The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  If slang’s vision of a general hospital is bleak, that for a psychiatric institution, where patients are confined over the blue wall, is simply cruel. Using, in many cases, its mocking names for the mad, it simply adds some kind of place name, e.g. farm, house or factory, and takes things from there. Thus along with farm itself, we have drool farm, ding farm, funny farm, cuckoo farm, happy farm, loony farm and nut farm. The banana farm is in a tropical or semi-tropical country. Factory (or foundry) produces the puzzle factory, cackle factory (a cackle tub, however, is a pulpit or a dissenting chapel), a cracker factory or cracker-box (whose inmates have gone crackers), a foolish factory, a giggle factory, funny factory, loony factory, a fruit or fruitcake factory for the fruitcakes who are of course nuts, which in turn produces nut factory or foundry. The rat factory is Australian and stems from ratty, eccentric, which also offers rat joint, again a mental hospital, get, have or go rats, give rats, to drive someone mad, and rattiness. (To have rats in the attic or garret has origins in America.)

  House is even more productive. Compounds include the nut house, pipe-house, fit house (a hospital for the criminally insane), bat house (from bats in the belfry), big house (usually a Federal prison), birdhouse, brickhouse, crazy house, cuckoo house, dippy house, fool-fool house, foolish house (which has also been used for a carnival’s hall of mirrors sideshow), franzy house (from standard English frenzy, craziness and which can also mean a brothel), funny house (or funny bin or funny place), giggle or giggley house, happy house (or home), itzy house, kooky or kookie house, loony house, monkey house, rathouse, the US military’s red house, silly house, whacky house, booby house, buzzy house, potty house (as in eccentric rather than commode) and bughouse.

  The bug, a figurative insect which buzzes in one’s head (or brain, cotton or wig), also gives the bughouse fable, an exaggerated story; the bug ward or bughouse ward, a psychiatric ward and bughouser, an asylum inmate. The bug doctor or inspector is a psychiatrist, and bug juice a sedative drug used for controlling violent or non-cooperative prisoners. Bug as a verb means to commit to a psychiatric institution, as does the almost humorous drop a net on.

  The boob or booby is an inmate, which makes for the boob box and for one of the best-known terms: the booby hatch, or hutch, which underpins the simple idea of confinement with the once celebrated asylum at Colney Hatch near London, opened in 1851. (There is also the Royal Navy’s booby-hatch, a large inverted box that covers a hatch, and intended to stop careless sailors from falling.) Synonymous are booby box or booby cage plus squirrel cage, ranch, pen or tank. There are also the cranky hatch and canary hatch, the cuckoo academy and cuckoo’s nest (seemingly coined by Ken Kesey in his asylum-based 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).

  Nut means the head (since around 1790; before that it was the head of the penis) and a nut has meant an eccentric since 1908; nuts has meant crazy since 1840. Thus we have the nut bin, box, college, hatch, hut, place, wing, house and hospital. There are nuttery and nutty house. The nut croaker is a psychiatrist and at US college nuts and sluts is a course in abnormal psychology.

  Still educational we find the brain college, the academy and laughing academy (plus laughing farm or house) and the giggle or giggling academy or bin. There is simple bin, plus the buggy, the loony bin (perhaps the best known term of all and possibly coined by P.G. Wodehouse who used it in 1909), loony-boob, pen and roost. Last of a long list: the shrink klink, which combines shrink, as in head-shrinker (plus shrinker and shrinkette) with clink, a prison, since 1515 when it was the name of an establishment in London.

  Francis Grose, never loath to regale his readers with more than just simple definitions, and the size of whose dictionary entries sometimes rivalled that of his stomach, also offered the verb dowdy. To dowdy was to play a practical joke based on one’s pretending to be mad, especially to have just escaped from one’s keeper or from a psychiatric institution. As he explained, dowdying was ‘a local joke formerly practised at Salisbury, on large companies, or persons boasting of their courage. It was performed by one Pearce, who had the knack of personating madness, and who by the direction of some of the company, would burst into a room, in a most furious manner, as if just broke loose from his keeper, to the great terror of those not in the secret. Dowdying became so much the fashion of the place, that it was exhibited before His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales [. . .] Pearce obtained the name of Dowdy, from a song he used to sing, which had for burthen the words dow de dow.’ You had, as they say, to be there.

  Running these many institutions were the experts, usually psychiatrists (slang seems to have evolved nothing to describe the actual keepers). These were doctors and so named: the head doctor (or head feeler or tripper), the loony doctor (another Wodehouse coinage: in Carry on Jeeves, 1925), the nut doctor, talk doctor and skull doctor. Shrink aside, the tongue-twisted trick cyclist is popular while wig-picker and sky artist are less common.

  Given slang’s lack of respect for those who claim to follow the Hippocratic oath, perhaps we should conclude with those necessary figures who turn up to clear up the medical mess. The undertakers, practitioners of the black job or black work, and known as black coats (as were clergymen) and black job masters. Undertaker, while never slang, is itself a euphemism: what is this unspoken task that they undertake to do? Digging the grave gives sod-buster, as does landbroker. A coffin is a wooden kimono, as well as wooden suit, uniform, doublet, surtout and ulster (the last pair both terms for overcoats) and wooden habeas which puns on habeas corpus, a piece of legal Latin and a writ whereby an accused and jailed person must be brought before the court and the reason for their imprisonment justified; the literal translation is ‘thou shalt have the body’. Thus the undertaker could be an overcoat-maker and a wooden overcoat man. He was a gloomer, from his professional misery, and, unflatteringly, a meat-packer (meat being the corpse), a bone-snatcher, a ghoul, a death-, bug- and carrion hunter. The Memoirs of Sally Salisbury, one of the great eighteenth-century courtesans, recount how Sally, infuriated at some aspect of a friend’s funeral, ‘flew at the poor Undertaker, hit him an unmerciful Box on the Ear, D--n you, said she, for a Whining Carrion-hunting Son of a Bitch!’ There was also the carrion-crow man and the raven, both of them black and with a reputation for carrion-hunting of their own, and the phrase cry pork was to tell the undertaker that a funeral was in the offing; the term comes from the supposed similarity of pork! to a raven’s cry.

  That one more term for the undertaker was body-snatcher brings us to those who were interested in the body, even after the burial. Such resurrectionists, another grim and even blasphemous pun, and all-night men (when they plied their ghastly trade of disinterring the freshly buried) worked to supply hospitals with otherwise forbidden corpses. Specialists and their students needed something to practise on and other than a regular supply of freshly hanged criminals, until the Anatomy Act of 1832 legitimised the use of any corpse, digging up the recently dead was the only way. Sometimes, however, the resurrection-men proved a little over-enthusiastic. Such a zealous duo were the two Williams, Burke and Hare, a pair of Edinburgh villains who didn’t bother to wait, but during 1828 murdered sixteen unfortunate victims so as to sell their corpses to the medical school for surgical dissection. Burke was hanged in 1829; Hare, who turned King’s evidence, escaped the noose. Robert Louis Stevenson immortalised them in ‘The Body Snatchers’ (1884) while the noun burker, and verb burke are slang’s memorial.

  Sweety Darling: Carrying the Torch for Love

  IF SLANG HAS stories, then they are not to be found on those shelves marked ‘romance’. Slang likes its four-letter words, but l-o-v-e does not qualify and when Cupid enters the picture then if there is a ‘story’ its definition is rarely more than the one that is a synonym for ‘hoax’ or ‘trick’ or even ‘lie’. The truth is simple: if we are seeking hearts and flowers, we are foolishly misguided, for slang has no words for love.

  The first thing we need to take on board is that while slang undoubtedl
y boasts the widest-ever-ranging vocabulary when it comes to sex and the bits and pieces that we need to accomplish it, love, that much fetishised emotion, doesn’t come into the picture. Yes, the lexis does offer the odd, dare I suggest grudging acknowledgment: there is love as a noun, but that’s far from emotional, and defined as any person or thing that is pleasant or attractive, e.g. it’s a real love. There is love as in love of a . . . which is a term of praise kindred to duck, as in ‘duck of . . .’ and tends to apply to small children or else items of clothing: hats, dresses, although Walter, the narrator of that multi-volumed piece of Victorian porn My Secret Life, recalls how, on holiday, his hosts offered to ‘get me a love of an Italian boy to bugger’.

  But of the thirty-plus compounds that attend it, love has quietly but comprehensively replaced itself by sex. Other than the whole humans implied in love muffin and love machine, it’s all down to those bits and bobs. There are the penises; the love truncheon, warrior, pump (notably in Spinal Tap’s epochal ‘Lick My Love Pump’), hammer, staff, stick, steak, bone, dart, gun and muscle. (Not to mention corporal love, which fleshy non-com ‘stands to attention’.) There are the vaginas: the love box, canal, flesh, glove (otherwise a condom), hole, cabinet and shack (another rock ’n’ roller, by the B-52s). Love hillocks are the female breasts as are love apples (which can otherwise be testicles), love button the clitoris, love-lips the labia, love grenades or spuds the testicles, love juice or custard, semen, love rug the pubic hair and on it goes. Love handles (the idea being that one can hold on to them during sex) represent the excess flesh around a portly stomach that may be seen in a kinder light by those who appreciate the Rubenesque figure. There is the love bug, which in this context stands for VD rather than VW, as in Disney’s twee Herbie. There is a moment’s possibility in love affair, but inspection reveals that this is drug slang, and refers to a shot of heroin and cocaine mixed, and the love letter, showcasing slang’s usual cynicism, is in fact a stone, as thrown maliciously at a human target.

  Love’s lexis is not all sexual. The love drug, plain and simple, is MDMA or Ecstasy, love weed marijuana and pure love LSD. Love curls were a hairstyle in which the hair is cut short and worn low over the forehead, love-pot a drunkard. And for the love of Mike! (which love-object can also be Heaven! holy Buddha! Jupiter! Michael Angelo! Moses! Pete (and Alf)! Peter the hermit! and Polly Simpkins!) is an exclamation of exasperation or surprise.

  One can expand the search, but can one render the definitions more affectionate? No. Love and kisses, rhyming on ‘the missus’ at least suggests a tinge of harmony, but love and marriage is merely a carriage, while other rhymes offer love and hate (weight), God-love-her (one’s mother) and light of love (a prison governor), and never forget that this last, when un-rhymed, means a whore.

  Last chance: definitions containing ‘love’, and excluding those that include ‘affair’. Slang resists moderation and passion, even obsession, is the rule. There’s the passionate lover who goes at the beloved hot and heavy like a tailor’s goose. The goose being the iron used to perfect a fresh-sewn garment, a reference that not for the first time has one wondering about the back-story of a folk song, in this case ‘dashing away with the smoothing iron’. Alternatively he may be a bone-setter, the force of his affections threatening to break the loved one’s limbs, though there may be a pun on bone, the penis, too.

  But tender passion (on stream from 1752)? Not much improvement here. Slang’s list for ‘being in love’ includes such as doing one’s balls on, bughouse, busted on, collared on, dead set on, daffy, dippy, dotty, doughy, dropping one’s ovaries (a camp gay term, at least in South Africa), fall for, have it for, hung up on, gone a million, nuts on, potty, snowed over, soft, spoons on, stuck on, going turtles on (‘turtle dove’ = love), whipped, whooped, wrapped (i.e. rapt) and yar. Is it just me, or do others also fail to see much in the way of hearts and flowers? Half of them, after all, are synonyms for ‘mad’ and there are a few fools too. One that is not is sugar on, but that ushers in a whole new selection: what one might term ‘sweet talk’, a term that, as far as the love-making sense goes, seems to have appeared as recently as 1945, as part of a slang glossary entitled Hepcats’ Jive Talk.

  The obvious candidates are sugar and sweet and both enlisted as terms of endearment, but they are not alone. The equation of the loved one and the toothsome treat, one who is ‘good enough to eat’, is venerable. ‘Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue’ declares the Song of Solomon around 200 BCE and the pattern has continued. Honey, with its combinations honeychild, honey-chops, honey-dip, honey-baby, honey-pot and honey-bun all arrive in the early twentieth century, as does crumpet. The equation seems unquenchable and endearments include honey-bunch, honey-bunny (used to grim effect in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction), honeybugs, honeypie and honey-cunt. Like sugar there are less appetising senses, notably the ironic: a honey of a mess is problematical; while honey can denote various bodily fluids, whether sexual or excretory – the latter best known in honey cart, used in various forms of public transport to describe a container for what an earlier world, equally euphemistic, termed gold (a substance that was removed by the gold-finder, otherwise known matily as Tom Turdman). The rival images combine in the eighteenth century’s it’s all honey or all turd with them said of those whose relationship fluctuates violently between amity and its antithesis.

  Sweetie, sweetie-pops, sweetycakes, sweetie-pie, sweet pea and sweet potato pie are other modernisms. Sweetmeat is ambivalent: it can be a lover or a mistress but it can be, with knowing cyncism, an underage prostitute. Cake has been popular in the States for a century; lollipop has been common since 1850.

  Tart is perhaps the most interesting. Now seen as a pejorative, other than in Australia and Liverpool where it remains neutral, it began life positively. The Slang Dictionary of 1859 explained; ‘Tart, a term of approval applied by the London lower orders to a young woman for whom some affection is felt. The expression is not generally employed by the young men, unless the female is in “her best”, with a coloured gown, red or blue shawl, and plenty of ribbons in her bonnet – in fact, made pretty all over, like the jam tarts in the swell bakers’ shops.’ (Beware, however, of compound tarts: rhyming slang is pervasive and the raspberry, strawberry, cherry and treacle varieties all mean farting.) When tart turned nasty is hard to nail down, though by 1889 the Portsmouth Evening News of 30 May could report that ‘a Court of Law has decided it is libellous to call a girl a “tart”.’

  Moving on to the physically attractive, it’s definitely more of the same. A pretty girl can be jam, crumb, biscuit, pie, bun, raspberry, peach (and the intensified peacherino) and cupcake. Cheesecake, a pin-up, appeared around 1930 (its male counterpart beefcake is slightly younger).

  Other expressions of affection or approval include dishy, tasty, fruity, scrumptious, flavour, slice and yummy. Endearments have included a banana, a basket of oranges (a reference apparently to glittering nuggets of gold as well as fruit), one who is the jammiest of the jam or the real raspberry jam, a bun, butter, a cutesie-pie, a dixie cup, a creamie, a pancake, a pastry, and even a penn’orth o’ treacle.

  Sometimes sweet turns sickly and endearment turns to abuse. Such terms include pieface, muffin, fruitcake, jellybean, jellyhead, all of which suggest a certain ‘softness’, and social doughnut hole, in other words a human ‘nothing’.

  Those seeking solace in a bit of rom, with or without com, may be cheered to find that while slang’s words for womaniser (alley-cat, belswagger, chicken-butcher, jelly roller, lusty lawrence, poodle-faker . . . ) number 131, those for ‘lover’ rack up twenty more. Even in sneering slang cads and bounders are seemingly vanquished, in theory if nowhere else, by lurve.

  Given slang’s default position – the sneer – goo-gooer is probably the mot juste. That and pash, sweet daddy and daddy-one, main man, duck, goodie, momma, boopsie, heart and last heartbeat. The blues, all nudge-nudge and somewhat transparent double entendre wen
t for biscuit rollers, coffee grinders and ash-haulers, which last comes from haul someone’s ashes, where ashes meant ass, in its vagina definition. Bessie Smith celebrated those adept in the sexual side of eating: ‘He’s a deep-sea diver / with a stroke that can’t go wrong, / He can touch bottom, and his wind holds out so long.’ Lemons were of course, always up for squeezing.

  There was the carpet knight who is also found as a carpet-champion, carpet lover, carpet-monger, carpet squire and carpet warrior. In all cases he preferred the boudoir where the only war was between the sexes over the harsher environs of the real-life battlefield. Like the smoodger (from smoodge, to kiss and cuddle), there is the squeeze who can be elevated to main squeeze. The panorama garbled paramour, and pully-hawley reverse engineered play at pully-hawley, another of those terms for intercourse that emphasised the sheer physicality of the act. A torch was carried and refers to lost or unrequited love: the ‘light of love’ is still burning, even if it is unreciprocated. The flamer, variously an admirer, lover or promiscuous woman, ‘burnt brightly’. As for men, the missionary man was no more exciting than his position of choice, and what a girl needed was a natural-born man. What she probably got was Jody, otherwise Joe the Grinder (Sancho to Spanish speakers) who moved in when hubby or boyfriend had to be elsewhere, especially in wartime.