The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  Names for the womaniser, the punning cock of the game, seem to advocate not especially procrastinated rape (a plot device that was once advised as a guarantor of fictional best-sellerdom). It’s up and at her all the way: the mutton-, hair- or fleece monger, the rump- and whiskersplitter, the bum-fighter (who is not a sodomite: bum works for the vagina as well) and quim-sticker, the buttonhole-worker, gulley-raker and tuft-hunter (more usually discovered sucking up to a tuft, i.e. toff, from the distinguishing golden tassel on his university mortar-board), a leg- or linen-lifter. There is the smock-soldier and feather-bed soldier, the parlour python and the lounge lizard, the meathound (a carnivore only in the figurative sense) and the jazzhound (where jazz means intercourse, not music), the dasher, the masher and the pieman and crumpet-man and the he-whore (who may be donkey-dicked). In no case is there a sense of critique: this was slang-man’s go-to position. No namby-pamby gender equality here.

  It is hard, slang being what it is, to decide where to limit the list of what the lexis at least, defines as ‘promiscuous’ women. If one believes slang, most, even all women, other than those sidelined as mothers, nags or hags (and even mother is more likely to be a brothel-keeper), are seen as being up for it, and if in truth hope is ever-vanquished by experience, slang has no intention of telling. The line between a professional and an enthusiastic amateur is opaque: context helps a little, but not invariably. Those who slang tells us enjoy more pricks than a second-hand dartboard (not to mention a pin-cushion) may or may not opt for an income. There are 1000+ prostitutes to 170 promiscuous women, and forty-four who are labelled as both, but there is no system of checks. Whore is too random an insult to be very much believed. For our purposes let us forget them all. Instead, let us consider the mistress.

  The point of the mistress is that she is not the wife. Thus the backstreet wife (her male equivalent being, when he’s not a sodomite, a backdoor man), the left-handed wife (there is also a left-handed bridegroom), the side-dish and the bit on the side.

  The long-vanished loteby, coined in the fourteenth century, was based on lote, to skulk or hide.

  She could be a rainbow, from her taste in colourful, thus arousing clothes (so too could be a whore) but she can equally be a wife in water-colours, a muted version of the actual spouse, presumably portrayed in garish oils. On the other hand, and contrasted with the excitements of adultery, the wife is a cooler, who ‘cools one’s passions’ while the mistress ‘heats them up’. The relationship is not acknowledged as serious: she’s a bit of nonsense or a gallimaufry, which also works for her vagina and is properly defined as a stew that is made of random bits of food. Clothes may also underpin the fancy piece or fancy bit, though these may be a matter of ‘a little of what you fancy’.

  However independent the grandes horizontales of courtesan legend may have been, slang’s mistress is, of course, at her lover’s disposal. A convenient or conveniency (itself a convenient word, meaning not just mistress, but wife, prostitute, vagina, brothel – a convenient house – and lavatory). She is both a comfortable importance, and a comfortable impudence, especially when he takes her out in public and introduces her as his wife. Her lover cannot see her daily, and may not wish to, which makes her a weekender, or a Saturday-to-Monday, although these seem illogical since most married men are locked into domesticity at that time of the week.

  She is, however could she not be, morally unacceptable. Thus the blowen (also a whore) which according to the nineteenth-century expert in matters Romani, George Borrow, comes from beluñi, ‘a sister in debauchery’, though Hotten brings in German’s bluhen, bloom, and buhlen, sweetheart, but adds ‘the street term . . . may mean one whose reputation has been “blown on”, or damaged’. Trug or trugmallion, from Italian trucca, defined in 1598 as ‘a fustian or rogish word for a trull, a whore, or a wench’ is possibly cognate with standard English truck, to barter or exchange commodities.

  She’s a plaything, a gamester (her game being sex; when used of men the word means stud) and a dolly, which comes from doll, but may be linked to Italian’s dolce and thus part of the stage/gay language Polari. She is quite simply a toy, which slang uses indiscriminately for penis, vagina, whore and mistress. One of her earliest incarnations was the doxy. She began life in the sixteenth century as the female companion of a variety of mendicant villains and soon embraced a less specific role as a mistress. If she survives, anachronistically, it is as a ‘good-time gal’. Roots are debatable: possibly Dutch docke, a doll, possible standard English dock, a tail (and thus its various sexual meanings in slang) and possibly lowland Scots doxie, meaning lazy.

  Her role is primarily sexual, which makes her an underput or belly-piece, both suggesting the missionary position, and a pintle-bit or pintle-maid, where pintle is the penis; the dismissive bit has been used for women, always in a sexual mode, since 1665, usually in compounds such as bit of drapery, of muslin, of skin, of raspberry and so on. Bit of how’s-your-father is of course sex. The buttered bun (butter being semen and bun the vagina) was originally and remains a woman who has had intercourse with one man and is about to repeat this immediately with a new partner; she has also signified both mistress and prostitute. And if sex is riding, she can be a mount, a mare (a semi-positive use of a word that usually, and, nastily, denotes an older woman), or a hobby horse, not so much the children’s toy, but a small horse who can be ‘ridden’ by all and sundry. The eighteenth-century ligby seems to come from lig, to lie down. Ironically, we assume, she is a pure. Yet like all women she is weak: a frail, and the frail sisterhood was one of many Victorian euphemisms for prostitutes. ‘Frailty,’ declared Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though for once sidestepping entendres of any dimension, ‘thy name is woman.’

  Mystery Tour: Far Away Places

  ONOE UPON A time, prior to the seventeenth century, there wasn’t any difference between dictionaries and encyclopedias. The idea was that a good reference book offered all knowledge, or at least all sorts thereof, and why differentiate? The aim was to offer what Latin termed an omnium gatherum, a collection of all (knowledge). To an extent, notably in certain US dictionaries, this never went away, and they persisted in providing non-linguistic information, typically gazetteers of world geography, but such as Samuel Johnson or the OED decided otherwise. Dictionaries were about words, not wanderings.

  Slang, cheerfully breaking most of the other lexicographical rules, breaks this too. It doesn’t produce full-on gazetteers, but dig around, there’s an encyclopedic side to slang. Mainly places, some real, some otherwise, and a few people, on just the same basis.

  It’s not exactly slang from day one but it’s worth getting a little back-story. The idea of ‘far, far away’ first emerges in Latin’s Ultima Thule – the land of Thule being supposedly six days’ sail north of Britain and thus the northern limit of navigability; for Latin speakers that meant the Shetlands, while in 1771 Smollett, in Humphrey Clinker, equated it with the Orkneys or Hebrides. Since then archaeologists have named Thule as a pre-historical Inuit culture, lasting from c.500–1400 and encompassing an area from Alaska to Greenland. Moving from the specific to the general brings the back of beyond, which concept has been recorded since 1816 (Walter Scott coined it for his novel The Antiquary, though he went further in time – talking of an old Roman camp – than he did in distance). In any case even if the use is no earlier the concept undoubtedly must be. The OED defines it as a ‘humorous phrase’ and the image, however contrary might be the reality, remains so.

  Neither of those are slang, but there is no doubt about the arsehole (or asshole) of the universe, which is a place not so much distant but beyond acceptability. Alternative forms include the arsehole of creation, of the world, and the bunghole of the universe. The concept seems to have appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, but TripAdvisor followers might want to note the description of Holland as ‘the Buttock of the world, full of veins and blood, but no bones in’t’ in A Brief Character of the Low Countries (1660) and Ned Ward’s reference in �
�A Trip to Jamaica’ (1704) to ‘The Dunghill of the Universe, the Refuge of the Whole creation, the Clippings of the Elements, a shameless Pile of Rubbish, confus’dly jumbl’d into an Emblem of the Chaos.’ In 1946 Primo Levi, fresh from its horrors, used Latin to describe Auschwitz as anus mundi.

  If you want mystery you want distance; faraway places, real or otherwise, have to be far away and it helps if one’s local topography conjures up such imagery. Sadly, the UK isn’t really much help here. Australia and America, big countries both, come up with the goods, but the UK doesn’t cut it – John O’Groats and Lands End, Britain’s famous extremes, are too parochial, just too close. Wales can’t help: the root of ‘Welsh’ means ‘unintelligible language’ and thus ‘foreigner’ but Wales just isn’t foreign enough. Only, perhaps, in its linguistic links to rotwelsch, Germany’s name for its homegrown criminal cant: rot means red, which takes us to red hair, seen as stereotypically Jewish and therefore, another anti-semitic trope, symbolic of cunning. The whole, therefore, ‘cunning talk’.

  So the ‘tight little island’ remains just that. Getting away from it all is something for others, or at least for them to describe. The great deserts epitomise the lonely wasteland, and the Sahara, of course, boasts Timbuktu, the daddy of all such terms, first recorded in this sense in 1863. A settlement had existed since the Iron Age: the perception of isolation is purely Occidental.

  Timbuktu is real. But it is, in every sense, an outlier. Australia, with its vast interior never-never (the outback was also neverland, before that was ceded to Peter Pan and Co.) is far more productive. It is, after all, also credited with the original use of the middle of nowhere (also known, but only locally, as the red centre). Never-never was first used in 1833 of the ‘Never-never blacks’ and there are regular examples from the 1860s onwards. The name gained wide popularity with the book We of the Never-Never (1908) by Jeannie Gunn, a memoir of her life on a cattle station in the Northern Territory. Despite the logic of the English term, it may in fact come from Comderoi nievahvahs, unoccupied land, although this equally may be pure coincidence (the suggestion appears in a book of 1857); on either count it precedes J.M. Barrie’s coinage; another, perhaps one-off use, comes in Rolf Boldrewood’s bushranging yarn Robbery Under Arms (1888), when a Native Australian character declares : ‘I want to die and go up with him to the never-never country parson tell us about.’

  There is a mix of real and fantastical among the names slang uses to epitomise the furthest of distances. Nar Nar Goon is an actual small town, with a population of 1,010 at last count, near Melbourne. The name supposedly means koala. Bullamakanka or Bullabananka has a tenuous link to Fiji bullamacow: bully beef, but it may be coincidence and there is no more such a township than there exists New Zealand’s Waikikamukau which needs to be pronounced slowly, i.e. ‘Why kick a moo-cow’, the physical manifestation of which is limited to a meat-free restaurant in Brighton, Sussex. Similarly playful are the entirely fictional Wheelyabarraback (‘wheel your barrow back’) and Bundiwallop (which may play on the alcoholic ‘wallop’ delivered by ‘Bundy’, i.e. Bundaberg rum). The latter is also found as ‘Bandywallop’ (which was popularised by Australia’s longest-running children’s TV show Mr Squiggle, created by the puppeteer Norman Hetherington in 1959). We may also visit, at least in America, ‘Y.U. Bum University’ (better known as ‘why, you bum, you’) and ‘Wassamatta U.’, created for the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon series and which sounds, if properly pronounced, like a refugee from a Scorsese Mafia saga.

  Oodnagalahbi has been twinned with real-life Oodnadatta: a small town in northern South Australia but the important syllable is the galah, both noisy bird and slang for fool. Slang’s many-headed lexis of stupidity also underpins Australia’s Woop Woop, otherwise found as Upper Woop Woop, Oodnawoopwoop, or Wopwops. The woop is a peasant, with that species’ stereotypes. Both the human and the reduplicated metonym seem to have been born in the 1930s. There is Bunyip flats, name-checking the bunyip, a supposed monster that inhabits the country’s deep and inaccessible heart. Australia has also given Hay and Hell and Booligal, anywhere hot and uncomfortable and popularised by ‘Banjo’ Patterson’s eponymous poem. Hell is of the reader’s own definition but Hay and Booligal are actual New South Wales communities. Patterson targeted Booligal: the others get off lightly:

  ‘No doubt it suits them very well

  To say it’s worse than Hay or Hell,

  But don’t you heed their talk at all;

  Of course there’s heat – no one denies –

  And sand and dust and stacks of flies,

  And rabbits too, at Booligal.’

  Rabbits? Indeed. The First Fleet of 1788 brought rabbits as well as humans and by the 1890s they were serious, crop-ravaging vermin. A dingo fence had been completed in 1885; now the aim was to corral the bunnies. The fence was completed in 1907. The rabbits were undaunted (the deliberate introduction of the rabbit-focused disease myxomatosis proved more cruelly efficient) but the equation of the boundary and desolation in the phrase beyond the rabbit-proof fence was in place as soon as were the wire and palings. The contemporary over the fence, playing the abstract role, means beyond the bounds of taste.

  Synonyms can be found in back of Bourke, celebrating a town in the extreme west of New South Wales which was the terminus of the railway line from Sydney and thus the start of the real Outback, and beyond the black stump, where the stump represents a symbolic marker that divides the ‘civilised’ world from the wastelands beyond; the antithesis is of course this side of the black stump. Actual black stumps, rendered thus by lightning or some other source of fire, crop up everywhere and they are useful as boundary markers or signposts. The symbolic version is recorded in 1882, though it is possible that this indicates a factual rather than figurative use. A popular etymology for the phrase cites a particular black stump at the Astro station near Blackall, Queensland, used in 1887 by surveyors involved in the mapping of outback Australia. Given that Blackall was some one thousand kilometres west of the state capital Brisbane, it was seen as the last stop before civilised life ran out. Still, the sense is that it was just one more among many.

  Outside Australia one finds the Caribbean behind the bananas and behind god’s back, meaning deep in the countryside and Ireland’s back of God-Speed, a place so very far off that the positive reinforcement of one’s wish of ‘God-Speed’ to a traveller will have faded away well before they arrive.

  In New Zealand the backwoods are the booai or booay which originates either in the Maori puhoi: dull, slow, or Puhoi, a failed mid-nineteenth century utopian settlement. This gives up the booai: totally confused, absolutely wrong, of plans, ruined and of items wholly non-functional and adjacent perhaps to the canonical shit creek. (Though Booai too, allegedly, was a genuine settlement, not that far from Auckland.) Spelt Boohai, and here defined as ‘a fictitious river’, the phrase is also used to brush aside questions involving the word ‘where?’: the answerer explains that he is ‘up the Boohai hunting pukeko with a long-handled shovel’ (or ‘a popgun’).

  America cuts, as ever, to the grosser aspects of the chase. B.F.E. and B.F.A. – ‘butt fucking Egypt’ or ‘Africa’ – stand for somewhere very far way. The place itself, coined by the military, is Bumfuck, Egypt, also known as Bumblefuck, Egypt, Butt Fuck, Egypt (and West Buttfuck), or, bowdlerised at least of its sodomy, as Beyond Fucking Egypt. What Captain Grose in his notes termed arse-men (the term would not actually enter print till the 1940s) and invaders of the rear settlements are not mandatory: there is no suggested reference to either City of the Plain and Egypt seems to exist purely on grounds of assonance; Bumfuck, while sometimes set on foreign soil as befits an image of distance, can be found nearer CONUS, in Iowa, or Wyoming. Nor should bugger’s woods, while defined as out of the way and unimportant, be confused with this group. This bugger is a booger, i.e. a bogeyman, and lurks in the woods. Nor need the distance be that great: the implication is simply of inaccessibility and inconvenience, be it of a parking
lot or a restaurant.

  America is also responsible for the seemingly obscene Gobbler’s Knob, but like certain Australian towns, the actual place exists, in this case a small town best known for its hosting of the annual Groundhog Day ceremony. Not so much distant, but supposedly obscene are the two Pennsylvania towns of Blue Ball and Intercourse. Neither apparently had obscenity in mind at their founding – Blue Ball actually commemorated a tavern, the sign for which was a blue ball hanging from a post, and Intercourse, originally Cross Keys, noted the confluence of two main roads – but were notoriously used in 1962 by the US publisher Ralph Ginsberg as mailing addresses for his magazine Eros. All pretty puerile, but Ginsberg was still prosecuted for obscenity, and even the Supreme Court conceded the guilty verdict.

  Other images of inaccessibility include Doo-wah-diddy, High Street, China and West Hell, which last is the antonym of the equally forlorn East Jesus. Black America offers its own subset. These include the nonsensical B. Luther Hatchett or Beluthahatchie, Ginny Gall, which refers back to the west African region of Guinea, and Zar, apparently eliding ‘it’s there’. The implication remains that of a place that is far away, unpleasant and culturally alien. Guinea, in addition, was the trading post for much of the slave trade.