The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  Shakespeare Twelfth Night (1600)

  Stuart Farquhar (Kenneth Williams): Please, Miss Plunkett, you’re squashing my itinerary.

  Moira Plunkett (Gail Grainger): Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I keep on forgetting what a big girl I am now.

  Stuart Farquhar: Quite, shall we get them out now?

  Moira Plunkett: Why, Mr Farquhar!

  Stuart Farquhar: The people for the coach, I mean.

  Moira Plunkett: Oh, those. Yes, of course.

  Rothwell Carry On Abroad 1972

  Plus ça bleedin’ change, eh.

  Pugilism: The Noble Art of Milling

  THERE IS NO way round this. If slang has little or nothing of one aspect of humanity, affection, it offers an excess of its antithesis: violence. If anything, it offers too much. Murder, manslaughter, stabbing, slashing, garrotting, whipping, mugging, judicial execution, simple beating. Compared to these legions rape, to one’s relief, is relatively overlooked other than when performed by modernity’s gangs; yet we should not be too optimistic: perhaps macho, misogynistic slang simply failed to acknowledge the concept.

  But all these, barring the violence that doubles as court-ordered punishment – though where would that be without crime aforethought? – are the products of villainy. They stand beyond the moral pale. One brand of violence does, however, gain acceptance, or does so on the whole. Boxing, originally known as prize-fighting: two men (or thus it was until recently), at first bare-knuckled and relatively free-form with a heavy larding of wrestling thrown in, later gloved and subject to a set of rules created by Oscar Wilde’s persecutor the Marquis of Queensberry, bound by the ‘square circle’, limited in time, attended by seconds, judged by a referee. So let us focus on sanctioned slogging. The prize-ring. The ‘Sweet Science’ as first Pierce Egan and later the writer A.J. Liebling called it. The Manly Art. The language that went with it was extensive, the ‘manly tongue’, one might suggest.

  The proper name for that language was flash and its definitions were open to suggestion. The Life and Character of Moll King (1747) explained that ‘This Flash, as it is called, is talking in Cant Terms, very much us’d among Rakes and Town Ladies.’ Grose, from 1785, defined ‘FLASH LINGO’ as ‘the canting or slang language’. By 1789 in George Parker’s Life’s Painter, it is lumped together with slang and cant: the reader is advised that ‘The explanation of the Cant, Flash and Slang terms [. . .] gives at one view, a perfect knowledge of the artifices, combinations, modes and habits of those invaders of our property, our safety and our lives, who have a language quite unintelligible to any but themselves.’ Finally, in its last incarnation, laid down in W.T. Moncrieff’s 1821 play Tom and Jerry (the dramatic version of Pierce Egan’s Life in London) the man-about-town Corinthian Tom pronounces that, ‘Flash, my young friend, or slang, as others call it, is the classical language of the Holy Land; in other words, St. Giles’s Greek [. . .] a species of cant in which the knowing ones conceal their roguery from the flats.’

  What united all of these was that if the vocabulary still dealt with the same old themes, a new factor had joined the game: unlike cant, associated with lower-class villains, flash, bringing together the upper and lower orders, indicated that slang had become fashionable. Flash dealt with some of the same topics as cant – typically money, drink, criminal types and their schemes – but its use did not automatically brand one as a criminal. To use flash was to be in the know; it was, logically, to be flash to, which we might call ‘on the ball’.

  It’s all about ‘knowingness’. Here’s another definition, from the three-times transported James Hardy Vaux, who had appended a ‘New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language’ to his Memoirs, first published in 1812 and thus creating Australia’s first ever dictionary, of any sort. As a noun flash could be ‘the cant language used by the family i.e. the underworld (a term that long predates its attachment to the US Mafia), and that ‘a person who affects any peculiar habit, as swearing, dressing a particular habit, taking snuff, &c., merely to be taken notice, is said to do it out of flash; it is the adjectival use that clearly crosses classes. ‘FLASH, to be flash to any matter or meaning, is to understand or comprehend it, and is synonymous with being fly, down, or awake.’ Woke as we put it now.

  The term prize-fighter dates back to the seventeenth century, when it seems to have been used only historically, and with reference to gladiators. It takes on a modern use with the rise, around 1800, of the Fancy, described by Robert Southey as ‘the Amateurs of Boxing’. The Fancy comprised the boxers (fancy coves) themselves, plus the fans (fancy blokes): sporting gents of one degree of respectability or another, bookmakers (commissioners or legs, which equated the bookie with a blackleg or racecourse swindler whose name came from the black-topped boots such swindlers favoured) of equal variety, plus anyone who was up for the trek to some distant field where beadles and bailiffs (body-snatchers, bums, shoulder-clappers) – empowered to halt such illegal festivities – feared to tread. The fights went on for scores of rounds. The Queen of Marksbury, as various fistic practitioners have malapropised him, had yet to rule. And like any self-respecting coterie, there was a language.

  Prize-fighting was a perfect complement to flash. It was not wholly illegal – although beadles and bailiffs would attempt to curtail matches if they could. Its fans, known as the Fancy, were a socially mixed group that brought together the fighters themselves, their professional handlers, a collection of more or less honest bookmakers, a range of noble supporters, and anyone – in and out of the underworld – who appreciated ‘the Manly Art’. Writing ‘Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress’ (1819), his satirical account of that year’s congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, Byron’s friend Tom Moore – ‘passing from the Academy of Plato to that of Mr Jackson—now indulging in Attic flashes with Aristophanes, and now studying Flash in the Attics of Cock Court’ – signed himself ‘One of the Fancy’. Keeping in the boxing mode, he cast the diplomatic encounter as ‘The Grand Set-to between Long Sandy and Georgy the Porpus’ (i.e. Tsar Alexander and King George IV). Among its flash-filled verses were such as this:

  Neat milling this Round – what with clouts on the nob,

  Home hits in the bread-basket, clicks in the gob,

  And plumps in the daylights, a prettier treat

  Between two Johnny Raws ’tis not easy to meet.

  His preface gave a mini-glossary and the verses were properly footnoted.

  A year later there appeared The Fancy or ‘The Poetical Remains of the late Peter Corcoran’, which pseudonym masked John Hamilton Reynolds (1794–1852), poet, satirist, critic and playwright, and friend of Keats. The hero is a young poet, whose growing obsession with prize-fighting takes over from his writing, his job as a lawyer and his sweetheart who, seeing him with a pair of black eyes, breaks off the relationship. In the end Corcoran, whose ‘memoirs’ are filled with flash, dies of brain fever. His cranium, it is noted, has an unusually large organ of combativeness.

  Boxing was also seen as the one cross-class sport in which a gentleman could indulge. As ‘Mr Thornton’ puts it in A Bachelor of Arts (1800) ‘A young man, fresh from school or college, can be but little in want of Latin or Greek; but, what he is in want of is, knowledge of the world—that acquaintance with life and its usages which is essential for entering into society. My son, for instance, ought to be perfectly master of riding, fencing, and shooting; he should even learn to box, for do we not meet with imposing toll keepers and insolent cabmen at every turning? And as he can’t call them out, he should be able to knock them down.’ To what extent gentlemen faced off against impudent proles is unknown, other than in the popular ‘sport’ of boxing a charley – overturning a watchman in his box – but the principle was there.

  Not everyone appreciated this socially transgressive world. The US writer Washington Irving’s ‘Buckthorne: the Young Man of Great Expectations’ in his Tales of a Traveller (1824) was unimpressed: ‘I know it is the opinion of many sages [. . .] that the noble science of b
oxing keeps up the bull-dog courage of the nation; and far be it from me to decry the advantage of becoming a nation of bull-dogs; but I now saw clearly that it was calculated to keep up the breed of English ruffian. “What is the Fives Court [London’s leading boxing school],” said I to myself [. . .] “but a college of scoundrelism, where every bully ruffian in the land may gain a fellowship? What is the slang language of The Fancy but a jargon by which fools and knaves commune and understand each other, and enjoy a kind of superiority over the uninitiated? What is a boxing-match but an arena, where the noble and the illustrious are jostled into familiarity with the infamous and the vulgar? What, in fact, is the Fancy itself, but a chain of easy communication, extending from the peer down to the pickpocket, through the medium of which a man of rank may find he has shaken hands, at three removes, with the murderer on the gibbet?”’ His assessment may have been spot-on, but what the priggish Yankee missed was the appeal of the Fancy to both noble and vulgar. Not to mention its slangy language.

  Slangwise these were fistiana’s glory days. Not till the 1930s, which offered such Palookaville pleasures as the tanker, who takes a dive or goes in the water (a tank being a swimming pool), the umbrella, who ‘folds up’, and the tomato can, who is ‘easily crushed’, did the smackers, soccers and bruisers offer so many synonyms.

  The big word was mill. Milling had already meant any form of beating or thrashing but now it meant prize-fighting – with bare knuckles – and a fight could be a milling-bout or a milling-match. Mill itself meant a fight. Thus ‘An Amateur’ (actually the slang collector John Badcock), tells in Real Life in London (1821) how ‘There was a most excellent mill at Moulsey Hurst [a cricket ground near the Thames and later the Hurst Park racecourse] on Thursday last, between the Gas-light man, who appears to be a game chicken, and a prime hammerer—he can give and take with any man—and Oliver—Gas beat him hollow, it was all Lombard-street to a china orange.’ (There was an original Game Chicken – the bare-knuckle champion Henry ‘Hen’ Pierce who had died in 1809). The milling-cove or milling kiddy was a boxer, and the milling-panney (from panny, a house) the place where the fight took place. There was a seeming variation: milvader, to box and thus milvadering, the fight. But there was no link: it came from Scottish milvad: a blow.

  The boxers (buffers) seemed to be built on different lines. Nothing as simple as a head: there was the nob, the attic, the knowledge box, the top-loft, the brain canister and upper crust (fifty years before it began referring to a somewhat different variety of nob). Eyes were ogles, peepers, daylights and day-openers; teeth were ivories, domino boxes and grinders; the stomach, that alluring target, was a bread-bag, bread-basket or bread-room, a tripe-shop or a victualling office (Australia opted for tuckerbox); the nose a bowsprit, smeller, sneezer, sniffler or snifter, snuffbox or bag or sensitive plant; the ribs were palings. The arms were props. The fist, one’s most vital appendage, was the mitt or mitten, the hard dumpling, the famble, the daddle, bunch or box of fives, mauler or mauley or the prop. It was also the auctioneer: it ‘knocked things down’.

  Knocking down was of course the point. One used nothing so prosaic as a jab, hook or uppercut. Blows could be nobbers or headachers (to the head), mufflers (to the mouth), facers (to the face), props (uppercuts) and chippers (jabs). A simple blow was a fib, which gave fibbing gloak, the boxer (gloak being a variant on bloke) and fibbing, the ‘noble art’ itself. As explained by the great boxing journalist Pierce Egan in his Book of Sports (1832): to fib was ‘technical, in the P[rize]R[ing], to hammer your opponent repeatedly in close quarters; and to get no return for the compliment you are bestowing on him’. It could also be pepper, and the boxer was a pepperer. There were staggerers and tellers (which ‘told’ on one’s stamina) and the gaslighter which presumably put out one’s lights. The knockout punch was a burster, a clicker (which also meant the fighter), a doser, a finisher, a full stop, a settler, a stopper and a turfer or sender (both of which sent one to the grass). Suffering dizziness after a blow was shooting stars. Other punches included the plump, the bung (usually ‘in the eye’) the buster, the click, the culp (going back to Latin’s colaphus, a box on the ear), the deceptively mild poke, the toucher, dig, dab (thus dab the paint, to jab) or dub (especially as dub o the hick, a blow on the head), the milvad, the mill, the stoter (from Dutch stooten, to knock, to push), the teaser, the ticket, the rattler (presumably aimed at the teeth though it just might undermine a fighter’s composure), the walloper, the whiffle and the whistycastor.

  It was all very detailed, though that may have stemmed from the boxing writers’ need to hold their readers’ attention. The belly-go-firster or -fister was a blow to the stomach, especially one given with no warning, or at the start of a fight. A punch to the eye was an ogler, winker or blinder and to bung up an eye was to blacken it. Black eyes were peepers in mourning. The brisketer or brisket-cut was launched at the chest. The flytrapper, chatterer, muffler, munzer (from muns, the face) and muzzler targeted the mouth, the cheeker the cheek and the facer, conker, chop or chopper the face (chops had meant the face since 1577). The throttle hurt the throat, the bellier or bellowser the stomach (and the phrase bellows to mend was applied to a man who was running out of wind), the rib-tickler or -bender or ribber savaged the ribs. Blows to the head included the topper, nutcracker (nutcrackers themselves were fists), header, jobber, topper, nodyer (from Australia) and nope (from northern dialect nawp, noup, nope, a blow and ultimately a supposed Scandinavian verb nawpe, to strike down). The nose attracted smellers, sneezers, snorters, nosegays, nosers, nosenders and snufflers. Finally the ear was assailed with luggers (from lug), buckhorses (in honour of the pugilist Buckhorse, real name John Smith, who, for a small charge, allowed people to hit him hard on the side of the head), and the whisterclyster, whisticaster or whisterpoop. Whister meant a whisper, clyster an enema and cast to throw.

  The product of all of this was blood. Or claret. Of all the Fancy’s favourite terms this is perhaps the sole survivor. One could claret one’s opponent or tap their claret, i.e. draw their blood; and the first such blow was the claret-christening; the nose was the claret-jug, claret-cask or claret-spout. To make it bleed was to tap a judy which played on judy, a woman, and the blood that flowed when she was deflowered.

  Modern boxing is more likely to provide imagery than slang: out for the count, beat someone to the punch, saved by the bell, or chuck, throw or toss in the sponge or towel, itself already in use in the mid-nineteenth century. The last great exponent of language in the world of boxing was Muhammad Ali, but his delivery was all his own work.

  Tom Moore’s friend Lord Byron was a great fan. He was a regular at the training sessions offered by John Jackson (1769–1845), an ex-prizefighter (champion from 1795–1803) who taught Byron and a number of his friends. The aristocratic poet termed him his ‘old friend and corporeal pastor and master’ and noted in his ‘Hints from Horace’ that ‘men unpractised in exchanging knocks / Must go to Jackson ere they dare to box.’ It was a quintessential flash relationship: the lord and the butcher’s son turned publican, united no doubt in language as much as in friendship.

  Byron was an aristocrat and a renowned if controversial poet, but the Fancy’s true laureate was less socially distinguished. If prize-fighting and its language has a story over and beyond those who actually battled out the bouts it is that of its chronicler-in-chief, Pierce Egan (1772–1849). As John Camden Hotten put it, writing the introduction to his 1869 reprint of Egan’s ‘novel’ Life in London (1821) ‘In his particular line, he was the greatest man in England. [. . .] His peculiar phraseology, and his superior knowledge of the business, soon rendered him eminent beyond all rivalry and competition. He was flattered and petted by pugilists and peers: his patronage and countenance were sought for by all who considered the road to a prize-fight the road to reputation and honor. Sixty years ago, his presence was understood to convey respectability on any meeting convened for the furtherance of bull-baiting, cock-fighting, cudgelling, wrestling
, boxing, and all that comes within the category of “manly sports”.’ Egan’s ‘peculiar phraseology’ would make him the father of every sportswriter who, perhaps unconsciously, has adopted his heightened style as a blueprint for their own.

  Egan was born in Ireland but at some stage moved to the London suburbs, where he would spend his life. By 1812 he had established himself as the country’s leading ‘reporter of sporting events’, which at the time meant mainly prize-fights and horseraces. As A.J. Liebling, his spiritual if not actual successor, put it over a century later, ‘Egan [. . .] belonged to London, and no man has ever presented a more enthusiastic picture of all aspects of its life except the genteel. He was a hack journalist, a song writer, and conductor of puff-sheets and, I am inclined to suspect, a shake-down man.’ Most important for Liebling, who wrote for the New Yorker on boxing among much else, was that ‘In 1812 he got out the first paperbound instalment of Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism; from the days of Brougham and Slack to the Heroes of the Present Milling Aera.’ The journal lasted until 1828, its fifth volume, and established its editor as the foremost authority on what in the fourth volume (1824) was termed ‘the Sweet Science of Bruising’ which Sweet Science 130 years on gave Liebling a title for his collected boxing pieces.

  Egan’s journal mixed round-by-round reports of fights with biographies of those who fought them, but as Liebling notes, as well as these unsurpassed technical skills what Egan achieved was to portray the links that held together the Fancy – its ‘trulls and lushes, toffs and toddlers’ – and its world of flash. ‘He also saw the ring as a juicy chunk of English life, in no way separable from the rest. His accounts of the extra-annular lives of the Heroes, coal-heavers, watermen, and butchers’ boys, are a panorama of low, dirty, happy, brutal, sentimental Regency England that you’ll never get from Jane Austen. The fighter’s relations with their patrons, the Swells, present that curious pattern of good fellowship and snobbery, not mutually exclusive, that has always existed between Gentleman and Player in England.’