Lost English

by Chris Roberts

  Rum

  Very often used almost in admiration as much as in warning, prefixing anything with ‘rum’, meaning curious, peculiar or eccentric, indicated that the listener should pay attention to the person or event being talked about. Originating in the eighteenth century, and unrelated to the cane sugar- or molasses-based liquor, its early use indicated excellence, while later the meaning shifts closer to ‘strange’. The 1811 edition of Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has dozens of definitions of words prefixed by ‘rum’, from rum cove (qq.v.) – a dextrous and clever rogue – to rum doxy (q.v.) – a beautiful woman. By the twentieth century this multiple use had been pared back to indicate that a person might be a bit of a handful (‘A rum ’un, that,’ similar to ‘He’s a wrong ’un, and his father was a wrong ’un too’). ‘A rum situation’ might be used to describe a tight spot or odd occurrence, especially one that the speaker had not come across before. Today the word is chiefly used either ironically or facetiously, which is a pity, as it conveys a little more than mere oddness.

  Running-board

  On early cars up to the late 1950s (and even later for some models), a kind of footboard running down each side just below the doors, typically extending from the front to the rear mudguard. A rare item today, this side of retro cars or people who wish to make some sort of statement about their individuality. SUVs have a truncated step that is similar, but in the past few cars were complete without a running board to aid ingress and egress, as well as to provide dramatic shots in gangster films. The ornate running-board has been used for purely aesthetic effect as well, and there have been various revivals in America. There is no doubt that they attract show-offs, so much so that the highway codes of most countries have a section about not riding on the running-board. Since modern mass-produced cars with their monocoque body shells have no mudguards, these elegant additions have become redundant.

  Sawbones

  Delightful old term for doctor, or more accurately a surgeon, which most people will only be familiar with through the truncated version on Star Trek, where the ship’s doctor is referred to as Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy. First noted in 1837, it is quite simply the splicing together of the word ‘saw’ with ‘bones’, but today is only used jocularly, like the even older ‘quack doctor’, usually reduced to plain ‘quack’.

  Serge

  Along with other trappings of more military eras the recognizable twill fabric (with ridges on both sides) has rather fallen from favour. Although the word is derived from the Latin sericus, silken, via French, there is now a softer, finer variety known as French serge, and silk serge (used for linings) is widely seen but rarely mentioned outside the clothing industry. The heavier worsted sort of serge is still sometimes used in making military uniforms and trench coats which, post-war, pretty much every male possessed. This is no longer the case since the end of National Service and the change in menswear fashion in favour of denim, which, ironically, has a similar weave and is thought to derive from a shortening of serge de Nîmes.

  Shanks’s mare or Shanks’s pony (to go by)

  A quaint way of saying walking, the shank being the shin or area of the leg below the knee. The slogan was rather nicely used during the Second World War to suggest that people should walk when they could to save resources, the official posters showing a happy pony with a shoe covering most of its torso trotting along cheerily.

  Shindy

  Slightly archaic term for ruckus, quarrel, affray or bit of biff. There are dozens of semi-retired terms for fighting in the English language, but as a traditionally violent nation we seem reluctant to let go of set-to, rumpus, scrimmage, tussle, brawl or barney, despite the availability of fisticuffs, scrap, tear-up and exchange of blows.

  Sire

  Though relatively recently still used of animals, in particular horses, nobody ‘sires’ children today, and the words begat or procreate look to be on the danger list too. It is a gloriously aristocratic word and that may be the reason for its decline, as the only person it might be appropriate for would be some roaring patriarch in breeches declaring to his assembled family ‘I have sired the future generations of this family,’ before adding in an undertone, ‘and several others too.’ The word goes back at least to Jacobean times, as evidenced by a line in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1609–10): ‘Cowards father cowards and base things sire base.’

  Slide rule

  The slide rule itself still exists, but its practical use has been seriously curtailed by the increase in availability of computers from the 1950s onwards, and even more so by cheap calculators since the 1970s. Some pocket-sized scientific calculators were even known as ‘slide-rule calculators’ and were able rapidly to replicate the computations and readings that slide rules had been necessary for since the seventeenth century. For centuries, therefore, they were indispensable as mathematical aids, and running a slide rule over something was a final and rigorous test of the validity of any theory or proposition.

  Spend a penny

  At one time this was a highly descriptive euphemism for going to the toilet, because for more than a hundred years visiting a public lavatory actually cost one (old) penny (0.4p), since the doors were opened by dropping a penny in a slot in the lock, then turning the handle. This gradually became less and less widespread with the coming of decimalization in 1971, as the replacement of literally thousands of toilet doors across the country to accommodate the new currency was beyond the reach of most local councils. Previous inertia was the reason why the phrase remained around for much of the twentieth century, as the cost of visiting a ‘public convenience’ had remained static for so long. With the advent of automated coin-in-the-slot toilets and others, as at stations, entered via coin-operated turnstiles the cost of ‘spending a penny’ has now risen to twenty, thirty or even fifty pence in some places (50p = 120 old pence … ).

  Spirit duplicator

  These were also known as ‘Banda’ or ‘Ditto’ machines, the former term being most prevalent in the UK. Prior to the widespread use of the first photocopiers, these machines offered schools, churches and small political groups a cheap and easy means of duplicating information. The name derives from the alcohols which were a major component of the solvents used in these machines. Material to be duplicated was written or typed on to special two-ply sheets of paper (cheerily named ‘spirit masters’), one of which was pre-coated with a layer of wax that had been impregnated with a colorant. The pressure of writing or typing on the top sheet transferred coloured wax to its underside, producing a reverse image of the desired marks. The first sheet was then fastened on to the drum of the machine, with the waxed side out. As the paper moved through the printer, a solvent spread across each new sheet of paper would dissolve just enough of the pigmented wax to produce a copy. Usually the resultant ‘print offs’ were a dim purple on cheap paper that retained the smell of the solvent, and it is this scent that most will remember for enlivening dull school lessons with its intoxicating aroma. Indeed, the harmful effects of sniffing one’s notes led to an early discontinuation of use in some areas. (See also Xerox.)

  Spooning

  This is still used to describe a sleeping (or, indeed, lovemaking) position where one person holds another closely from behind so they fit together like two spoons. It no longer refers, however, to kissing or canoodling or making out, or any of the other myriad words for the clothed embraces of lovers, a meaning that survived certainly until the Second World War. It could also mean to court (courting, q.v.) someone, often in an unbearably sentimental fashion, and this is very probably the route by which, in the nineteenth century, ‘spoon’ acquired its association with kissing. There was an older meaning of spoon to describe a silly sort of brainless person, and spooning was often used dismissively of young lovers to imply that their heads were empty of anything else but necking, snogging, and so on.

  Sport

  ‘She bought her own car and got in with the Brighton sports, thinks she’s too good for
the likes of us now,’ sniffs the young taxi driver at the beginning of Ian Fleming’s Thunderball (1961). He was referring to a local doxy (q.v.) who had done well for herself, but the use of ‘sports’ to describe racy young men with a bit of money didn’t last much beyond the next wave of fashionable young men on the Brighton Road (Mods and Rockers, q.v.). The sports were a product of the mass motoring age and replaced the ‘swells’ of an earlier era. They could be from any background, though most were working-class boys who had seized the opportunities of a new economy: blokes with a bit of money who enjoyed life’s racier pleasures. The phrase ‘Go on, be a sport!’, which is still heard today, touches on the same unstuffy approach to life and morals.

  Sputnik

  One of a handful of Russian words that have entered mainstream English, but also a word and a concept whose time has passed. Sputnik, literally ‘travelling companion’, is Russian for satellite, and during the space race and science-fiction boom of the 1950s and early sixties carried with it dreams of adventure and travel beyond the stars. It also excited the United States government, which was terrified, after the successful launch on 4 October 1957 of Sputnik 1 – the first manmade satellite to orbit the earth – that America might lose space to the Soviet Union. Sputnik 2 was launched the following month, carrying the ill-fated Laika, a stray dog that had the dubious honour of being the first animal to be sent out into orbit. More sputniks were sent into space, more or less successfully, over the next few years, culminating in the successful manned space flight with Yuri Gagarin in April 1961.

  The Soviet lead was not to last (though in 1963 they were the first to send a woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into space): America soon caught up and eventually overtook the Soviet Union in space exploration, and in 1962 became involved in the public–private partnership (as it would be called today) that was Telstar. This first communications satellite carrying broadcast and telecommunications signals was a collaborative effort between NASA, several US telecommunications firms, the GPO (as the Post Office then was) in Britain and the French national post office. Later Sputnik missions were failures and not widely broadcast. More recently, in 1997, Sputnik 40, a model of Sputnik 1, was launched from space station Mir to mark the fortieth anniversary of the first mission.

  Stamps and coupons

  George Orwell noted that coupon snipping is one of the defining characteristics of the English. The word comes from French couper, to cut, and has the sense of a printed form offering the holder free or discounted goods, or other benefit. Coupons still hang on through Internet promotions, though ‘voucher’ tends to be the more widely used term, and the popularity of loyalty cards and air miles has further eroded the once mighty coupon, which were for so long a regular feature of newspapers and magazines. Government-issued coupons were also a vital feature of life during the Second World War (and, for some items, until nearly ten years after it ended), since they regulated a person’s ability to buy rationed items such as food, clothing and petrol. Stamps as a means of saving only survive in very poor areas, whereas once Green Shield Stamps, in particular – a kind of early loyalty scheme to reward shoppers, introduced in 1958 – were very popular until they were withdrawn in the early 1990s. The genius of stamps from a business point of view is that during inflationary times they decrease in value; further, as founder Richard Tompkins discovered, many were never cashed in.

  Both coupons and stamps have shifted from being a part of everyone’s lives to an existence on the margins and, despite economic fluctuations, are unlikely to re-emerge in their previous forms, not least because of the proliferation of retail loyalty-card schemes.

  Street Arab

  It is not hard to see why this term to describe semi-vagrant street urchins has fallen from use. However for Dickens, Conan Doyle and other writers the term meant any children, often orphans, who lived on the streets of Britain’s cities. The modern equivalent might be ‘hoodie’, ‘herbert’ or ‘scally’ (rapscallion, q.v.), all of which refer to semi-feral urban youths who challenge orthodox notions of dress, manners and social order, or at least are said by the yellow press (q.v.) to do so. The term was most popular in the nineteenth century but survived up until the time when wider society recognized separate youth groups with their own designations, such as ‘punks’ or ‘skinheads’. Lee Jackson’s A Dictionary of Victorian London (2006) offers the following observation of a typical street Arab (from Punch, 1842):

  He has a shrewdness of observation, a precocious cunning, and, above all, an art of annoying … We confess, that for all our usually placid disposition, when walking in the streets we cannot stand the sarcasms of the little boys. They are like mosquitoes, who sting and buzz about you, but are never to be caught.

  Street cred

  In the age of Pop Idol the concept seems almost quaint, and the term is heardly heard nowadays. The mania for street credibility reached its peak in the late 1970s during the punk era, and was to some extent tied to those more class-conscious times. Despite the involvement of large numbers of middle-class art students, punk liked to portray itself as a working-class sub-culture. Also as part of its DIY ethos, displaying the trappings of the previous era’s bloated superstardom status was frowned upon. No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977, as The Clash sang.

  Elvis did literally die that year, and street cred became the watchword. The best definition of it came from the late cartoonist Ray Lowry (1944–2008), who said that ‘street credibility is the ability to change the tyre on your tour van in your stage clothes on the Old Kent Road without getting beaten up.’ Maintaining the appearance of street credibility was also important commercially, because bands that lacked it, or were perceived as ‘selling out’, would rapidly dwindle in popularity. It was important because punk affected, and to a certain extent did actually possess, an ideology – or as John Lydon, otherwise Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols, said at the time, ‘We mean it, maaaaan.’

  Student power

  This carries the notion of power being a liberating force, best wielded by those on the margins, students, schoolchildren or whichever other group might improve the world by seizing control. (At least, that is what former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell meant by ‘girl power’.) Today, however, the whole idea of student radicalism in the UK has become very last-century, and the phrase is now one of a series of slogans from the 1960s counter-culture that have been chanted for the last time, or which are only employed ironically when quoting the Trotskyite Wolfie (‘Freedom for Tooting!’) Smith, from the late-1970s TV sitcom Citizen Smith.

  Tanner

  Of all the ‘lost’ coins of the realm the tanner – the use of the word dates from the early nineteenth century, though its origin is unknown – or sixpence is possibly the most missed. First struck in 1551 (with the head of Edward VI on them), they lasted 420 years until decimalization in 1971. Then their value was rather rudely dropped from half a shilling to two and half new pence, though they remained legal tender at this new (de)value until 1980. Up until 1920 they were pure silver, and half silver till 1946, though this did not stop their addition to Christmas puddings post-war as a ‘lucky’ gift.

  This linking with luck is perhaps due to the coin’s longevity, and for much of the post-war period many footballers carried sixpences in their boots, while a bride might be given one on her wedding day. The association of luck, love and tanners did not hold true for everyone, however, least of all the greatest siren of the British goggle-box, Elsie Tanner of ITV’s long-running soap, Coronation Street. This northern bint (doxy, q.v.) was already looking out of place by the 1970s, and disappeared from public view four years after the coin she was named for.

  To boot

  This is scarcely ever ever heard today without an accompanying thigh slap, usually by the principal boy in a pantomime. It quite simply means ‘in addition to’, and derives from the Old English bot meaning ‘advantage’ or ‘remedy’. Whether this is what the ‘boots’ (bootboys) once provided in hotels by polishing guests’ shoes is a
nother issue, but such staff are no longer referred to by the term.

  Although ‘to boot’ has nothing to do with footwear, with this age of trainers and its corresponding decline in the wearing of more formal shoes has come a similar fall in the use of shoe-based metaphors. To be ‘down at heel’ is still sometimes heard, although few people realize the direct relationship between a person’s worn-down footwear and their financial situation. The same is true of the far less used ‘on one’s uppers’, which refers to the sole being virtually entirely worn away, leaving only the upper part of the shoe left.