Liberty bodice
Trade name of an undergarment for women invented towards the end of the nineteenth century and known in America as an ‘emancipation waist’. The clue to its function lies in the name, for the Liberty bodice offered the kind of freedom of movement denied by the corset and other Victorian underwear. The Liberty bodice was a sleeveless vest-like garment usually made of warm fabric, sometimes quilted, and often accompanied by suspenders to which stockings could be attached. The bodices, which remained on sale until the 1970s, and were worn especially by young girls, had no extra support built into them, unlike corsets. They derived from the Victorian dress-reform movement that wanted to liberate women from restrictive corsetry and excessive layers of underclothing. Parts of the manifesto of the Rational Dress Society (1881) might ring true today, as it railed against ‘any fashion in dress that deforms the figure, impedes the movements of the body, or in any way tends to injure the health. It protests against the wearing of tightly fitting corsets; of high-heeled shoes; of heavily-weighted skirts.’ Science backed up the claims of the campaigners for more ‘rational’ clothing, and in time women’s underwear became simpler and less confining.
Although Liberty bodices were originally targeted at lower-class women, especially the servant classes, the lofty aim behind them was to promote women’s health through participation in sports (by allowing much freer movement of the upper body), while alerting the public to some of the dangers of, for example, wearing corsets during pregnancy. There is no doubt that it lived up to its name, and that much of what the Rational Dress Society desired has come about. Some of the claims of clothing manufacturers and designers were more questionable, however. The German naturalist and physiologist Gustav Jäger (1832–1917) alleged that only clothing made of animal hair, such as wool, promoted vitality. In 1884 an Englishman named Lewis Tomalin opened a clothes shop in London named, in honour of Jäger and his theories (and with suitable Anglicization of the spelling), Dr Jaeger’s Sanitary Woollen System. Tomalin, who had translated Jäger’s work, and his descendants did rather well out of it – Jaeger became, and remains, an iconic British brand.
Lily-livered
Generally used to mean cowardly (or sometimes weak or timid), based on the medieval notion that the liver was the seat of courage; other terms include white- or, as Shakespeare has Hamlet describe himself, pigeon-livered. So if one’s liver was pale like a lily then clearly one was deficient in blood and therefore, following the medieval logic, lacking in full-blooded courage. The term is not much used now, not least because to call someone lily-livered is a considerable insult, while its close partner, ‘yellow-bellied’, has long since been reduced to plain ‘yellow’.
Lord Haw-Haw
Most commonly associated with William Joyce (1906–46), the nickname was also used more generally to describe anyone from the Allied side involved with pro-Nazi propaganda on the wireless (q.v.) in the Second World War. The most famous programme, titled Germany Calling after its opening line, was broadcast in English on the medium-wave station Reichssender Hamburg, and by shortwave to the United States. It started in 1939 and continued until 30 April 1945, when the British Army overran Hamburg.
The programmes attempted to discourage and demoralize British, Commonwealth and American troops, as well as the civilian population of, in particular, Britain, with exaggerated claims of German successes and Allied defeats. They also offered news of the fate of friends and relations who had been captured or who had not returned from bombing raids over Germany, which resulted in an audience made up in large part of those desperate to find out what had happened to their loved ones. The phrase originated in the Daily Express, where Joyce’s voice was described as speaking ‘English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way variety’. Besides Joyce (who was actually born in America to an English mother and an Irish father, and who, as an ardent supporter of fascism, fled Britain for Germany just before the war to escape detention), there was Wolf Mittler (a German national with a British education) and Norman Baillie-Stewart (a cashiered former officer of the Seaforth Highlanders). Baillie-Stewart served five years in jail while Joyce was tried and eventually hanged for treason, though his wife Margaret (Lady Haw-Haw) escaped prosecution. Many who lived through the war and can remember his broadcasts found that Joyce’s clear, mocking tones were among the worst indignities they had to endure.
LSD
Before lysergic acid diethylamide was a slightly scary glint in Timothy Leary’s eye, £sd (pronounced, and sometimes written, ‘l.s.d.’) was a common term for the British currency, sterling. The abbreviation stood for pounds, shillings and pence and originated from the initial letters of the Latin names for three Roman coins, the libra, solidus and denarius. This non-decimal system, with its tanners and bobs (qq.v.), meant that there were 240 pennies in the pound, which was made up of 20 shillings each containing 12 pennies. The system was based on the currency of the Roman Empire, and can be seen, historically speaking, in the pre-Napoleonic French and other abandoned currencies of Europe. With the emergence of the drug LSD in the 1960s, the opportunity for double entendre was too good to miss, one example being a 1966 single by the Pretty Things called ‘£SD’, but decimalization of the British currency in 1971 eventually did for the expression as applied to money.
Lucifer
As Boy Scouts know, the best thing for lighting a fire in the woods is a dry box of matches, but early examples of these, including the lucifer, had harmful side-effects. Samuel Jones perfected the friction match, invented in the 1820s by John Walker, whereby a mixture of chemicals would ignite if the head of the match was struck or rubbed against a rough surface. (Lucifer is the Latin word for ‘light-bringing’; it was also, of course, a common name for the Devil, who had originally been the Light-Bringer or ‘Light-bringing morning star’ before his fall.) Refinements continued through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, including the addition of white phosphorus, which reduced the pungent smell of the early matches. So by the First World War smokers were happily singing along to George Asaf’s famous song from 1915, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, which contains the lines: ‘While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag / Smile boys, that’s the style.’
Unfortunately, the use of white (and later yellow) phosphorus resulted in the horribly dangerous and disfiguring side-effect known as ‘phossy jaw’ and other bone disorders among workers in match factories, and also caused brain damage. From the late 1880s the Salvation Army led campaigns against the use of these chemicals in matches, and even produced its own brand of matches using the far safer red phosphorus; unsurprisingly, these were not called lucifers. Their campaign culminated in a law that prohibited the use of yellow phosphorus after 1910.
Lyons Corner Houses
For many children of the twentieth century a day out in London was not complete without a visit to one of the three Lyons Corner Houses in the West End. These were substantial buildings of up to five floors offering several restaurants, each with a live orchestra, as well as hairdressing salons, telephone booths, theatre-booking agencies and a magnificent food hall. (For those with aspirations the Corner Houses had two upmarket sister restaurants called Maison Lyons, also in central London.)
The British company J. Lyons & Co., founded in 1887, was at one time a huge empire, its core business being in food, catering and hotels, though in the 1950s it founded an innovative and successful electronics arm, which designed and manufactured computers (LEO – Lyons Electronic Office). The company’s 200 or so tea shops (the first opened in 1894, the last closed in 1981) were the most recognizable and popular part of the business, notable for their interior design and, until after the end of the Second World War, smartly uniformed staff (Nippy, q.v.). In 1973 the tea shops were remarketed as Jolyon Restaurants.
Later on the company expanded to include Steak Houses, Wimpy’s and Dunkin’ Donuts and merged with Allied Brewery in 1978 to form Allied Lyons. In the late 1980s the constituent parts, including Lyons Maid ice cream
, were sold off. Of all the varied products Lyons dabbled in, from tea to toothpaste and humbugs to hotels, it may be the tea shops – genteel, friendly places where it was hard to imagine anything really bad happening – that most will miss. Many Lyons products, however, live on, mostly under other names, while the tea shops and Corner Houses survive as fond memories.
Magic lantern
The forerunner of the slide projector, the magic lantern projected images on to a screen or other flat, vertical surface by means of an arrangement of mirrors and a light source, often an oil lamp, with a lens to focus the image. The use of light and glass (or other transparent material) to project images lasted long beyond the arrival of photography and film; indeed photography greatly expanded the number of available images. Neither a film nor a slide projector, however, can quite replicate the eerie flickering of the magic lantern, which, from its development in the seventeenth century, was quickly put to frightening uses with the horror shows, known as ‘phantasmagorias’, of Revolutionary France. In these, images might often be projected on to smoke to enhance the spooky effect, and in ‘The Casting of the Runes’ (1911) the ghost-story writer M. R. James wrote of a particularly devilish display designed to scare children out of their wits, since it featured what appeared to be a real demon. One of the earliest descriptions of the magic lantern, at least in Europe, came from Italy in the mid-sixteenth century, though magic-lantern shows reached the peak of their popularity in Victorian Britain three hundred years later, where patriotic as well as thrilling entertainments featuring a progression of slides amused children (and adults) of all classes. They could not compete with the cinema, however, and, went the way of the machines themselves, which are now collectors’ items.
Matinee idol
These belong to a bygone age of weepies and B-movies in which many people, perhaps a majority, watched their films at the local flicks (q.v.) in the afternoon. In a pre-television era, when fewer women worked outside the home, cinemas enjoyed far larger daytime attendances than they do now, which might account for why the term was applied almost exclusively to male stars. Several of these acquired insanely devoted followings, and some briefly entered the language in their own right (the expression ‘to be in like Flynn’, meaning to act swiftly or impetuously, to seize an opportunity, refers to Errol Flynn), whilst others were never true film stars but occupied a role akin to actors in today’s afternoon soaps. Their heyday was from the 1930s to the 1950s, and the use of the phrase began to die out as cinema-watching habits changed, especially after television became widespread, although you may still hear someone described as having ‘matinee-idol looks’. The more general modern term ‘movie star’ covers a far broader spectrum of actors, from big screen to home cinema, as well as encompassing both sexes.
Milk bars
Although there are still a few remaining, including a number of Willie Griffiths’s National Milk Bars, the idea of fashionable youth congregating in milk bars has vanished, as has the use of the phrase as a generic term rather than to indicate a specific venue. Griffiths opened his first in 1933 in Colwyn Bay and at its peak his empire stretched to seventeen in Wales and bordering English counties. Other chains and one-offs spread across the whole country – by 1936 there were more than 1,000 milk bars – and their popularity gave rise to the famous Korova Milk Bar in Antony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), which in turn inspired the cult New York nightclub of the same name founded in the 1980s. It is, however, unlikely that Mr Griffiths, originally a dairy farmer from mid-Wales, would have approved of the substances sold at either of those, and any milk and cream they might have sold certainly did not come from his farm at Forden. In the milk bar’s heyday there was even a National Milk Bar in Liverpool’s Lime Street station to greet Welsh Beatles fans with a taste of home, which was frequented by the band themselves, and it was in Liverpool this century that attempts were made by council leader Warren Bradley to turn boarded-up pubs into twenty-first-century milk bars for the city’s youth.
Mods and Rockers
There are still ‘Mod’ nights in Brighton today, and it appears to be one of those rare subculture words that will remain with us. ‘Rocker’, too, looks like sticking around, although its meaning has shifted away from motorbike-riding ‘greasers’ simply to mean someone who likes rock music. What has, perhaps thankfully, departed is the notion of Mods and Rockers going toe-to-toe (aggro, q.v.) on the seafronts of Britain.
The phenomenon first occurred in the 1960s, with swarms of young people descending on motor scooters (parka-wearing Mods) or motorbikes (leather-clad Rockers) on South Coast resorts like Brighton, Bournemouth and Margate. Since the two groups’ tastes in everything from means of transport to clothes to music were almost diametrically opposed, it should not have been a great surprise when they clashed, sometimes violently. It was in Margate, one May bank holiday weekend in 1964, that the local magistrate told the offending invaders they were ‘unkempt, mentally unstable, petty little sawdust Caesars who can only find courage by hunting in packs like rats.’ Similar tear-ups occurred in the Mod revival of the early 1980s but since then the idea of Mods and Rockers has become rather quaint, and it’s hard to believe that they had once inspired so much panic, anger and soul-searching, fuelled by the almost hysterical reactions of the media. They also inspired Stanley Cohen’s 1972 classic of sociology, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, in which the author states that moral panic (a term he coined) occurs when a ‘condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests’. His work was developed by Geoffrey Pearson in Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (1983). Both these books point out that youth gangs are neither a new, nor a revolutionary phenomenon in the British Isles, and both should perhaps be required reading for headline writers today.
Mrs Grundy
Best known now as a character in The Archers, the only surviving wireless (q.v.) entertainment show from the BBC Light Programme (Home Service and Light Programme, q.v.). In her previous incarnation, however, Mrs Grundy is a character alluded to, but not actually present, in a play called Speed the Plough by Thomas Morton (?1764–1838), first performed in 1798. This makes her almost unique in literature in becoming such a well-known figure (representing conventionality, prudishness and, oddly, since she pre-dates the reign of Victoria by four decades, Victorian morality) without actually ‘existing’ as a character, although Morton’s play often alludes to her with the question ‘What would Mrs Grundy say?’, which became a popular catchphrase. She is, however, a magnificent cipher, and as such is mentioned by Thackeray, Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Dostoyevsky, G. K. Chesterton and James Joyce, amongst others. She is cited in just about any work on English propriety or prudery, and yet today has been erased by a wife from rural Middle England, which, happily, is pretty much how the original Mrs Grundy started life. In the modern world, however, even the Grundys cannot appear too old-fashioned, which is why the current arbiters of English probity have buried the Mrs Grundy of the television age (Whitehouse, Mary, q.v.) in a very deep hole.
Mufti
Like many other words (for instance dekko, q.v.), this is another casualty of the end of the Empire, though most people would recognize the synonym ‘civvies’ to describe everyday clothes worn by someone who is more accustomed to a uniform. Mufti is an Arabic word for an expert in Islamic law and quite how it came to mean casual clothing in Britain is anyone’s guess; the idea offered by Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable is that the robes and cap of the Muslim lawman were not dissimilar to those of off-duty British soldiers serving in the Middle East. Children in British schools are sometimes offered a ‘mufti day’, usually a Friday on which they are allowed to wear their own clothes rather than school uniform, often in return for a small donation to some worthy cause selected by the school. It is rare now, however, to hear someone say ‘I was in mufti at the time,’ or ‘Because he was off duty at the time, PC Bigelow was in mufti.’
Never in a month
of Sundays
A long or emphatic way of saying ‘never’, this is a phrase that has lost its purpose now that the British Sunday has become so much more like any other day. Laws lifting restrictions on trading and pub hours, among other legislation, as well as the shifting of major events to the Sabbath, means that the dismal options which, in 1988, Morrissey sang about in ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’ have improved and expanded beyond measure. Oddly, though, this short-lived later meaning of a month of Sundays as something ineffably drab superseded an earlier one of it as something to celebrate; free time away from work when a person had all the time in the world. So to fail to do something even in the course of an entire month of Sundays meant, pretty much, that it would never get done, for that was considered a huge amount of spare time. The earliest known printed reference to the phrase is from 1759 in the Life and Real Adventures of Hamilton Murray, written by himself, giving it 250 years of usage, or an awful lot of Sundays.
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