Pop (bottle of)
The simple description is of a carbonated drink that does not contain alcohol, although the term was sometimes broadened to include cordials, squashes and other non-alcoholic beverages (slightly oddly, since the word is obviously onomatopoeic, from the sound of a bottle of fizz being uncorked). It is the huge expansion in the market for the latter, along with bottled water (something that barely existed in the UK prior to the 1980s), that has finished the word off, the dictionary rather sniffily describing it as ‘dated or North American’. Until relatively recently the choice, for a drink to consume on the move, was between a can or bottle of pop or a carton or bottle of milk; still drinks like orange squash were usually mixed at home, and juices were both rare and pricey. The options today, from elderflower presses to high-energy drinks and isotonic waters, mean that people tend to be very specific about which kind of drink they choose. Health concerns have affected sales of pop, but old favourites like cherryade, dandelion and burdock and ginger beer still hang on; until recently Vimto outsold the cola giants in Saudi Arabia, and Irn Bru has achieved a kind of cult status as a hangover cure in Russia.
Portmanteau
In certain specialist areas (including film, pharmacy and mathematics) the word still has some currency to describe several things that make up a whole, but no one in those fields would take a portmanteau to a conference to discuss such matters. In the nineteenth century (and well into the twentieth), however, that was the chief meaning of portmanteau – a large travelling case. Victorian portmanteaus were often vast, large enough for clothes to hang from a rail inside them, but the word was later applied to any large travelling bag, especially one made from stout leather. It is a very simple derivation of French origin from porter (to carry) and manteau (coat), thus a case or bag in which to carry your coats and, by extension, other items of clothing. A corruption of the term lived on in parts of Australia until the late twentieth century, where school bags were referred to as ‘school ports’. The word is also often encountered in the study of the English language, for a ‘portmanteau’ word (sometimes simply ‘portmanteau’) is one that combines the sounds and meanings of two words to give a new meaning, such as ‘brunch’ (breakfast and lunch). The term was invented by Lewis Carroll, who devised many such words himself, including ‘slithy’ (slimy and lithe) and ‘mimsy’ (miserable and flimsy); modern examples include ‘blaxploitation’ (black and exploitation) and Tanzania (the former African countries Tanganyika and Zanzibar).
Pound in your pocket, the
Sounding appropriately modern, this phrase, used by Harold Wilson in a radio and TV broadcast in November 1967, was a response to the devaluation of the pound to US $2.40, an attempt to break the cycle of boom-and-bust economics. Prime Minister Wilson was keen to stress that the drop in value on the international markets would not affect the strength of the pound in the pocket of ordinary Britons. At a time of limited international travel this would certainly have been the case, while the currency restrictions then in place would have insulated the economy further. The full quote ran: ‘It [devaluation] does not mean that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued.’ However, it was a psychological blow at a time when governments set a great deal more store on the value of their currency than is the case now, and the phrase was widely derided; for Wilson, it probably came under the heading ‘Things I Wish I Hadn’t Said’. It became a political catch phrase, but perhaps because of the odium it attracted, it is usually used nowadays, if at all, in an ironic sense.
Pully hawly
Quite literally, once one gets beyond the spelling, ‘to pull and haul’, a phrase which, originating in the eighteenth century, meant a sexual encounter. Thus ‘a game at pully hawly’ was similar to a bit of ‘slap and tickle’ or ‘a roll in the hay’ as a way of referring indirectly to sexual intercourse. The English are traditionally wary of talking openly about sex, which is perhaps why there is such an abundance of euphemistic terms relating to it still current in the language. Whether education programmes and the relatively recent fashion for explicit and open conversations will eventually do away with the euphemisms is unlikely. In part this is because many of the terms are very funny and, as John Cleese once noted, an Englishman would still rather be considered a bad lover than lacking a sense of humour.
Punchcard
Few areas have changed as rapidly as office work, and especially computing, over the past thirty years, which have seen USB flash drives replace CDs, which in turn took over from small disks, which replaced larger floppies, which were akin to the punchcards (or ‘punched cards’) that for decades had been the means of inputting data into a computer. These cards had patterned holes punched into them representing letters and numbers and which, taken together, built up into a database. Given the speed of technological change nowadays, punchcards have become as obsolete as the primitive computers they served. The expression ‘to punch one’s card’, however, has nothing to do with computers, and simply means putting a card into an automatic time recorder (‘punch clock’ or ‘clock card machine’) at the beginning and end of the working day, the machine then stamping the card with the date and the time of beginning and finishing work, a process usually known as ‘clocking on’ or ‘clocking off’.
Puttee
This, sometimes spelled puttie, derives from the Hindi word patti (band, bandage) to describe a long strip of cloth wound in such a way as to cover the lower part of the leg from the ankle to the knee. Puttees are wrapped tightly and spirally round the legs to act as support and protection, and as such were often worn by riders or cyclists, although mostly by soldiers. They were a standard part of the uniforms of several armies throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the requirement that they be wound absolutely evenly occasioned much cursing among the rank and file. The word came into English from soldiers returning from service in India in Victorian times, and like so many terms from Britain’s imperial past, its use now is mainly historical.
Quart
This is still a perfectly respectable unit of measurement denoting two imperial pints (or one quarter of a gallon – hence the name), just as a pole (or rod) is five yards and eighteen inches (or sixteen and a half feet) and four of them equate to a chain, ten of which make a furlong, of which eight comprise a statute mile. Despite metrification, the mile is unlikely to disappear from use, and furlong is firmly established among the racing fraternity. The same sort of grasp of the key units will save some imperial measurements such as the pint and possibly the gallon, but the gill (one quarter of a pint or five fluid ounces, also known as a ‘noggin’), along with the quart, is pretty much lost, in the way that the chopin (a Scottish unit of liquid measurement roughly equivalent to a quart) has already been.
Just to confuse the issue, the chopin was actually half the old Scottish pint measurement (which was equal to three imperial pints), whereas a quart is two imperial pints – this is possibly what Whitbread had in mind with its 1970s advertising slogan for its Trophy Bitter, ‘The pint that thinks it’s a quart!’ Such jingles often live long after the campaign has finished – which is half their point – so ‘Guinness is good for you’ has lasted decades, whereas others (such as ‘Wouldn’t you rather be Hemeling?’ ‘Follow the bear!’ and ‘Double Diamond works wonders’) have become lost. To confuse matters even further, the US liquid pint, quart and gallon are all smaller than their imperial equivalents… Moreover, since 2000, it has been illegal in the United Kingdom to sell any liquids other than milk (in returnable bottles), beer or cider in pint measures.
Queer Street (to be on)
First use of this of this term – it seems to date from the very early nineteenth century – merely indicated that something was wrong with a person, or that they were suffering from (non-specific) troubles. By the late nineteenth century, however, Queer Street came to have a precise location with a distinct link to financial difficulties – Carey Street, near Lincoln’s Inn Fi
elds (Lincoln’s Inn being one of London’s Inns of Court), where a bankruptcy court was situated. It would appear that the phrases ‘to be on Queer Street’ and ‘to be on Carey Street’ merged, and both came to be used to indicate that someone had money problems, although one may still, rarely, hear someone say ‘We’ll be on Queer Street,’ meaning to be in trouble. Another link to the law courts comes via ‘queer cuffin’, an old nickname for a magistrate which doubled up as a term for a rude or surly person, along with the phrase queer cove (q.v.).
In an odd coincidence, in view of the later use of ‘queer’ as an offensive term for homosexual, which resulted in the decline of the phrase, the centre of gay London in the Georgian era was at the end of Carey Street, near where the London School of Economics is today. It was also the hub of London’s then thriving smut-publishing industry.
Rachmanism
This term came to be used to describe a landlord who exploited his tenants. It derives from the notorious activities of Peter Rachman (1919–62), a West London landlord in the 1950s. Born in Poland and interred during the Second World War by both the Nazis and the Soviets, Rachman went on to fight for the Allies and settled in Britain in 1948. He rapidly built up a property empire consisting of more than a hundred mansion blocks and several nightclubs. His success lay in subdividing his flats for multiple occupancy, and, unlike most landlords of the time, in not operating a colour bar (q.v.); the large West Indian population in the Notting Hill area is a lasting legacy of Rachman. He exploited new immigrants terribly; living conditions were squalid and he employed henchmen to bully his tenants if they failed to keep up their rent payments. In 1963, a year after his death at the age of forty-two, the Profumo scandal broke and it was revealed that both Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies (‘Well he would [say that], wouldn’t he?’ q.v.) had been Rachman’s mistresses, having been set up in a mews house that he owned. The 1965 Rent Act, offering greater protection for tenants, was a direct result of Rachman and his activities.
Radiogram
These huge objects – some were sofa-sized, others a more modest chest-of-drawers scale – were at the peak of their popularity during the 1950s. As its portmanteau (q.v.) name suggests, it was a combined (valve) radio and gramophone (record player) and represented the height of mid-twentieth-century multimedia. The turntable was able to spin a variety of discs, which were mostly made of vinyl: first 78s (because they completed 78 revolutions in a minute), then 45s (45 rpm; also known as ‘singles’), which contained a song on either side, EPs (extended-play 45s), and the much larger long-players (LPs, 33⅓ rpm). Radiograms came in all shades of wood-surround from light tropical to Beethoven teak, and would often offer bonus features such as storage space for records or other items. Sophisticated chaps might even use them as a sort of music-playing cocktail bar whilst entertaining at home.
The popularity of radiograms helped to boost record sales, and by the late 1950s discs outstripped sheet music sales for the first time and became (with their later incarnations as cassette tapes and CDs) the chief means of establishing the popularity of a song until the recent download revolution. From this era came a host of phrases teetering on the brink of the linguistic abyss, from ‘hit parade’ to ‘pick of the pops’.
Rapscallion
Rather sweet term for a young man who indulges in mild, often irritating but also amusing, misbehaviour; someone who is a bit of a scamp, but not malicious. ‘Scallywag’, and even ‘ragamuffin’, might have also served as synonyms once, but these have mutated into the more criminally minded scally (street arab, q.v.) and the dancehall style of ragga over recent decades. The essential link is still there, at least in the minds of many scallies, who regard their behaviour as rascally good-natured and a bit of a laugh rather than violent, offensive or threatening. The word, which dates from the late seventeenth century, possibly as a humorous adaptation of ‘rascal’, is now regarded by dictionaries as archaic.
Rot or tommyrot
A chap just doesn’t say this sort of thing any more when he means nonsense, yet at one time, depending on the tone of voice employed, it could be a harsh and dismissive rebuke. The modern equivalent is probably ‘bullshit’ or ‘bollocks’, both of which have passed out of the swearing paradigm over the past couple of decades – ‘bollocks’ since the famous 1977 trial involving the Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bollocks, when the High Court upheld one not very convincing interpretation of bollocks as nonsense, particularly that delivered by the clergy. (Perhaps inspired by the innocuous etymology of ‘poppycock’, which comes from the Dutch pappy cak, ‘soft shit’ – What the dickens!, q.v.)
‘Tommyrot’ refers originally to soldier’s rations (Tommy, q.v.) specifically bread, but the word has come to mean bosh, twaddle or codswallop, words similarly rarely used nowadays. ‘Bosh’, from a Turkish word meaning empty, gained popularity after the publication of James Justinian Morier’s novel Ayesha the Maid of Kars (1834). Queen Victoria used it to criticize the proposed plans for Tower Bridge: ‘To those who say the bridge will increase the defensive strength of the Tower and improve the beauty and historical associations of the place, all I can say is bosh!’ Codswallop can claim no such illustrious pedigree, and despite the best attempts to link it to codpieces and beer (via the still just-used nickname for beer, wallop) is actually first recorded as dating from 1959 in BBC Radio’s Hancock’s Half-Hour.
Rozzer
Term, ‘of unknown origin’, for a policeman coined in the nineteenth century that disappeared from mainstream use by the twenty-first, but even so managed to outlive other later words such as ‘bogey’ and ‘filth’. Bogey was used to describe any form of investigator or snoop from nosy parkers (q.v.) to landlords, but was most frequently employed to describe detectives. Filth enjoyed brief popularity from the 1960s to the 1980s as a general term for police officer, specifically the London CID, which was hit by a number of bribery and racketeering scandals during this era. ‘Bobbies’ and ‘peelers’ (from Sir Robert Peel, 1788–1850, founder of the Metropolitan Police), ‘plod’, ‘fuzz’, and ‘Sweeney’ (from ‘Sweeney Todd’, rhyming slang for Flying Squad) have all come and (largely) gone; ‘pigs’ is just another American verbal import like the more current ‘feds’ or ‘five-oh’. Today the most popular slang terms tend to be regional rather than national, though most people would understand references to the ‘Old Bill’, ‘bizzies’ or ‘dibble’.
Rubber Johnny
This is a very rare example of an extremely popular slang or informal term being supplanted by the correct word. The widespread promotion, and advertising, of condoms in the 1980s as protection against AIDS, in particular, meant that jokier terms like rubber Johnny, which dates from the 1960s, or earlier euphemisms such as ‘French letter’ fell out of favour. Interestingly, the French slang for condom is ‘English bonnet’. (As an aside, French farmers, often bicycle mounted, who brought their produce over to Britain were known as ‘onion Johnnies’. This practice largely died out in the 1950s but was once quite large scale, with over 9,000 tons cycled around the UK in 1929 alone.)
Returning to the rubber variety, the more widespread availability of this form of contraception also put paid to the non-ironic use of the euphemistic question employed by barbers, ‘Something for the weekend sir?’ The condom moved out of the hairdressers and into just about everywhere, collecting new flavours, textures and colours as it went. They became a fashion item, special holsters were designed for holding them and they are practically obligatory at certain gatherings. This has removed much of the embarrassment associated with purchasing them and is excellent news for rubber-producing countries. It also means that schoolchildren called John, Johnson or Jonathan are spared the classroom request ‘Can I borrow your rubber, Johnny?’, and adaptations of ‘The Clapping Song’ (originally a hit for Shirley Ellis in the 1960s) which switched the words ‘rubber dolly’ to ‘rubber Johnny’ have disappeared.
Rules OK
Interesting but short-lived bit of phraseolog
y and graffiti that has vanished in its original incarnation as a yob (q.v.) manifesto, but which is still used as a punning title for articles about rules. The key difference between ‘Street End Aggro [q.v.] Rules OK’ and ‘Fiscal Rules OK?’ is not the question mark but the meaning of rules. In the first the word rules is being used as a synonym for reigns, whereas in the second it means a code of laws or guidelines. Very occasionally one might see something like ‘Rovers Rule OK?’ but this isn’t using OK in the sense of ‘If that’s all right with the rest of you;’ rather, it is a sort of anti-question stating a fact and daring anyone to oppose or contradict it. An exclamation mark might have been more appropriate, but for some reason these were never employed. The addition of OK and a question mark to a statement is a particularly 1970s convention, when it was also attached to the suggestion that George Davies is innocent as part of the (false) claim that he had been fitted up by the filth (rozzer, q.v.). Of the many jokey variants, ‘Elizabeth II Rules UK’ is one of the cleverer.
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