Lost English
Page 13
Wireless
This was a very sensible and widely used term for radio communications in the days before mobile phones and the Internet. It referred to a radio transmitter or receiver, which for most people just meant their wireless set or radiogram (q.v.) at home, on which they might listen to the Home Service (q.v.), Lord Haw-Haw (q.v.) during the war, or any number of other programmes. As the technology moved from valve to transistor (a word which itself has dropped from the language) to digital, and batteries improved, receivers could be made smaller and more portable. ‘The wireless’ has proved a surprisingly durable form of communication with more broadcasters using the technology via the Internet, so making a mockery of the 1979 Buggles hit ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’. By then, however, the word ‘wireless’ was already regarded as the preserve of the elderly and fogeyish (it was also thought by some to be more upper-class than ‘radio’ – see U and non-U), evoking images of the whole family sitting around a set listening to Vera Lynn, rather than younger people with their transistors and earpieces or terrifying ‘ghetto blasters’, or, most vexing of all, the coffee-swilling world netizen looking for a hot spot for his laptop. The word has enjoyed a slight revival, however, in the term ‘wireless broadband’.
Wizard
It is ironic that a time which has seen the greatest ever worldwide interest in wizards and witches coincided with the disappearance of the word ‘wizard’ to express delight or congratulations. It is a nice piece of irony that the boy wizard Harry Potter and his school chums are unable to use this word in the context in which it was most favoured in the boarding-school story tradition (the Mallory Towers or Just William books, for example), which J. K. Rowling draws on. It is unlikely that, satirical use aside, we shall ever hear someone shout ‘Wizard scheme, Melissa!’, or a young girl describe her father as ‘the wizardest daddy on earth’.
Wizard is one of many lost terms to express pleasure, including the short-lived ‘goody goody gumdrops’, which first appeared, ironically for such a British-sounding term, in an American cartoon in the 1930s. Indeed, although wizard is considered British slang, its first recorded use seems to be in the American novelist Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922). The Wizard was also the name of a popular boys’ comic that ran from 1922 to 1963, when it merged with The Rover.
Woolton Pie
This was exactly the sort of thing the wartime Ministry of Information had in mind when it produced the slogan ‘Better pot luck with Churchill today than humble pie with Hitler tomorrow.’ The pie was an attempt to produce something tasty and nutritious during wartime rationing. Chefs at the Savoy Hotel came up with the recipe and it was named for the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton (1883–1964), following, ironically, the same sort of guidelines the government is trying to impose on school meals today.
The recipe varied over the seasons, but Woolton Pie was basically a medley of root vegetables, including potatoes, carrots, swedes, parsnips and, for the fortunate, maybe a bit of turnip. Oats and chopped onions were added to the stock the vegetables were boiled in before being covered with pastry and grated cheese. It is, like scouse (from lobscouse, a kind of stew often eaten on ships as its ingredients were variable and could be stored for a long time; hence its association with ports and, in particular, Liverpool), a good basic food for people operating on a low budget.
Wrong side of the blanket (to be born on the)
Put simply, this is an old-fashioned euphemism for ‘bastard’. Before the Child Support Agency and today’s much more tolerant attitude towards single-parent families, illegitimacy carried far greater stigma, but although the phrase implies that the child has not been not born into any family (and until well into the twentieth century many were sent for adoption or to orphanages), that may not always have been the case. The expression may equally refer to a child whose mother and father were married, but to other people. The key point, however, is that a child born on the wrong side of the blanket is born away from the father’s home or to an unmarried mother, and was denied any legitimate claims to an inheritance.
Some noble families sidestepped this issue by prefixing the father’s forename with ‘Fitz-’, which had formerly denoted any son, to refer to illegitimate male offspring. In this way the son of William Jones, say, would not inherit the name Jones but might be known by the surname Fitzwilliam. All in all, however, it was better to be born on the wrong side of any blanket than to have been ‘born to be hanged’, although this did apparently mean one was immune from death by drowning.
Xerox
According to the official definition, Xerox is a global document-management company which once hit the Hooveresque heights of having its name associated with its chief product. So well known was the company for supplying photocopiers that the verb ‘to xerox’ was widely used as a synonym for photocopying. That time has gone and the rightful verb has returned, but Xerox can be proud not only of the company’s previous hegemony when it came to copying documents, but also in producing one of the few items of office furniture (other than the telephone) to have a song written about it (‘Zerox’ [sic] by Adam and the Ants, 1981).
Yellow press
It is perhaps odd that the phrase ‘yellow journalism’, first used in America in 1895, has fallen out of use, because we live in a golden age of exactly that. The term, from ‘yellow kid journalism’ after a popular comic strip of the day, describes a type of reporting which aims to increase circulation through eye-catching headlines and a deliberate avoidance of serious news, unless a ‘human interest’ or celebrity angle can be worked in. Trivial events are exaggerated and the yellow press thrives on gossip and scandal-mongering alongside distortions of real news. A good example occurred during the 2008 London mayoral election, when the London Evening Standard’s ‘misery boards’ outside every Tube station screamed ‘Islamic militant runs Ken campaign’. This carried the clear implication that Ken Livingstone’s campaign for re-election as Mayor of London was being orchestrated by supporters of terrorism. The key absence from the headline was the letter ‘a’ in front of ‘Ken’, which would have truthfully revealed that one out of dozens of unofficial campaigns was indeed being run by a militant Islamist. The term ‘yellow press’ is now quite rare – we use ‘tabloid’ or ‘redtop’ instead – although ‘yellow journalism’ is still used, almost always in a derogatory sense.
Yob
A simple piece of backslang that appears to have entered mainstream English in the Victorian era, but was not popularized until the twentieth century. It is really just ‘boy’ backwards, the implication being that reversing the word shows that something is wrong with the child or youth in question – in this case that the lad is an uncouth ruffian up to no good, and certainly capable of causing aggro (q.v.). Today we tend to say ‘ASBO’ (from Anti-Social Behaviour Order, a civil order in the UK and Ireland prohibiting certain specified behaviour; breaching an ASBO is a criminal offence) or ‘hoodie’ (from the hooded tops worn by many yobs) where once we said ‘yobbo’, but the meaning is the same: a young male engaged in, or likely to be engaged in, anti-social behaviour at best, criminal activities at worst. (Curiously, the adjective ‘yobbish’ to describe the behaviour is heard far more often than ‘yob’ or ‘yobbo’; ‘yobette’, for the female equivalent, has never really caught on, and the noun ‘yobbery’ is also quite uncommon nowadays.) This view of predominantly poor, often poorly educated and sometimes unruly young men is a common thread in British society and one that both the founder of the Scout movement, Robert Baden-Powell, and Rudyard Kipling, as well as several more recent commentators, have railed against. They and others have often pointed out that the demonized yob of peacetime is very often the hero in war (Tommy, q.v.).
Z reservists
Class Z reservists were former servicemen who could be recalled to the forces (of whichever branch) in the event of war, and who attended a two-week training camp every year. A bit like soldiers of the Territorial Army, but without the choice, they could be called up at moments
of crisis. In 1956 some Z Reservists baulked at being called up and possibly shipped out to intervene at Suez, and talk of them mutinying caused a certain amount of alarm in military circles.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ayto, John (ed.), Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, seventeenth edition, Chambers Harrap
— and Crofton, Ian (eds), Brewer’s Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable, second edition, Chambers Harrap
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Dalzell, Tom and Victor, Terry (eds), The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Routledge
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Green, Jonathon, The Penguin Slang Thesaurus, second edition, Penguin Books
Knowles, Elizabeth (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, second edition, Oxford University Press
— (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford University Press
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Yule, Sir Henry, Burnell, A. C. and Crooke, William (eds), Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases and of Kindred Items, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, Wordsworth Reference
The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to quote copyright material:
John Betjeman: extracts from ‘Business Girls’ and ‘How To Get On In Society’ from Collected Poems (John Murray), copyright © 1955, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1968, 1960, 1979, 1981, 1982, 2001 by John Betjeman, by permission of John Murray (Publishers), a division of Hachette UK.
Philip Larkin: extract from ‘This Be the Verse’ from Collected Poems (Faber and Faber), copyright © 1988, 1989 by the Estate of Philip Larkin, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.