Lost English

by Chris Roberts

  Toilet

  A much used word in the context of going to the lavatory, but a lost one when it comes to its former primary meaning – as in ‘to attend to one’s toilet’ – of grooming or preparing oneself for the day, or evening, ahead. There is even an archaic use of the word to refer to a dressing table, though the actual derivation is from the French word toile, meaning a piece of cloth on which were placed items connected with grooming, such as hairbrushes. Sherlock Holmes would often use the state of a person and whether they had neglected their toilet as a means of gauging the likely seriousness of a client. People still attend to their toilet, but refer to shaving, washing, putting on make-up and all the other functions of assembling oneself for the outside world by other terms.

  Tommy

  Colloquial word for a British soldier, it comes from ‘Thomas Atkins’, which was adopted in the early nineteenth century as a specimen name appearing on official Army forms. It is especially associated with the First World War, when it was used by German soldiers as well as Allied troops, just as Jerry (Boche q.v.), GI (government issue) and Charlie came to be used to describe German, American and Vietcong troops respectively. Although ‘Tommies’ could refer to British troops in general, singular ‘Tommy’ invariably means a private soldier, the honest and slightly put-upon working-class troops that have always formed the Army’s backbone. Kipling, in his poem ‘Tommy’ (1892), noted how differently these young men are treated in peacetime compared to when there’s fighting to be done:

  I went into a public-’ouse to get a pint o’ beer,

  The publican ’e up an’ sez, ‘We serve no redcoats here.’

  The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,

  I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:

  O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, go away’;

  But it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins,’ when the band begins to play.

  In this he was only echoing something soldiers have quietly put up with for centuries, and continue to do so.

  Tonic

  Used to describe anything that revitalizes a person mentally, physically or emotionally, yet tends now to be employed only in very specific senses medicinally (or, in another meaning, musically), or for the quinine-based mixer that frequently accompanies gin. The general use of a certain kind of drink as a bracer or pick-me-up has largely disappeared, but essentially all the modern high-energy, vitamin-rich, naturally sourced concoctions are just a new variant on the old sarsaparilla and other enliveners from the past. The other use of the word that has gone is the notion of a person being such a cheery soul that they act as a tonic for those around them. In fact, the only popular modern use of tonic in this sense is, disturbingly, the phrase ‘a tonic for the troops,’ and that largely seems to have survived because it was the title of an album (1978) by Irish band The Boomtown Rats, fronted by (Sir) Bob Geldolf.

  Touch of the tar brush

  Derogatory, if euphemistic, British slang expression for anyone thought to have black or Asian ancestry. A less offensive term today would be ‘mixed race’, but actually that would miss the nuance of the phrase, which was originally used about anyone with dark looks, regardless of his or her racial heritage. It basically implied that somewhere that person’s ancestry included descent from someone of a different race, which in port cities such as Bristol, Cardiff and Liverpool was extremely likely. Indeed, a 1991 documentary film by John Akomfrah called Touch of the Tar Brush examined the impact of what today would be called multiculturalism in Liverpool.

  Another odd and now defunct word for dark-skinned was ‘Dixie’ (after the nickname for the Southern United States), which, according to one theory, led to English football’s greatest goal scorer, William Ralph Dean of Everton, being better known as Dixie Dean. This word, like ‘coloured’, has mostly fallen out of use, as has ‘touch of the tar brush’.

  Trolleybus

  Essentially, trackless trams, often double-deckers, powered by overhead electricity cables, the current being picked up by an articulated trolley pole (or poles) on the vehicle’s roof. A nice example of a word that has been lost but may, if the plans of Leeds City Council come off, soon return both to the city streets and the lips of English speakers in the UK. Although common across Europe and in parts of America and Canada, trolleybuses were once widespread in the UK, with fifty systems operating across the country; however, the last of them – in Bradford – were decommissioned in 1972. They were as much a part of the urban British scene as trams and Routemaster buses, and that chronicler of bygone transport, John Betjeman, gives them a glancing mention in his poem ‘Business Girls’:

  Rest you there, poor unbelov’d ones,

  Lap your loneliness in heat.

  All too soon the tiny breakfast,

  Trolley-bus and windy street!

  Tube

  Not only has this nickname for television largely vanished, but the technology that gave rise to the term has also been almost completely overtaken. The cathode-ray tube made possible the appearance of images on a screen, and until the development of cheap liquid-crystal display and plasma screens, was the main means of showing broadcast and other images on a television set. In America it also gave rise to the term ‘boob tube’ for TV, the inference being that watching too much of it turned you into one. Since ‘boob’ has a different meaning in Britain, the terms most commonly used here were ‘idiot box’ or ‘goggle box’.

  Ironically, these were coined and most frequently used at a time when, by today’s standards, a decent proportion of TV output would not have caused the viewer to consider self-harm or hard drugs as viable alternative forms of entertainment. Yet the truth is that television has always had good and bad shows – it’s just that today there is more TV, and correspondingly, therefore, more poor programmes available to viewers. Television is mostly, after all, commercially driven, and thus naturally follows Gresham’s Law that bad money drives out good, or in this case Big Brother drives out big drama. The nickname also provided the title of a ground-breaking, if anarchic, music programme on Channel 4 from the early 1980s, which launched the television careers of, amongst others, Paula Yates and Terry Christian.

  Tumblers

  As a form of entertainment, tumbling just doesn’t cut it any more. At least, no one seems to refer to acrobats by that name nowadays, although tumbling remains one of the disciplines within gymnastics, and requires much the same coordination, balance, strength and agility as other acrobatics. Gymnastics aside, tumbling is still part of a clown’s (Joey, q.v.) repertoire, but today the child’s party that offers tumblers as a special attraction is likely to be thinly attended. After all, if one wants to see grown men fall over for no good reason there is plenty of televised football.

  Other circus or traditional country-fair entertainments have disappeared, from catching the greasy pig to climbing the greasy pole. This is largely because of changing tastes and, in some cases, such as freak shows, greater sensitivity, but the seemingly oxymoronic, modern trend towards resurrecting traditional arts and festivities, coupled with the mania for rebranding, may yet see ‘tumblaerobics’ as the next weight-loss sensation.

  Tussie-mussie

  A small posy of flowers which is either carried by a bridesmaid at a wedding, or pinned to her dress by means of a small decorative vase. Dating from medieval times, the word appears to derive from the earlier ‘tussemose’, related to more familiar ‘tussock’, and until well into the Victorian era it could also mean a bunch of aromatic herbs carried to disguise unpleasant smells, in the days before ‘personal hygiene’. It’s an odd, if pleasing sounding, way of referring to a bouquet, but is probably only used by florists nowadays. It is, however, no odder or older than many other wedding traditions, some of which date back centuries with little alteration.

  U and Non-U

  It is a modern conceit to suggest that class no longer exists in the United Kingdom, but it is now rare for it to be defined through the s
peech gradations U and non-U. ‘U’ in this context stands for upper class, and it first surfaced in 1956 in a scholarly article by a Professor Alan Ross. The ‘non-U’ he referred to was the everyday speech of the aspirant middle classes of the post-war period. It was part of a broader debate about social class, but came to be most focused on vocabulary and pronunciation, in particular whether one used certain telling words such as napkin or serviette, graveyard or cemetery, pudding or sweet. By the time Nancy Mitford and others picked up on the term, publishing an amusing and bestselling book called Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy based upon Ross’s article, the nation’s chattering classes were checking each other’s natter for giveaway clues, starting a debate about class-consciousness and snobbery that rumbled on into the 1970s. Even today, though rarely, someone may describe something as being ‘rather non-U’. Possibly the neatest explanation of the phenomenon was provided by John Betjeman in his poem ‘How To Get On In Society’, which in five succinct verses delivers over thirty fatal linguistic and social errors. There are seven in this verse, from the putting of milk in before the tea to the pronunciation of ‘scones’ to rhyme with ‘stones’, as well as the use of non-U words like preserve and doileys.

  Milk and then just as it comes, dear?

  I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones;

  Beg pardon, I’m soiling the doileys

  With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.

  UB40

  Best known in respect of the Midlands band, who adopted it as their name because they met while they were unemployed and the Unemployment Benefit Form 40 was as good a way as any of expressing their condition. As the old Labour Exchanges gave way to Job Centres, so the forms by which benefits are delivered have changed, and UB40 is now known as the Job Seekers’ Allowance. The whole area of benefits is replete with (if you’ll pardon the pun) redundant terms, including the YTS (Youth Training Schemes) and YOP (Youth Opportunity Programmes), some of which sank without trace whilst others lingered longer in the language; one still occasionally hears a young and lowly paid recent recruit to a company referred to as ‘the YTS kid’. Other terms for the unemployed come in and out of vogue, from the rhyming slang ‘rock and roll’ (for ‘on the dole’) to ‘being on the social’, ‘going to scratch’, ‘signing on’ or ‘getting the giro’. The last few are unlikely ever to leave the language because they have entered that magical repository of folksong and tradition, the football chant.

  Vapours (an attack of the)

  Used to describe any number of mental or emotional conditions, from depression and hysteria to mood swings and fainting. Today these would all be segmented off into their proper ghettos of bi-polar or pre-menstrual tension, rather than be collectively put down to vapours or its synonym, nerves. The latter word was deployed much more broadly in the past to describe a character or way of being, and ‘a fit of nerves’ was used very often to describe ‘female complaints’. Today ‘the vapours’ is mainly used jocularly, to describe someone getting in a bit of a tizzy.

  Veranda

  This is an external (but often, or even usually, roofed) gallery area attached to one or more sides of a house which offered shade and shelter, and in hot climates would be cooler than the interior. It derives from Portuguese varanda, meaning a railing or balustrade, though it originally came from Hindi, like so many other terms in English that are still used (such as bungalow) or which have all but disappeared (dekko, q.v.). A veranda (or verandah) is generally raised above ground level, perhaps partly to improve the view from the seats that are often to be found on them. Warm climates like India or Portugal, or even parts of the United States, lend themselves to this architectural feature, but they are rare in the UK, hence the decline in the use of the word.

  Washing boards

  A wooden board with ridges on it that was used in conjunction with (or occasionally instead of) a dolly (q.v.), it was particularly good for stubborn stains which could be removed by rubbing the fabric against the board’s uneven surface. Whether the cloth was then passed on to the wash tub and dolly or just rinsed, it would eventually have to be wrung out and dried. This drying process was aided by using a mangle, which consisted of two rollers through which the laundry was passed by turning a handle. Later versions were electric but initially mangles were hand-operated and, like the dolly, required a good deal of strength to operate for any length of time. The disappearance of washing boards was inevitable once washing machines became widespread.

  Wayfarer

  A simple, if now rather quaint, term from the Old English word faran, to travel, and ‘way’ in the sense of a track or road, meaning to make one’s own way on foot. It conjures an image of someone travelling at a gentle untroubled pace with no particular need to arrive at any time. This makes it antithetical to the modern world of fast travel and appointment-driven journeying, though unlike other terms connected with walking – the noun ‘tramp’, for example – it has not been stigmatized. The closest modern synonym might be ‘rambler’, but even they have an element of urgency about them.

  Well, he would [say that], wouldn’t he?

  A heavily used catchphrase that arose from the Profumo scandal of 1963 (Rachmanism, q.v.). It is a quote from one of the principal characters, Mandy Rice-Davies, at the trial of another, Stephen Ward, which arose from the denial by Lord Astor that he had had an affair with her. Many urban legends surround the scandal, which involved government ministers and foreign spies, as well as the nobility. The yellow press (q.v.) had a field day and as a result all kinds of possibly apocryphal stories were reported, including the alleged first words of the Malaysian Prime Minister on arrival in London, which were quoted as ‘I want Mandi.’ The fact that mandi in Malay means to take a shower or bath was explained in less bold type.

  The scandal broke the Macmillan government, which was thrown out of office a year later, and heralded the official beginning of Swinging London; it was noted, in passing, by the poet Philip Larkin, who wrote:

  Sexual intercourse began

  In nineteen sixty-three

  (which was rather late for me) –

  The phrase came to be used whenever someone wished to cast doubt on the truth of a comment, and lasted rather longer than Miss Rice-Davies’s fame – after a failed pop career, she described her life as ‘one slow descent into respectability’.

  What the dickens!

  One could also be given the dickens for, say, a late arrival or other misdemeanour, or have the dickens of a time finding something that was difficult to reach. ‘What the dickens,’ however, was a general term of surprise similar to ‘What the deuce’ – both words standing in for ‘the Devil’ (even though ‘deuce’ does sound rather like the French word Dieu, God). ‘The deuce!’ is often used to express anger. The earliest known written instance of dickens (‘devilkins’) is in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597): ‘I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.’ So the phrase has nothing to do with the Victorian novelist, and indeed predates him by several centuries.

  Expressions like this are ‘minced oaths’, deriving from an age when polite and/or God-fearing people did mince their words. There are many more, from ‘By Jove’ (substituting a Roman deity for God) to ‘Strewth’ (God’s truth), most of which have fallen into disuse as it became broadly acceptable to take in vain the names of God, Jesus or the Devil. A few, like ‘Cor blimey’ (supposedly from ‘God blind me’) or ‘Tarnation’ (from ‘Damnation’ used as an oath), ‘Crikey’ and ‘Cripes’ (from Christ), are still just hanging on (as does ‘Strewth’ in Australia), whereas it’s safe to say that ‘Zounds’ (God’s wounds) and ‘Odds bodkins’ (God’s body) have definitely strayed off the linguistic map. (See also Rot or tommyrot.)

  Whitehouse, Mary

  A Christian campaigner who died in 2001, most famous for her attacks on the broadcast and other media which she saw as undermining the nation’s morals. She was the founder of the National Viewers’ an
d Listeners’ Association, which lives on as Mediawatch. Originally an art teacher, in the early 1960s she became responsible for sex education at a secondary school. It was perhaps her shocked reaction to some of her pupils’ morals, for which she blamed television, that started her off. She began her ‘Clean Up TV’ campaign in 1963 and by 1965 had collected over half a million signatures for a petition sent to the Queen. Although many of her legal actions failed it would appear she did influence future laws about the broadcasting of warning signs on films, and had a pornographic magazine named in her honour to go with the CBE to which she was appointed in 1980.

  Her own favourite programmes were Dixon of Dock Green, Neighbours, and coverage of snooker, while she had issues with Till Death Us Do Part, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Not the Nine O’Clock News, the swearing in Four Weddings and a Funeral – and Doctor Who (for its ‘nightmarish qualities’). This earned her a place in pop culture, not only in the programmes she targeted, but also in the BBC radio and TV topical comedy show The Mary Whitehouse Experience (1989–92), while she was one of the influences behind Mrs Merton in the spoof television chat show The Mrs Merton Show (1994–8). This latter character perhaps captured the wit, humour and charm of the real Mary Whitehouse, although many others in the media probably shared the views of the comedian Bernard Manning, who said, ‘She’ll be sadly missed, I imagine, but not by me.’ (See also Mrs Grundy.)