It’s what schoolboys at Winchester College would have called a Mons (whereby everybody jumps on top of one boy for reasons that remain suspicious). You are no longer a conventicle of thoughtful professionals, you are Dover Court: all speakers and no listeners.3 And it is time for a mugwump to step in.
A mugwump is a derogatory word for somebody in charge who affects to be above petty squabbles and factions. So when your boss tries to make peace at the meeting table like an impartial angel, he is being a mugwump.
Mugwump is therefore an eminently useful word. It has a preposterous sound: the ug and the ump get across the idea of plodding stupidity, and context can give it meaning.
The origin of the word is rather extraordinary and involves the first American Bible.
There was a seventeenth-century chap called John Eliot who was a Protestant, a Puritan and a colonist in America. He wanted to convert the local natives – the Wampanoag – to Christianity and to do so he needed a Bible in their language. He learnt Massachusett, the language of the Wampanoags, and then had to invent a writing system to get it down on paper. The result was Eliot’s Massachusett Bible of 1663: the first Bible ever printed in America.
Eliot had the perennial translator’s problem of finding words for concepts that don’t exist in a language. The Wampanoags had no centurions, no captains, no generals, and so what was he to do when such fellows cropped up in the Bible? He decided to translate all of them using the Wampanoag word for war leader: mugquomp.
Mugwump then disappeared for 150 years. There is neither citation nor quotation until the early nineteenth century when it reappears as a comical and derisive term for a boss.4
Mugwumpery can be dealt with in two ways. You can return to hepcat jive-talking and shout ‘Get off the fence, Hortense!’ This is an example of the mid-century American craze for throwing in a rhyming word at the end of a sentence, e.g. ‘See you later, alligator’, or ‘What’s on the agenda, Brenda?’ or ‘The figures from the third quarter are disappointing but we’re confident that we have the sales team in place to make progress in this exciting sector, Hector’.
The other way to deal with mugwumpery is to accept it and switch to log-rolling, which is an American term derived from the phrase ‘You roll my log, and I’ll roll yours’. Log-rolling can therefore refer to the mutual and excruciatingly boring exchange of praise and plaudits, as everybody agrees that everybody else is just super. There’s even a specialist term, literary log-rolling, that refers to authors writing complimentary reviews of each other’s dreary tomes. There should be an example on the back.
Discretion
And now, once the contekors have stopped quarrelling, the dust has settled and everybody has resolved on a course of aboulia (indecisiveness) and periergy (needless caution), the morning meeting can finally be wrapped up. Anything further would be supervacaneous. Most importantly, we should leave now before anybody mentions the tacenda. Tacenda are those things that must never be mentioned, like the fact that the company is effectively bankrupt or overstaffed or in breach of child labour laws, or all three. In fact, the tacenda is the absolute opposite of the agenda: those nefandous words that the tongue of man should never utter in front of his colleagues, but must instead be dedicated in reverent hush to Harpocrates, the ancient and terrible god of silence.
So take your harpocratic oath, gather up your things and dash out of the meeting room. You may even have time for a quick earnder, which is an old Yorkshire term for a morning drinking session.
1 Mataeology comes from the Greek mataios, meaning pointless, and logia, meaning words. This same root also gave the English language mataeotechny, which means ‘an unprofitable or pointless science, skill or activity’.
2 Apelles was Greek, but the only version of the story we have is in Latin.
3 The church at Dover Court in Essex once contained a speaking crucifix, which may be the origin of this expression. Apparently, the crucifix insisted that the church doors were never shut, and it was therefore filled with chattering pilgrims, which may also be the origin. Unfortunately, the cross was burnt to ashes by Protestants in 1532, so we can no longer ask its opinion.
4 So long is the silence that some say John Eliot’s mugquomp has nothing to do with the nineteenth-century mugwump. The OED avers that there is no reason to connect the two. I might believe the OED, were it not that the first modern mugwump it cites is from Vermont in 1828. Vermont is only just to the north of the Wampanoag homeland. This alone would test coincidence to the limit. The second citation is from Rhode Island in 1832 and Rhode Island is slap bang in the middle of Wampanoag territory. Had mugwump reappeared in California or Dorset, I might credit it as an independent coinage.
But geography being what it is, I am as certain as certain can be that mugwump is mugquomp, and that the first American Bible produced a fine American insult.
Chapter 6
11 a.m. – Taking a Break
Coffee – gossip – incredulity – cigarette
Since mankind first mastered the concept of the time, eleven o’clock has been the sacred hour of the mid-morning break. It is the holy hour of tea or coffee, and possibly a biscuit. At the eleventh chime of the clock, spring into inaction.
Even bears hold this undecimarian hour to be a time of eating and idleness, as is witnessed in the first book of Winnie the Pooh, Chapter 2:
Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o’clock in the morning, and he was very glad to see Rabbit getting out the plates and mugs; and when Rabbit said, ‘Honey or condensed milk with your bread?’ he was so excited that he said, ‘Both,’ and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, ‘But don’t bother about the bread, please.’
There are all sorts of words for this snack: elevenses (Kentish dialect), dornton (northern), eleven hours (Scottish), eleven o’clock (American) and elevener (Suffolk). An elevener is best, as it includes the possibility of a drink or tipple, whereas all the rest are teetotalitarian.
Of course, you mustn’t be lazy. It is important to work energetically at your coffee- or tea-making.1 You may bustle around with the mugs and spoons while the kettle thrumbles (makes that rumbling noise just before it boils). And that thrumbling will act as a summons to all the office gossips.
The word for a person who always wants to know the latest gossip and scandal is a quidnunc, which is Latin for ‘what now?’ The practice of being a quidnunc is called either quidnuncism or, slightly more delightfully, quidnuncery. There’s even an alternative term, numquid, which means exactly the same thing: ‘now what’ instead of ‘what now’. So as the tea brews, the water cools or the coffee percolates, it is time to drop your voices and quother, or speak in low tones of firings, hirings, of bonks and rumours of bonks.
Even if you don’t want to know ‘what now’, you will probably be told anyway. The following is from a dictionary of late eighteenth-century slang, but it rings terribly true today:
FIRING A GUN, Introducing a story by head and shoulders. A man wanting to tell a particular story, said to the company, Hark! did you not hear a gun? – but now we are talking of a gun, I will tell you the story of one.
Now they all come out: the rumours, furphies and strange tidings – the pure joy of being a rawgabbit and a spermologer. A rawgabbit, just in case you were wondering, is somebody who speaks in strictest confidence about a subject of which they know nothing. A rawgabbit is the person who pulls you aside and reveals in a careful whisper that the head of Compliance is having an affair with the new recruit in IT, which you know to be utterly untrue because the head of Compliance is having an affair with you, and the new recruit in IT hasn’t started yet. Nonetheless, as a careful spermologer you mustn’t reveal that you know too much. Being a spermologer isn’t nearly as mucky as it sounds. Though it does come from the Greek for seed-gathering, spermologer’s use in English is a metaphorical one for a gatherer of gossip and a seeker after scurrilous rumours.
You may begin to feel that you are in what Second World War soldiers called a bind.
Bind. This must be the most used of all Air Force slang expressions. It may describe a person who bores with out-of-date news or who is always in the know.
Hence:
Binding rigid. The act of continually retailing stale information.
Disbelief
Actually, though we are beside the kettle, most of the best rumours are started in the lavatory. The technical term for a story started in the lavatories is latrinogram, from gram being writing in Greek and latrine being, well, a latrine. Latrinogram is first recorded in 1944 as a British military term and was probably where guesses as to the date of D-Day were exchanged. So popular were wartime lavatories as a source of gossip that there’s a similar and slightly earlier version of latrinogram: Elsan gen, which is defined in a 1943 dictionary of services slang thus:
Elsan gen: News which cannot be relied upon. [Literally, ‘news invented in the gentlemen’s toilet’, Elsan being the trade name of the excellent chemical lavatories with which bombers are equipped.]
I’m not sure exactly how you would fit two people into the lavatories of an RAF bomber, or why indeed you would wish to do so. The rumble and thrumble of the engines might also make it hard to exchange the juiciest furphies in an appropriate quother. It therefore looks to me as though Elsan gen was a circumlocutory manner of saying that the information (or gen) was equivalent in quality to the stuff physically produced in such a cubby hole, and therefore fit only to be flushed out over Axis territory.
Soldiers of the Second World War seem to have spent as much time gossiping as fighting, if their slang is anything to go by. Aside from Elsan gen, they had duff gen (bad), pukka gen (good) and the gen king (the chap who knew all of the gossip before it had even happened).
All of the best rumours are false. The more that you yearn to believe a good yarn, the more likely it is that that yarn is mere flim-flam, flumadiddle, fribble-frabble, effutiation, flitter-tripe, rhubarb, spinach, toffee, waffle, balductum and bollocks.
This leaves the question of how you should respond to the Elsan gen. The politest method would be to tell your interlocutor that they are a controver, an obsolete word for an ‘inventor of false gossip’. Though it’s recorded in a dictionary of 1721 the word, for some reason, never caught on or even made it into any subsequent dictionaries. This strange vanishing means that you can call somebody a controver to your heart’s content and they’ll never know what you mean. Thus the cogs of office society can remain oily.
Alternatively, you can exclaim, as the Victorians would have done, that a story is ‘all my eye and Betty Martin’. The origins of this phrase are rather peculiar. The story goes that a British sailor happened to wander into a church in some foreign and Roman Catholic country. There he heard a prayer which of course sounded like nonsense to him because it was in Latin. So far as the sailor could tell, they were saying something along the lines of ‘All my eye and Betty Martin’. The original prayer was probably Ora pro mihi, beate Martine or ‘Pray for me, blessed Martin’, Saint Martin of Tours being the patron saint of innkeepers and reformed drunkards. Alternatively, it could have been Mihi beata mater or ‘For me blessed Mother’, making Betty Martin the Virgin Mary. So if you want to be sure not to blaspheme, you could just call your story-teller a blatherskite or clanjanderer. Or you could take a lesson from this singular dictionary entry:
DICK That happened in the reign of queen Dick, i.e. never: said of any absurd old story. I am as queer as Dick’s hatband; that is, out of spirits, or don’t know what ails me.2
This is my personal favourite, as it usually takes the other party a couple of seconds to figure it out.
Honesty is as under-represented in the dictionary as in life. It makes occasional appearances, such as:
BUFFING IT HOME is swearing point-blank to anything, about the same as bluffing it, making a bold stand on no backing.
But that’s taken from an 1881 dictionary of New York criminal slang, so it doesn’t fill you with confidence. The best you can do is a corsned, which was a part of ancient English law:
Corsned, Ordeal bread, a Piece of Bread consecrated by the Priest for that Use, eaten by the Saxons when they would clear themselves of a Crime they were charged with, wishing it might be their Poison, or last Morsel, if they were guilty.
As we are having elevenses, you may simply reach for the nearest chocolate biscuit.
Finally, there is the gossip that has neither the virtue of truth nor the fun of falsehood, and is merely old. A standard riposte to hearing old news is to say ‘Queen Anne is dead’. The phrase is first recorded in 1798 (Queen Anne ha
ving died in 1714), but it’s still used in British journalistic circles. It’s a slightly out of date expression for being out of date, but it does have the virtue of finality. And having informed your colleagues of the monarch’s demise, you may sneak off for a cigarette.
Cigarettes
James VI of Scotland and I of England was a misocapnist, i.e. he didn’t like smokers or smoking one little bit. In 1604 he wrote a pamphlet about how much he didn’t like smokers called A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco. A few years later the Bishop of Winchester translated Counter-Blaste into Latin. Why anybody would have bothered translating an anti-smoking tract into Latin is beyond me, but that didn’t stop the Bishop of Winchester. He called the translation the Misocapnus, which is Latin for ‘against smoke’, and the word blew gently into the English language as misocapnist (the noun) and misocapnic (the adjective).
The primary reason that James I didn’t like tobacco was that it was a habit newly imported from the American Indians, whom he thought simply horrible. He asks his subjects:
… shall we, I say, without blushing, abase our selves so farre, as to imitate these beastly Indians, slaves to the Spaniards, refuse to the world, and as yet aliens from the holy Covenant of God? Why doe we not as well imitate them in walking naked as they doe? in preferring glasses, feathers, and such toyes, to golde and precious stones, as they do? yea why do we not denie God and adore the Devill, as they doe?
The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language Page 6