The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  Like Tom Moore’s satire, Boxiana was a showcase of ‘Fancy slang’. But by its nature it was restricted to the topic in hand. Seven years after the launch of his boxing journal Egan achieved a best-seller that packed in even more flash, and proclaimed itself as a very Bible of Fancy goings-on, both high and low. Pugilistic poetry was now cropping up in magazines such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which also serialised Egan’s work and stated that ‘The man who has not read Boxiana is ignorant of the power of the English language.’

  In 1821 he announced the publication of a regular journal – Life in London – to appear monthly at a shilling a time. It was to be illustrated by George Cruikshank (1792–1878), who had succeeded Hogarth and Rowlandson as London’s leading satirist of urban life. The journal was dedicated to the King, George IV, who at one time had received Egan at court. The first edition of Life in London ‘or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq., and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis’ appeared on 15 July.

  Egan’s creation was an enormous, instant success, with its circulation mounting every month. Pirate versions appeared, featuring such figures as ‘Bob Tallyho’, ‘Dick Wildfire’ and the like. Print-makers speedily knocked off cuts featuring the various ‘stars’ and the real-life public flocked to the ‘sporting’ addresses that Egan had his heroes frequent. There was a translation into French. At least six plays were based on Egan’s characters, contributing to yet more sales. One of these was exported to America, launching the ‘Tom and Jerry’ craze there. The version created by William Moncrieff, whose knowledge of London and of its slang equalled Egan’s, was cited, not without justification, as ‘The Beggar’s Opera of its day’. Moncrieff (1794–1857) was one of contemporary London’s most successful dramatists and theatrical managers. His production of Tom and Jerry, or, Life in London ran continuously at the Adelphi Theatre for two seasons; it was Moncrieff as much as Egan who, as the original DNB had it ‘introduced slang into the drawing room’. Some theatrical versions (of 1822 and 1823) felt it worth offering audiences a small glossary, mainly derived from the footnotes in Egan’s prose original. In all, Egan suggested in his follow-up The Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry and Logic (1830) some sixty-five works were created on the back of his own. And added that, ‘We have been pirated, COPIED, traduced; but, unfortunately, not ENRICHED.’

  ‘We’ had also come to epitomise a whole world. The adjectival use of tom and jerry lasted into the mid-century. Young men went on ‘Tom-and-Jerry frolics’, which usually featured the picking of drunken fights and the destruction of property, and in 1853, in Robert Surtees’ Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, the story of a plausible con-man among the hunting set, the ageing rake Mr Puffington, ever-assuring his friends that, like Corinthian Tom, he could show them ‘Life’, can be found reminiscing and ‘[t]elling how Deuceace and he floored a Charley, or Blueun and he pitched a snob out of the boxes into the pit. This was in the old Tom-and-Jerry days, when fisticuffs were the fashion.’ There were tom-and-jerry shops, which were cheap, rough taverns, tom-and-jerry gangs of rowdy, hedonistic young men, and a verb use which mean to go out on a spree. By 1840 the names had come to christen a highly spiced punch, still being served up by Damon Runyon in ‘Dancing Dan’s Christmas’ a century later. It was adopted by London costermongers to mean a cherry in rhyming slang.

  Life in London appeared until 1828, when Egan closed it down. The journal was incorporated into the sporting magazine Bell’s Life, which would last until in 1886, it too was bought up, by the Sporting Times. Egan’s prose style was incorporated as well, and it was seemingly still popular thirty years on. When, during his freshman term at Oxford, set c.1850, the fictional ‘Mr Verdant Green’ tries some genteel prize-fighting, it ends, as do most of his sporting efforts, in disappointment: in ‘the sporting slang of Tintinnabulum’s Life [. . .] his claret had been repeatedly tapped, his bread-basket walked into, his day-lights darkened, his ivories rattled, his nozzle barked, his whisker-bed napped heavily, his kissing-trap countered, his ribs roasted, his nut spanked, and his whole person put into chancery, stung, bruised, fibbed, propped, fiddled, slogged, and otherwise ill-treated.’ It was all getting a bit stale, and would be gone in another decade, but journalists had to earn their pennies per line and the readers definitely expected something a little livelier than ‘A hit B’.

  If slang, or rather flash, did manage to reach the essentially female arena of the drawing room, it would have appeared only in a very few, and most likely those of the better class of brothel. Flash remained a male delight. And a raffish one. Egan uses it in many of his London scenes, but they are invariably those where our heroes encounter the low end of the city’s life. Indeed sophisticate Tom is constantly warning country Jerry to mind his language when voyaging amongst ‘the Roses, Pinks and Tulips, the flowers of Society’. It is when they visit All Max, the East End gin shop, and encounter such members of the ‘flash part of mankind’ as Bob the Coal-Whipper and Black Sal that the racy slang comes out; in the fashionable West End club Almacks, ‘we must mind our P’s and Q.s’. Not merely that but the trio arrange a fail-safe, a murmur of ‘lethe’ (Greek for forgetfulness) if any of them are heard to fall from social grace. As Tom says, ‘Indeed, if it were possible to call to your aid the waters of lethe, to cleanse your pericranium of all ideas of “the slang” for a night, upon entering those regions of refinement, [. . .] it would be highly advantageous towards your attraction.’ Code-switching is not a modern invention.

  In 1823 Egan consolidated his role as a leading purveyor of flash with his revision of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. It is effectively the dictionary’s fourth legitimate edition although as Julie Coleman points out, Egan’s direct source was the pirated Lexicon Balatronicum of 1811. Egan’s Grose, as it is generally known, embellished its predecessor with the inclusion of a variety of mainly sporting Regency slang. He also cuts the ‘coarse and broad expressions’ and ‘neglected no opportunity of excluding indelicate phrases [. . .] nor of softening down others which Grose had allowed and notes the way that some slang terminology, typically rum – once a positive term, but by 1820 generally the reverse – had altered its sense. At the same time he hoped that in sum that his efforts work ‘to improve, and not to degrade mankind; to remove ignorance, and put the unwary on their guard; to rouse the sleepy, and to keep them awake; to render those persons who are a little up, more fly: and to cause every one to be down to those tricks, manoeuvres and impositions practised in life, which daily cross the paths of both young and old.’ Among the headwords he excluded was the linguistic sense of slang (he defines it only as meaning fetters and as the verb to cheat), which Grose had listed, although at flash, defined as ‘knowing’ he offers patter flash ‘to speak the slang language’.

  Perhaps Egan’s most original contribution was the eleven-page ‘Biographical Sketch of Francis Grose, Esq.’ The sources for this have vanished, and it has come to be queried by modern researchers, but the picture he paints of the bonhomous, rotund lexicographer making his nightly tours of London’s taverns and rookeries is undeniably appealing.

  Jack’s a Lad: All Aboard the Oggin

  GIVEN SLANG’S HARD-WIRED identification with all things urban, it’s paradoxical, at least at first glance, how much the sea has come to register on its coinages. But there it is, and not just by chance.

  The best incubators for slang are nailed down and shut tight. Inward-looking and forced together willy-nilly. What John Camden Hotten termed ‘the congregating together of people [. . .] the result of crowding, and excitement, and artificial life’. The old slang collector-cum-purveyor of S&M porn was thinking cities but they’re not exclusive. An external threat may help. War is the obvious one; ’14–’18 produced a vast increase in the slang vocabulary, but there are alternatives. Worlds that are similarly closed and which generate their own languages. Among them is that of the sea, wh
ich naturally means ships and they in turn mean sailors. The influence of the sea on slang is thus worth more than just a glance.

  This is not navy slang – properly known (if not that often) as altumal, and possibly from Latin’s altum mare, the deep sea – which is a whole other thing, but the crossover from the watery world to the innately citified one of the counter-language. We must, sadly, sidestep such onboard characterisations as jemmy ducks, who looked after the poultry, jack dusty, the stores assistant (the ‘dust’ being flour) and jack nastyface, the cook’s number two. Gone too must be Jimmy Round, a Frenchman (from je me rends, I surrender, and attributed to the Napoleonic Wars).

  There are, for starters, the words that mean sailor. There are twenty-three jacks in slang which probably makes it the biggest creator of homonyms in the lexis but only one counts here: the one that abbreviates jack tar, which refers to the old habit of smearing your breeches with that sticky, liquid-repellent substance in a primitive effort at waterproofing. (He also comes as jackie, john and jackshite.) The image also gave tarpaulin (plus tar and tarry-breeks or tarry-jacket), which implied a man who had quite literally got his hands dirty learning the job and hadn’t merely got there through connections.

  Breeks began as white and his jacket as blue and thus the bluejacket; he roamed the sea, which gave lagger and lag-cull (both from lag, water) and was thus piscine: the scaly fish (who was tough), the otter and the sea-crab (which may have reflected a well-known ballad featuring the crab, a chamberpot, and the suggestion that one had best look within before squatting). He went shoeless which gave flatfoot, obsessively washed down the decks, thus swab and swab-jockey, and allegedly spat to excess, the gob (from gob, a clot of slimy substance). He often fought the French but still borrowed their matelot, though spelled it matlow. As Village People fans will recall, the sailor is a popular gay sex-object and usually twinned with something one might eat. Known as sea-food he was also a blueberry pie, lobster pot, sea pussy and, specifying his penis, a piece of salt water taffy (the UK’s rock).

  The sea itself tends to rhyming slang: housemaid’s knee, coffee and tea, River Lea, plus the briny, and the jokily miniaturising puddle, pond and ditch. Sailors, meanwhile, opt for oggin (which in terms of sailing, one flogs). The oggin, as a selection of its many literary appearances makes clear, is large, deep, wet, and while a necessary given for the naval personnel who coined the term, seems to suggest greater duty than pleasure. Safe on land the lubber may extol it, the sailor merely falls in and does not invariably emerge. One thing unites them: ignorance of its origins. The etymology of the word, that is.

  One belief is that sailors, universally unable to pronounce ‘ocean’, called it ‘oggin’. This is a calumny and may surely be dismissed. Wilfred Granville, in his 1949 collection of Sea Slang suggests an abbreviation of hogwash, which started off life meaning brewery swill, which was fed to the pigs, and thence bad beer or wine (and indeed tea) and in time, and figuratively, nonsense. The OED, as of 2004, rejects this but a link remains, however tenuous one might feel it. Hogwash can mean drink; one of the slang terms for the sea is the drink. A noggin is a drink (and before that a small drinking vessel). Oxford’s suggestion, therefore, is of a play on noggin, altered to oggin by metanalysis (the same phenomenon that once saw words such as nangry, and nanger, not to mention the Sansrkit nāraṅga which via Arabic naranj and Italian narancia, gives English orange).

  Which is where, absent alternative theories, it must be left. All that remains is a song. The tune will be self-evident:

  If the skipper fell into the oggin,

  If the skipper fell into the sea,

  If the skipper fell into the oggin,

  He’d get sod-all lifebelt from me.

  But enough with water. Let us turn to alcohol. Not especially as drunk by jack ashore, a compound that has illumined all manner of self-indulgence ever since its appearance around 1860, but in slang’s cheerful borrowing of seaborne imagery to denote that happy state wherein one is all at sea.

  There is the basic: drunk as a sailor, or as a Gosport fiddler, which pays tribute to the Royal Navy base. The wind plays its role: breezy, a few sheets in the wind, a sheet in the wind’s eye, hulled between wind and water, in the wind, under the wind, list-ingto starboard, shaking cloth in the wind, shot between (or betwixt) wind and water, three sheets before the breeze, three sheets in the wind, three sheets over and three sheets spread. Sheets, by the way, are not as might seem logical, sails, but ropes. The term comes from Old English scéat, a corner, and thence the corner of a sail and ultimately the rope that secures that corner. The unsecured sheet, blowing in the wind, weaves in the air like the drunk swaying down a road. Meanwhile hull means to drift with no sails spread.

  The terms can be neutral, even optimistic: aboard (of the grog), afloat, all sails set, well under way and under full sail. They can, logically enough, note the pervasive dampness of both liquor and the sea: damp, awash, capsized, decks-awash, drenched, floating, under the tide, half the bay over or over the bay or dam, over the plimsoll (line), that physical line that denotes the limit of safe loading, slewed, soaked, submerged, torpedoed, waterlogged, and wrecked. The popular half seas over may suit the list, but there are suggestions that Dutch op-zee zober, ‘foreign strong beer’ is the actual root.

  Other nautical origins can be found in terms such as block and block, castaway, foggy, round the horn, top-shackled, taking in cargo, needing a reef taken in, Lloyd’s List (i.e. pissed), steamed up, stoked, bungs up, waving a flag of defiance and the punning tight as a clam’s (or crab’s, fish’s or oyster’s) arse. Grog, always a naval staple with its roots in standard English grogram, ‘a coarse fabric of silk, of mohair and wool, or of these mixed with silk’ (OED) and the coat of such stuff as worn by Admiral Vernon, known as ‘Old Grog’ from his having ordered the navy’s rum to be diluted with water, gives groggified.

  Finally, a bunch of admirals, taken from a mid-seventeenth-century lexicon of drinking, The Eighth Liberal Science. Admiral of the blue, a publican or innkeeper (his traditional blue apron); admiral of the red, a heavy drinker (as well as the colour of wine, the term may also refer to the drunkard’s red nose) and admiral of the narrow seas (playing on narrow seas, the British Channel or Irish Sea) a drunkard who vomits over his neighbour at table. In 1796 Francis Grose noted an expanded version: vice-admiral (of the narrow seas) ‘A drunken man that pisses under the table into his companions’ shoes.’

  The girls came off the streets of London after the Street Offences Act of 1959 and their disppearance has done nothing for slang coinage. The Ratcliff Highway, London Docklands’ homegrown Sodom and Gomorrah, whose taverns and tarts saw for as many seafarers as ever did the ocean, has long since fallen silent. The ubiquitous ho may be accurate, albeit bereft of a few letters, but it hardly sets the juices flowing. It was not always thus and the sea, given jack’s recreational partialities, played its part. All too aware of her dubious allure he called her a land pirate (usually a highwayman) but that didn’t hold him back. Not for nothing are ships invariably ‘she’.

  There are the basic ships: the schooner, the pinnace, the privateer and the land carrack. All these are relatively lightweight in terms of tonnage and punnage too (the larger battleship is invariably old, plain and dismissed as unalluring): light, as in unable to keep her heels on the ground, is an old term for a ‘loose woman’. The tilt-boat, playing with tilt as in falling over, sustains the idea. Then we meet the light frigate, double-punning both on her ‘sailing’ the streets and on the term frig, from Latin fricare, to rub and meaning both to have sex and to jerk off, oneself or a client. The frigate comes in two flavours; the frigate well-rigged, who is neatly, fashionably dressed, and the frigate on fire, a specimen of hot stuff who is suffering some form of STD. Best, though rarely avoided, she can also be a fireship.

  Setting aside rhyming slang’s boat and oar, barge, which suggests a certain embonpoint, and scupper, into which one tosses unwanted waste (thus linking to the use
of crud, muck, scum and slime for semen), we find hooker, undoubtedly one of prostitution’s leading synonyms and productive of a variety of back-stories. Popular etymology suggests the denizens of Corlear’s Hook, known as The Hook, a red-light area on the New York City waterfront. There is also the city’s use of hooker, a tug that cruised to pick up incoming schooners off Sandy Hook and the sailor’s affectionate nickname, hooker, for any vessel. The link to Corlear’s Hook is sanctified by Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1859), which defines hooker as ‘a resident of The Hook, i.e. a strumpet, a sailor’s trull’. On the other hand the memoirs of the ex-madam Nell Kimball stated: ‘The moniker hooker came about in the Civil War . . . General Joe Hooker, a handsome figure of a man, was a real quif-hunter, and he spent a lot of time in the houses of the redlight district, so that people began to call the district Hooker’s Division.’ Sounds good? Yes, but the term is thirty years older. In the end, like much slang, the origin is probably a tweak of standard English, in this case hook, to catch, to lure, to entice, but with strong reinforcement from both the New York City location and the sailor’s nickname.

  But monetary exchange is not mandatory. Looking back at some of the sea-based novels produced around 1800, focused on what was still an unreformed Navy, the punning on naval jargon reaches near Carry On proportions.

  The components of the ship herself, or the old bitch as she is sometimes termed, are a ready source. The cat-head, for instance, is officially a protruding spar that keeps the anchor away from the superstructure. There are two: one per side. The bow, we know, is the front of the ship and the stern its antithesis. The Post Captain, or, the Wooden Walls Well Manned, written in 1805 and as such the first of these works, gives us dialogues such as these; ‘Faith, Hurricane, our lady passenger is a fine girl. She has a good pair of cat-heads!’ ‘Yes, sir, she is nice and bluff about the bows.’ (Though her stern goes unremarked.)