Lost English

by Chris Roberts

  Ham-and-egg shift

  This basically meant the eight-hour day shift from ten to six, usually, though not exclusively, in the mining industry. There has been a strange and ongoing evolution of work terms since the eighteenth century, a time when the Monty Python gag about ‘working twenty-nine hours a day’ would have been lost on many mill owners. Before the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s and early 1800s, working hours were dictated, far more than is the case today, by the seasons, daylight, saints’ days and the weather. Over time Factory Acts, fourteen of them over a one-hundred-and-fifty-year period starting in 1802, regulated hours and improved lighting, which brought the possibility of twenty-four-hour shift working. From the 1860s unions campaigned for the ten-hour and then the eight-hour day, and more recently the target has been a forty-hour week, alongside a great deal being said about the desirability of a better ‘work-life balance’. Ironically, the very technology that has enabled flexitime and home working has damaged this balance further by allowing work to bleed into the home space. This does at least mean one can choose meal times, even if ham (fatty meat) and eggs (cholesterol) in the modern diet are frowned on, while the steep decline in heavy industry in Britain since the Second World War has also seen off ‘the ham-and-egg shift’ as an expression.

  Hardtack

  Many words and phrases have been lost since the end of conscription into the armed forces with the phasing out of National Service in the UK (it finally ended in 1963), but hardtack belongs primarily to the nautical tradition (‘tack’ being sailor’s slang for food, akin to ‘tuck’). Also known as ‘sea biscuit’ or ‘ship’s biscuit’, it is a hard-baked, flour-based cracker that was cheap to produce and, crucially, could be stored for a long time when other foods might have gone off. A similar type of ration is still used today by those exploring inhospitable environments, but hardtack goes back to the sailors of ancient Egypt and the soldiers of the Roman Empire. There hasn’t been too much demand in civilian society for hardtack (which can be dipped in tea to add flavour and soften the biscuit), but if times ever get really difficult economically a batch can be cooked up by mixing flour (two cups), salt (six pinches) and half a cup or so of water. The resultant dough must then be baked for a couple of hours before being cut up into biscuit-sized pieces and baked again.

  Heath Robinson

  Charming expression for anything that is impractical and eccentric, from ideas and schemes to, most often, designs for products which, if judged sufficiently over-complicated or impractical, are frequently denounced as ‘Heath Robinson contraptions’. The term is owed to the illustrator and cartoonist William Heath Robinson (1872–1944), who delighted in sketching unlikely-looking machines designed for highly irregular jobs (rocket-delivered lunch hampers for pilots, for example). His cartoons poked fun at, especially, the supposedly labour-saving inventions that began to proliferate in the early twentieth century, and he specialized in drawing ludicrously over-complicated devices ostensibly designed to perform simple, or even pointless, tasks. Once in common use, ‘Heath Robinson’ is not much heard now, being largely meaningless to a generation raised on computer games, DVDs and graphic novels.

  Here’s how!

  One of a delightful series of lost, or rarely heard, toasts that includes ‘Cheerio!’, ‘Chin-chin!’, ‘Bottoms up!’ and ‘Down the hatch!’ Several of these refer to the actions involved in downing, say, a gin and It (q.v.) or other ‘short’, and may or may not be accompanied by the clinking of glasses together. (It has been said that the original notion behind this was to slop drink between glasses, thus rendering poisoning attempts less effective.) The salutes have largely been replaced by the ubiquitous ‘Cheers!’, the affected ‘Skol!’ or ironic variations on ‘Mud in your eye!’ Perhaps the finest toast of all to have disappeared, or rather to have altered its meaning, is wassail (now usually taken to mean ale or wine mulled with spices), as in the Christmas carol ‘Here We Come A-Wassailing’, for which the best-known words date back at least to the seventeenth century, but are probably from much earlier. ‘Wassail!’ (‘Be in [good] health!’) is actually the opening part of a Saxon toast – though it may have originated with Danish settlers – to which the reply is ‘Drinkhail!’ As Bill Bryson explains in Notes from a Small Island (1995), this could be repeated until all participants were ‘comfortably horizontal’.

  High days and holidays

  This, which today is a term for special occasions, is to some extent a tautology, in the sense that the word ‘holiday’ derives from ‘holy day’, while ‘high days’ were really just the most important of these religious festivals in the Church calendar – thus the highest holy days are Christmas and Easter, for example. Either way, though, a high day or a holy day meant a break in the regular pattern of daily life, work and worship, and time off from labouring, and so they came to be regarded as special days. Originally some of them would have been the standard national (and international) Church festivals mentioned above, whilst others might have had more local significance (such as Wakes Weeks in Lancashire). Although the word ‘holiday’ dates from the early Middle Ages, a time when the Church had enormous power and influence over people’s lives, today we use it in this sense for bank holidays and other official days off, or to mean a break from work or from some situation, place, or even person. In general speech, high days seem only to survive in the expression, for you never hear someone say ‘You realize that Sunday is a high day?’ The even more old-fashioned expression ‘red-letter day’, meaning a day that is going to be or has become special, dates from the eighteenth century and also comes from the Church, from the custom of highlighting festivals on a printed calendar by printing them in red.

  Home Service and Light Programme

  By as early as 1925 BBC Radio, with its lofty mission to educate, inform and entertain, reached most of the UK. It faced no national competition for nearly seventy years and no (official) local rivals until 1973. Even the unofficial opposition was overcome when the BBC poached the best disc jockeys, including Tony Blackburn and Dave Lee Travis, from offshore pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline. During the preceding decades the BBC’s Home Service and Light Programme were listened to by virtually the entire nation. (The more cerebral Third Programme, now BBC Radio Three, was not launched until 1946.) The Light Programme emphasized entertainment although, unlike one of its successors, Radio One, it was not entirely music focused, giving the nation such programmes as The Archers (which is still with us, on BBC Radio Four) and Life with the Lyons, a 1950s sitcom on both radio and television (which is not).

  In 1932 the BBC set up the Empire Service, which became the Overseas Service in November 1939, a few months after the outbreak of the Second World War, when broadcasts were made to Europe; these were taken over by the European Service, which started in 1941. In 1988 the name World Service was adopted for what had become known as BBC External Services, with a remit not so far from George V’s first-ever Royal Christmas Message to the Empire, to broadcast to ‘men and women, so cut off by the snow, the desert, or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them.’ It did, and sometimes still does, offer an interesting portrayal of an almost vanished Britain. Programmes that the Home Service, in the form of Radio Four, would not consider broadcasting (Dave Lee Travis’s irksomely upbeat Jolly Good Show, say) were still being beamed abroad into the twenty-first century.

  Both the Home and Overseas Sections of the BBC provided English-speaking people not only with news and topical comment – the first broadcast about the colour bar (q.v.) in Britain was in the 1940s – as well as music of many kinds, drama, comedy and much else besides, but also a large number of catchphrases, some of which remain a vital part of the language. These include ‘I don’t mind if I do,’ ‘After you, Claude’ and the subsequent Internet message-board favourite ‘TTFN’ (‘Ta-ta for now’). All of those came from Liverpool comedian Tommy Handley (1892–1949), whose own personal catchphrase, ‘It’s that man again,’ has, ironically, vanished.
His comedy show of the same title, usually shortened to ITMA, ran on the Home Service from 1939 to 1949. It will be interesting to see if many of today’s favourites phrases from radio and television have the same reach.

  Hugger-mugger

  This term, which dates from the sixteenth century, generally means confusion or disorder, but was formerly a word for secrecy, and especially in describing people operating clandestinely together but often in a rather chaotic fashion, so that it is the confusion of action or language that bewilders outsiders as much as the secrecy. Thus to be hugger-mugger with someone meant that you shared their secrets, although often only in a specific area relating to a project or plan.

  Like ‘hush-hush’ or ‘on the QT’, these rather quaint expressions are being replaced by harsher modern alternatives. However, nothing is as extreme as the latest, and totally unrelated, use of ‘hugger-mugger’ by the police. They coined it to describe a form of robbery in which an apparently drunk, but jovial, stranger embraces people on the street as a cover for stealing from them.

  Indian giver

  Offensive and, given the historical facts, rather ironic term for someone who offers a present then asks for his gift back, or who makes it clear that he expects to receive something in return. It belongs in the same category of expressions as ‘Dutch treat’ or ‘Spanish practices’, though in this case it is the Native American population that is being insulted. Originally – and unsurprisingly – an American and Canadian term, it dates back to the eighteenth century, and most likely arose because of what might politely be referred to as cultural differences over ownership and trade. Considering how cheaply Europeans acquired the island of Manhattan – said to have been in return for trade goods to the value of sixty Dutch guilders – to pick just one example, it seems only fair that the natives should get a little something back elsewhere.

  Invacar

  These light-blue, fibreglass-bodied three-wheeled cars, designed for use by the disabled, were once better known by another term which thankfully is now as defunct as the vehicle itself. The first were designed after the Second World War by the motorcycle engineer and designer Bert Greeves (1906–93), who built one for his paralysed cousin and then expanded production to meet the needs of the many disabled servicemen, winning a contract from the government to supply what were then called ‘invalid carriages’. Various models were tried but the most popular was Greeves’s Invacar, made at Thundersley in Essex, where he also designed and built innovative motorcycles that won considerable success in competition. It was claimed that the Invacar could reach a speed of 60mph, and they were much the most numerous of the designs to be found on Britain’s roads; the last was produced in the 1970s. The old DHSS (Department of Health and Social Security, which had succeeded other variously titled ministries involved in the programme) had been funding the production and technically all the cars were owned by the government, as they were leased to drivers as part of their disability benefit.

  Their decline was precipitated by other state-inspired mobility schemes and the introduction of new and more stringent safety regulations, and after 1 April 2003 they were banned from the roads, even though at that point there were only some two hundred left in use. Occasionally one may still spot an Invacar stored amidst other refugees from a previous age, though most were recalled and sent for scrapping. Bert Greeves was appointed MBE for services to the disabled; given that some thousands of his Invacar were produced over more than three decades, providing hitherto undreamed-of mobility and independence to disabled drivers, it seems a rather thin reward. The Greeves motorcycle concern folded in the late 1970s.

  Jam sandwich (or jam butty)

  Affectionate term, coined in the 1970s and still in use in the 1990s, for a type of police car which was distinguished from the traditional blue ‘panda’ patrol cars by being both larger and faster, and by having a fluorescent-red horizontal stripe running along its sides, sandwiched between the white of the rest of the vehicle. There is less differentiation between types of police vehicle today as any might be called on to engage in the type of rapid-response work that was formerly the preserve of the jam butty. Oddly, perhaps, there seems to be no equivalent slang term in wide use today, despite the obvious Battenberg-cake markings of modern police vehicles.

  Jerrycan (sometimes jerrican)

  A steel container for fuel originally designed in Germany – where it was called the Wehrmachtskanister, meaning, loosely, ‘armed-forces container’ – in the 1930s, and stockpiled secretly in the run-up to the Second World War. They were stronger, and easier to handle and pour liquid from, than alternatives used by the British and American forces, and as a result they were soon copied by both major Allied powers. In a nod to the original design these copies were known as ‘jerrycans’ after the nickname ‘jerry’ (Boche, q.v.) for a German. Current versions are more likely to be made of plastic, but their shape and size owe everything else to the German originals, even if they are no longer referred to as jerrycans.

  Joey

  A very good example, perhaps, of one use of a word hastening the end of another. In the aftermath of a 1975 BBC TV Horizon documentary, called Joey, about Joseph Deacon (a man born with severe cerebral palsy and other conditions) arose the unfortunate use of the term ‘joey’ to describe anyone with a (perceived) physical or mental handicap. (Joey Deacon died in 1981, aged sixty-one.) The term, along with the equally offensive non-medical use of ‘spastic’, which had gone well beyond the realm of playground insult, did not survive the different political climate of the 1990s. By then, however, it had certainly banished the other once-common use of ‘joey’ to mean a clown. This had derived from the famous English clown Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837), whose character, Joey, is regarded as the first modern clown. Grimaldi is remembered every year at the Clown’s Church, All Saints’ in Dalston, in Hackney, East London, and his ghost is said to haunt more spots in London than any other spectre, except possibly Winston Churchill’s. Grimaldi was also responsible for introducing the dame to pantomime, as well as the idea of audience participation in a show.

  Knickerbockers

  Knee breeches (also called ‘knickers’ in the US): a sort of loose-fitting trouser gathered in at the knee or, sometimes, the calf, and once extensively worn by schoolboys and sportsmen, including skiers and mountaineers. Stylized versions are still worn by golfers (very baggy ones are called ‘plus-fours’, less baggy ‘plus-twos’, from the extra width in inches) and baseball players, and some British private schools still retain them as part of the uniform, though they are rarely referred to by their proper name. The New York Knicks basketball team does not wear them, but the side’s name derives from a nineteenth-century nickname for a New Yorker. Both this and knickerbockers owe their names to the same source: a satirical work by the American writer Washington Irving (1783–1859) entitled A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, supposedly by a Dutchman named Diedrich Knickerbocker and first published in 1809. As a result, ‘Knickerbocker’ came to be used as a nickname for any American descended from Dutch settlers, of which there were many in New York, and hence by extension for a New Yorker – and, ultimately, the Knicks. It is thought that the knee breeches gained the nickname from the illustrations in Irving’s book, many of which depicted Dutchmen wearing them. Today, the word’s only widespread use in Britain is as part of the name of a rather complex ice cream, the Knickerbocker Glory. The garment itself is still widely worn by walkers (especially on the Continent) and field sportsmen, though generally referred to as ’breeches’ (pronounced ‘britches’) or ‘breeks’.

  Lascar

  A sailor from India (or other eastern countries) employed on European ships over the past five hundred years. The word derives from the Persian laskar, meaning army, which in the seventeenth century the Portuguese adapted to lascari to refer to an Asian soldier or sailor. The English term lascar, referring specifically to men serving on ships, often under extremely harsh contracts, cam
e from this. The Navigation Acts of 1660 attempted to restrict the number of Asian sailors on any given ship to one third of the full complement of crew, but these strictures were abandoned in subsequent years. The Honourable East India Company recruited seamen from the Gulf and India, and from the nineteenth century on a number of these established small settlements in several ports and cities in Britain. With the decline in British shipping and the Empire, as well as its slightly negative connotations, the word has gently slipped away, although it is found in, for instance, several of Joseph Conrad’s novels, and forms part of the title of Rozina Visram’s 1986 study, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700–1947, while Spike Milligan’s immortal comic novel Puckoon (1963) mentions a ‘one-eyed Lascar from a coaling ship in Belfast’.