Nice as ninepence, As
This is the exception to all those other (often pejorative) phrases like ‘as bent as a nine-bob note’ (bob, q.v.) in that a ninepence coin did once exist (there was, for instance, a silver one issued in the early nineteenth century), although there is no indication that the coins were particularly nice or ‘neat’ (the other chief variation of the phrase). It would appear that the expression is all about the alliteration, which is possibly why some sources have suggested that it derives from ‘as neat as ninepins’, ninepins being the traditional form of skittles (Not all beer and skittles, q.v.). However, the phrase ‘As fine as fivepence, as neat as ninepence’ can be traced to the seventeenth century, so its continuation into the twenty-first isn’t a bad innings.
Nippy
The first waitresses in the tea shops and restaurants established and run by J. Lyons and Co. were known as ‘Gladyses’, but in the 1920s they were superseded by Nippies, who also staffed the restaurants in the Lyons Corner Houses (q.v.). The nickname was apparently inspired by the quick and neat motions needed to serve customers in a crowded eatery. The Nippy – who wore a black uniform, like a maid’s, with white collar and cuffs and a white apron, topped by a curious black-and-white cap not unlike a cloth tiara – became a national icon whose wholesome and proper image was strictly maintained, though in an interesting example of changing social mores a range of Nippy gaspers (q.v.) was briefly introduced. Children could dress up as mini-Nippies in outfits bought by indulgent parents, and in the early 1930s a musical called Nippy enjoyed a successful run; there was even a pack of playing cards in which the queens were Nippies. One child who never grew up to be Nippy, however, much though she might have wished to, was Margaret (now Baroness) Thatcher. Instead she worked at the Hammersmith headquarters of J. Lyons as a research chemist, and during her time there she was part of the team that invented the ice cream Mr Whippy.
Nit nurse
A victim of more enlightened times and health campaigns that now spare children being inspected in public by a stranger and then being sent home from school with a pink letter and a prescription for Derbac. Although head lice in schoolchildren have not gone away, Nitty Nora the nit nurse has become a figure of folklore, along with Parkie the park keeper and other semi-official authority figures from childhood who, although often disliked, did at least offer children a strand of adult supervision that was neither parent nor teacher.
None of your beeswax
A delightfully meaningless (unless you are involved in apiculture) way of advising someone to keep their nose out of other people’s affairs (nosy parker, q.v.). Despite all manner of pseudo derivations to do with the use of beeswax in make-up in centuries past, and thus the meaning that a lady should attend to her own face not others’, the real origin appears to be a more pleasant way of saying ‘mind your own business’ based on a jokey similarity in sound of the words ‘business’ and ‘beeswax’, and was popularized in the 1930s. A continued request for information might result in a further riposte of ‘Not on your Nellie!’ which essentially means ‘No chance’ or, literally, ‘Not on your life’, from the slightly convoluted rhyming slang ‘Nellie Duff’ for ‘puff’, an old-fashioned slang word for ‘life’. ‘Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher!’ exclaims Bertie Wooster in P. G. Wodehouse’s immortal The Code of the Woosters (1938).
Nosy parker
‘Now I go cleanin’ windows to earn an honest bob, / For a nosy parker it’s an interestin’ job,’ as George Formby sang in his 1936 hit ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’. This lovely, and declining, rather than lost, term says much about the British. No one likes a nosy parker, which is what makes Formby’s refreshing admission such a good lyric. Being nosy has long been synonymous with inquisitiveness, and Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable argues that the term derives originally from someone who pokes their nose in, a ‘nosy poker’. A more specific, if tenuous, derivation comes from Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937 and subsequently), which suggests a link to the prurient ways of the royal park keepers supervising the 1851 Great Exhibition. The Oxford Dictionary of English, however, confidently asserts that it comes from an early twentieth-century postcard caption, ‘The Adventures of Nosey Parker’, about a peeping Tom in London’s Hyde Park. Other unlikely notions include derivation from the inquisitorial ways of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury under Mary I and then Elizabeth I, or even from the inquisitive ways of the rabbit, for which ‘parker’ is an archaic term.
As George Orwell wrote in his 1941 essay ‘England Your England’, ‘the most hateful of all names in an English ear is nosy parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, “co-ordinated”.’ He was writing of the Nazi threat to this country, but in this context professional snooping, whether through CCTV or e-mail monitoring, thrives in the modern world of data-theft scares, with the result that the amateur curtain-twitcher has been left rather out on a limb.
Not all beer and skittles
Skittles or ninepins is still played in some pubs in England and Wales, and there are actually local Skittles Leagues, but it is nothing like as popular as it once was. It dates back to at least the seventeenth century and is a simple game involving wooden pins set up in a diamond pattern with players throwing a ball at them to knock them down. The expression was usually employed to contrast a coming period of difficulty with the pleasures of a careless afternoon in the boozer. Dickens in The Pickwick Papers (1837) introduced a variant, ‘It’s a reg’lar holiday to them – all porter and skittles’ (porter being a dark brown bitter made from charred or browned malt). The expression has declined with the popularity of skittles and has been supplanted by phrases like ‘It’s hardly a picnic,’ ‘It’s no stroll in the woods’ or ‘It’s not a piece of cake.’
Oojah
One of a number of very useful words (‘thingamabob’ or ‘thingummy’ is another; an American might prefer ‘doohickey’) which can literally refer to anything at all that a person has temporarily or permanently forgotten, or does not wish to mention by name. In Right Ho, Jeeves (1934), P. G. Wodehouse’s second full-length novel about the inimitable valet, Bertie Wooster tells his Aunt Dahlia that ‘things are not looking too oojah-cum-spiff at the moment.’ The expression dates from earlier, however, and was, if not actually created by the British Army, certainly popularized by the troops and in that way spread across the world and into everyday speech. A Washington Post article from 1917 (resurrected by the Lost for Words blogspot) shows the ambivalent relationship of ‘proper writers’ to these slang terms entering the language and the writer’s uncertainty that he was doing the correct thing in mentioning them, as that would only spread them further. Referring to oojah, he wrote:
Heaven forbid that I should perpetuate such a monument of silliness; but, indeed, I fear that the rhyming slang fashion is all too deeply established: our recruits are carrying it far and wide, and its entry into the civilian language will be one of the least satisfactory souvenirs of Armageddon.
In this case his fears were unjustified, for oojah has fallen rather short of Doomsday.
Ottoman
This deeply useful, and functional, household item has fallen victim to the Scandinavian-design-led home-decoration revolution since the 1980s. Probably French, rather than Turkish, in origin, it takes its name not from its invention by Ottoman Turks but from their supposed habit of lounging around on such furniture. Essentially a backless padded seat, it could be sofa- or pouffe-sized, with smaller ones often serving as footstools. In some the padded top was hinged and could be lifted up to provide storage underneath, thereby maximizing space. However, heavy furnishings, particularly those which completely conceal stored items, are frowned upon in the modern home, being considered bad feng shui. This is in itself notable, as feng shui itself dropped out of fashion with such rapidity
that it would surely be a candidate itself for any future edition of this book.
Parade
In this sense, not a public procession or military display, but a public square, promenade or row of shops. The first of these two meanings has long since disappeared, but the concept of the parade of shops lingered into the modern era. A parade would usually just be a short row of retailers on one side of the street only, often set back a little to allow parking, and traditionally consisted of local stores serving the immediate community and some passing trade. Shops might include butchers, grocers, pharmacists, hairdressers, newsagents, a florist and very often something completely off the wall that had just sort of ended up there, such as a specialist hobby shop, travel agent or artificial-limb stockist. The grander parades might include a small post office or a sub-branch of a bank or building society.
At least, that was the way things were. In the past there might, in one in four parades, have been a chippy, whereas now some form of fast-food outlet is a given. As indeed are estate agents, a small supermarket and a diminishing selection of the previous stalwarts, except for hairdressers, who continue to be over-represented. The decline of parades as convenient shopping areas for local people has been largely because of the rise of bigger supermarkets, changing eating habits and the fracturing of communities, as well as the inability of small shops to offer the long opening hours that people require in the twenty-first century.
The term came into its own with the suburban developments of first the 1920s and then the 1950s, well before the notion of the drive to the ‘hypermarket’, a word which, oddly enough, has itself disappeared. At least within the UK no one talks of hypermarkets, but in the new expatriate colonies of the Spanish Costas the word is still used. That’s one of the beauties of English – a word that the British had the merest dalliance with for a few years in the seventies and eighties goes abroad and, linguistically, makes its fortune. No doubt at some point in the future it’ll return, looking leathery but fit, to mainstream English, just as so many other words have in the past.
Parthian shot
The return of this rather attractive term would be a welcome addition to the language, although over the last half-century it has been all but obliterated by the similar-sounding and meaning, but technically incorrect, ‘parting shot’. A Parthian, or indeed parting, shot is the last word, a frequently barbed, pithy or telling remark with no chance for the recipient to come back. The point is obvious if one says ‘parting shot’ because that is a point of separation, but there is a much more interesting history to the Parthian variant. It alludes to the practice of the Parthian horsemen (the kingdom of Parthia is now part of Iran) who were trained to ride their horses hands-free. In battle the cavalry would fake a retreat before swivelling in their saddles and firing arrows at their pursuers. It made for a devastating final statement, which is of course the aim of any valedictory comment.
Pell-mell
Chaotic, helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy or jumbled would be good alternatives here, but any description of disorderly or reckless haste would do. It derives in part from French mêler, to mix, but, perhaps appropriately in view of its meaning, it has origins in another foreign word, Italian pallamaglio, which translates as ball-mallet, to confuse the issue. This referred to paille-maille (or pall-mall, among other spellings), an early form of croquet played in the pre-Georgian era by London’s nobility and gentry in the area around what is now St James’s Street. From this we get the street name Pall Mall, which is situated at the southern end of St James’s Street – apparently the matches were end-to-end stuff, although whether that accounts for the meaning of haste and disorder is not known. The use of pell-mell as an adjective is now rare, although not so rare as the original but long-vanished game.
Penny chew
There is probably a whole book to be written on lost confectionery and other much-loved comfort food. There is certainly a small industry supplying ‘retro’ sweets such as Curly Wurlies, Freddo chocolate, Refreshers and Anglo Bubbly bubble gum. These companies also provide some of the key products that would once have come under the heading of penny chews (or even two- or four-for-a-penny chews, costing a halfpenny or a farthing each; see Halfpenny, ha’porth), such as Mojos, Black Jacks and Fruit Salad. The main reason that the term ‘penny chew’ has vanished, however, is not to do with the complete disappearance of the product, but just because inflation has eroded the value of the currency, as the sweets did children’s teeth, so that the notion of a penny buying anything has become pretty much redundant. Also redundant, sadly, are many thousands of Woolworths staff who sold the Pic n’ Mix range from that now defunct high-street store. These were until recently a key dispenser of some of the delights formerly known as penny chews. In February 2009 the last bag of Woolworths Pic n’ Mix sweets was sold on eBay for £14,500, which was donated to charity.
Pin money
There are lots of amusing, if incorrect, theories about the origin of this term, including the notion that it was first used in connection with Henry VIII and gifts he gave to his wives. It originally meant a small amount of money given to a woman by her husband or, sometimes, father, often as an allowance, to be spent on small or non-essential personal items, ‘pin’ in this case meaning ‘a decorative clasp for hair or garment’. It dates from the seventeenth century, and in time came also to mean small sums earned in a part-time job. The important aspect, though, is that it was for ‘extra’ purchases, rather than necessities. While some women would cheerfully admit to doing a job for pin money, the term came to be used pejoratively in the period after the Second World War, when it was argued that men, and especially those returning to civilian life from the armed services, should be employed ahead of women. This carried the implication that all women only worked for pin money, while men needed a proper income to support a woman, amongst other things. The term is not much heard now, possibly because it has also been used as an argument to justify the difference in pay scales between men and women doing the same job.
Pithead ballot
This phrase was one of a whole raft of trade-union related terms that have either disappeared or are on the verge of doing so, and seems to have left the language after the battle fought by the government against the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1980s. ‘Collective bargaining’, ‘show of hands’, ‘flying picket’ and ‘closed shop’, like ‘pithead ballot’, all belong to the era when trade unions had some real influence and industrial unrest was common. One barely hears the word ‘solidarity’ used in the context of workers’ rights any more, and outside of the old mining communities, where memories of the bitter strike of 1984 to 1985 linger, even the deadly insult ‘scab’ – meaning a strike breaker – has gone. The American writer Jack London (1876–1916) wrote a 250-word definition of a scab, one of the more affectionate parts of which runs:
A scab is a two-legged animal with a cork-screw soul, a water-logged brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumour of rotten principles.
Poodlefaker
Quite gorgeously bonkers word for a young man, often a newly commissioned officer, who habitually socializes with women. There is little apparent logic to its derivation until one learns that ‘poodle’ was nineteenth-century army slang for a woman, and ‘faker’ in this context refers to pretend emotions. (An alternative derivation is that the person is playing the role of a lap dog.) It refers, almost always disparagingly, to a man who cultivates the company of women for his own ends, whether these were social advancement, appearance or, less often, directly financial. George Orwell offers a glimpse of the dim view taken of poodlefakers in his novel Burmese Days (1934), when describing a kind of British officer who censoriously viewed any social duties at all as poodlefaking, and who disapproved of women in general: ‘In his view they were a kind of siren whose one aim was to lure men away from polo and enmesh them in tea fights and tennis-parties.’ Perhaps the last widely reported use of the word in public was in
the early part of this century when Tony Blair was described by Boris Johnson, in an article in the Daily Telegraph, as a ‘mincing poodlefaker’.
There is something slightly effeminate, or at least faux-effeminate, about the poodlefaker, possibly because of the word’s association with poodles, and it is a trait he shares with the ‘fancy man’, another term seldom heard these days. The latter was often held up in a poor light against the honest toiling chap, but this was partly because he could court the ladies with his fast car, flash clothes and ‘smart talk’. The fancy man (or woman, for that matter) was also considered too flighty to be marriage material, though he might break up a few, but offered a welcome break from the often drab lives of women stuck at home. Some fellows might refer to them disparagingly as ‘ponces’, and a few fancy men may indeed have been procurers for prostitution, but most were just flash blokes after fast times.
Pooh-pooh
A way of fairly politely, but firmly, dismissing an idea or pretty much anything else, it derives from the repetition of a nonsense sound, ‘pooh’, suggestive of impatience, scorn or contempt, and originally of disgust. It has no clear relationship to the equally defunct term ‘pooh-bah’ or ‘grand pooh-bah’, so called from the self-important character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado (1885). The satirical use of pooh-bah to describe anyone with an overly high opinion of himself, or fond of awarding himself titles (it is almost always a male), has gone, but the word litters popular culture of the recent past, including the American cartoon show The Flintstones. ‘Pooh-pooh’, however, is still sometimes heard, but usually with the implication that whatever has been pooh-poohed may not have been given a fair hearing.
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