The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  Finally, a hole in the wall, which comes either from the holes in the walls of English debtor’s prisons, through which the inmates could obtain supplies and money to alleviate their situation, or from the small shops and similar establishments found in the broad stone walls of fortified medieval cities. Hole in the wall, now usually an ATM, became a generic for anywhere tiny and tucked away, and often outside the law. There was a Wild West Hole in the Wall, named as such and an outlaw hideaway that provided a refuge for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the real-life Wild Bunch. Perhaps least savoury was the Hole in the Wall on Water Street, NYC, where c. 1860 its proprietor Gallus Meg (a monstrous Englishwoman) bit the ears off ill-behaved customers and preserved her trophies in a pickle jar displayed behind the bar. Whether her nickname came from gallows, a Scots term for rascally and dissolute, and which slang adopted as a synonym for ‘extreme’ (often with overtones of violence) or whether she had the habit of wearing galluses, i.e. braces (US suspenders) is unknown. Both terms suggest hanging, whether for legal reasons or from the shoulders down.

  Distance is evoked in a variety of dismissals, which put more than a little flesh on the bones of ‘go away!’. There are go to Jerusalem and to Jericho which were presumably ways for the religiously inclined to avoid saying ‘hell’, but more dramatically, and devoid of superstitious self-censorhip was go to hell Hull and Halifax, which flourished around 1600. It is accompanied by the somewhat blasphemous but definitely heartfelt prayer, ‘from hell Hull and Halifax Good Lord deliver us’. Halifax in this context referred to the Halifax Gibbet Law under which a prisoner was executed first and his or her guilt or innocence ascertained afterwards. That the execution was effected by a newfangled machine that in its operations prefigured the guillotine of the French Revolution and beyond did not offer much comfort. As to Hull, this referred to a one-time practice of executing villains by tying them at low tide to gibbets in the Humber estuary and awaiting the sea’s fatal return.

  Early modern criminals, at least in London, might benefit from sanctuary, a form of ‘nowhere’ that existed primarily in law. The bricks and mortar and the local streets were undoubtedly present, but for whatever reason, they were beyond legal grasp. The metropolis offered three: Alsatia (upper and lower), the Bermudas and, still thinking West Indies, the Caribees, Cribbeys or Cribbey islands.

  The first, Alsatia, was divided into Higher Alsatia (Whitefriars in the City) and Lower Alsatia (around the Mint in Southwark). It took its slang nickname from Alsace-Lorraine, the marginal, disputed border area between France and Germany. Higher Alsatia, its earlier manifestation, was once the lands of the Whitefriars Monastery, extending from The Temple to Whitefriars Street and from Fleet Street to the Thames. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries the area went downhill, and as allowed by Elizabeth I and James I its inhabitants claimed exemption from jurisdiction of the City of London. As such the area became a centre of corruption, a refuge for villains and a no-man’s-land for the law. The privileges were abolished in 1697, but it was decades before the old habits died out. It was sufficiently well-known for a hit play, Shadwell’s Squire of Alsatia, to wow London in 1688. Its programme, much required, came with a forty-seven-page glossary of criminal terms. Walter Scott also used the zone as a backdrop for a chunk of his historical novel The Fortunes of Nigel (1822).

  The ‘West Indian’ sanctuaries were less formalised, and smaller, but they still worked. The Bermudas were equally applied to Covent Garden and the transpontine Mint. Both provided warrens of hard-to-access alleyways and dense-packed hidden courts. The Cribbeys were Covent Garden only. Although the pun seems pretty definite, Captain Grose essayed another origin, at least for the Cribbeys: the term came ‘perhaps from the houses built there being cribbed (stolen) out of the common way or passage.’

  For devotedly urban slang anywhere beyond the concrete is too distant and the sticks, wherein live the hicks, represent many steps too far. If there is a hell on earth then it may well be a small town: certainly slang has plenty to offer, and none kindly. They can be found in Cities: Smoke & Mirrors.

  Other examples of Anytown, USA include Superman’s fictional, but emblematic Smallville, though Andy Hardy’s hometown, Carvel, never attained generic status; nor does Grover’s Corners, the eponymic ‘star’ of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town (1938). Hoboken, Dubuque and Peoria are all quite real: towns in respectively New Jersey, Iowa and Illinois. The former is best known for its association with Frank Sinatra, the next was cited by the New Yorker’s founding editor Harold Ross as that place, replete with its old ladies, for whom his magazine would not be edited, and finally the third is traditionally used as a demographic gauge of what will or will not appeal to America’s great non-metropolitan public. ‘Will it play in Peoria?’ allegedly asked Groucho Marx, assessing a new vaudeville act, and the concept stuck. It remains the ‘test market capital of the world’.

  Podunk is another epitome of the American average, though for all its bricks-and-mortar reality – there are five instances of the name listed in American gazetteers and the word itself is established in the Algonquin language – it still suggests a certain unreality. The idea of Podunk as a settlement representative of the much-feted, if elusive ‘real people’ began in Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s 1840 book, The Politician of Podunk, which cites ‘a small village of New York’ around 1800. The modern use was popularised six years later in ‘Letters from Podunk’, published in the Daily National Pilot of Buffalo, NY. By 1869 Mark Twain could mention ‘Podunk, wherever that may be’ and get his laugh. Quite why Podunk, sometimes appended to ‘university’ to suggest some out-of-the-way and inferior seat of learning, has gained this image is unknown. None of the five towns are especially large, but this opprobrium seems unearned. It is perhaps the lumpish ‘chunk’ sound of the name (one thinks ‘stick-in-the-mud’), and thus an equation between the onomatopoeia and the supposed ‘lumpishness’ of the small-town inhabitant.

  Still on the American front, there’s Marlboro country, which represents the kind of remote countryside once suggested by landscapes in advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes, and Plumnelly, which is often used in the context of a border between two states or other areas: ‘plum out of Georgia and nelly out of Alabama’. In the version ‘plum out of town and nelly out of this world’ the inference is that wherever we’re talking about, it’s barely on the planet.

  Australia and America stand for quantity when it comes to such terms, but they are not unique. One finds them elsewhere, for example in Ireland. Last of all, and based on the Irish ‘Baile’, that is, home or town, we have a couple of localisms: Ballybackanowhere and Ballygobackwards, the latter popularised by the Irish comedian Jimmy O’Dea, who created a series of sketches in which he played its stationmaster; other Irish nowherevilles include Backo’beyond and, proving that arseholes of the universe are not confined to a single map, Backarseanowhere.

  Cities: Smoke & Mirrors

  NO CITIES, NO slang.

  Look in a dictionary. How does it define slang? Which words do the lexicographers choose to explain this much argued-over form of language? What we find are these: ‘casual’, ‘playful’, ‘ephemeral’, ‘racy’, ‘humorous’, ‘irreverent’. The overriding images: speed, fluidity, movement. No time, nor need for lengthy, measured consideration. The keywords are abbreviation, terse, in your face: slang’s words are twisted, turned, snapped off short, relaunched at a skewed angle. Some with their multiple and often contrasting definitions seem infinitely malleable, shape-shifting: who knows what hides round their syllabic corners. Look at hot: thirty-four columns of close-knit print. Red, twenty-one. Dog, thirty-four again.Or, why not, fuck: thirty-six more. These are among slang’s heavyweights, but the rule pertains across the board. It is not, I suggest, a language that works out of town; it requires the hustle and bustle, the rush, the lights, the excitement and even the muted (sometimes far from muted) sense of impending threat. To use slang confidently one needs that urban cockiness. It doesn
’t work behind a yoke of oxen, even athwart a tractor.

  Then there are the value judgements: ‘sub-standard’, ‘low’, ‘vulgar’, ‘unauthorised’. The word we are seeking is street. Street as noun, more recently street as adjective. The vulgar tongue. The gutter language.

  Let’s eavesdrop on a predecessor. John Camden Hotten: publisher, plagiarist, pornographer. Exemplary slang lexicographer too, whose dictionary – the first to use the word ‘slang’ in its title (although its author preferred to term himself a ‘London Antiquary’) – appeared in 1859 (six revisions would follow) and told readers that:

  ‘slang represents that evanescent, vulgar language, ever changing with fashion and taste, . . . spoken by persons in every grade of life, rich and poor, honest and dishonest . . . Slang is indulged in from a desire to appear familiar with life, gaiety, town-humour and with the transient nick names and street jokes of the day . . . slang is the language of street humour, of fast, high and low life . . . Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding, and excitement, and artificial life.’

  The congregating together of people in cities. The congregating of people together elsewhere too, for instance in the crowded, terrifying, hellish trenches of World War I, that great generator of slang on all sides, but above all, the city street.

  No cities, no slang. It is unsurprising that the word itself, plus lesser conurbations such as towns and villes plus thoroughfares such as streets, lanes and alleys, and local areas such as hills, hollows and bottoms have all imposed their contours on slang’s larger map.

  The city is where the law lives (the outlaw – Robin Hood, Billy the Kid – stays clear). In a world yet to welcome a full-scale police force the city bulldog was a constable, who took his canine identification from his predecessor, the bandog, a bailiff in slang and properly a large guard-dog; the term re-entered use in the 1980s to describe a cross-breed of Neapolitan mastiffs and US pit bull terriers. There may also be a link in both to dog, to pursue. The city college was a prison, London was full of them, and prisoners were collegians, underpinning the ‘school for crime’ stereotype but perhaps offering no more than an ironic take on their far from academic situation. The term applied specifically to the most important, Newgate (which boasted thirteen recorded nicknames); the term worked for New York’s Tombs too. While public capital punishment was the mode, the city scales, on which the malefactor was weighed off, and the city stage, on which he or she danced before a thronging audience, both stood for the gallows. Less threatening uses offered city sherry, bitter beer, and city wire, a fashionable lady, from the seventeenth century’s use of wiring in clothing and hair.

  Such concrete uses are historical; modernity prefers its city figurative, an all-purpose suffix -city, that suggests a state of being, a concrete or abstract concentration, defined as a supposed place and delineated by a qualifying noun. The term seems to have emerged from jazz, and has been attributed to the saxophonist Lester Young, who supposedly coined it around 1938.

  The -city suffix is open to suggestion: among the best-known compounds are such abstracts as edge city, the extremes of experience, whether spiritual, physical, drug-induced etc; usually blended with overtones of fear and challenge; nowhere city (also nowheresville), a situation, place or person who or which is seen as irrelevant, pointless, of no use at all; fat city, a utopia in which all is well and prosperous (the opposite being thin city, though far less common) and the less well-known biscuit city, in which an extreme situation ‘takes the biscuit’. Taken literally, fat city also stands for gaining weight or being fat. Jump city is the beginning, when events ‘jump off and equally well known as jump street. Tap city or tapsville comes from the tradition of tapping the table to signify that one passes the bet, plus the use of tapped out to mean moneyless, indicates both the literal state of being unable to raise a stake for further betting and beyond that a metaphorical place devoted to borrowing or begging money, in other words, poverty. Wig city, from wig out, to lose one’s mind (one’s wig), is a state of eccentricity, even madness; it can also mean a psychiatric institution.

  Using a range of more concrete terms, both slang and standard, one finds fist city (with its synonyms fist hollow and duke city, from dukes, the fists), a fist fight; barf city, from barf, to vomit, anything particularly unpleasant, weep city, tearfulness, beef city, from beef, to complain, wherein one makes a fuss, box city, dead, where a box is a coffin and cement or silent city, both graveyards. Doll city is full of dolls, pretty girls, and may apply to a single example, dope city (or scag town, from scag, heroin) is any area of a town known for its high level of drug sales or consumption and slice city an assault with a razor or a knife (next door was slice town, a red-light area). Finally sue city (punning though not especially pointedly on the town of Sioux City, Iowa) involvement in a court case or similar legal situation.

  Cities are proud, demanding a known place in the wider world, and urban boosters are keen on the instant identification that comes with nicknames. The most recent, popularised via rap where conventional city pride is not invariably on the agenda, is Chi-raq, a mixture of Chicago and Iraq, pointing up the alleged similarity of the respective levels of violence, but this sidesteps ‘city’ as such; Chicago is far better known as the Windy City, not to mention the Big Windy, the City of Winds, Madame Windy, Windtown, Windville and the Windy. According to etymologist Barry Popik the original windy city was Homeric Troy, followed by Siena, Italy, known as the Citta dei Venti, i.e. ‘city of winds’. Then, in the early 1880s, the Chicago Tribune newspaper, keen to promote Chicago as a summer resort, focused on the cool breeze off the adjacent Lake Michigan. The name stuck, though one also meets Chi-Town and the windy city can also apply to Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

  Noir fiction, almost always set on the mean streets, celebrates a variety of pseudonyms, best known among them surely Bay City, created by Raymond Chandler, as the epitome of all-embracing urban corruption. The city in question has always been seen as Oakland, California, otherwise known, though in fact not fiction, as Bump City. One might have expected real cities to avoid the name, but it is that adopted by San Francisco, regularly abbreviated as ’Frisco, though not by its natives, and also known, from the earthquakes which if not that frequent are regularly expected, as Shaky City, which stands on San Francisco Bay.

  Nicknames suggest a primary characteristic, in the city’s context of that which the metropolis produces, or at least wishes to be known for. That these may hark back to a more prosperous era, long before the concept of a rust belt, is not for these pages. Thus we have Motor City or Motown, Detroit, Michigan, Music City, Nashville, Tennessee, also known as Guitar Town. With its links to country music as the epitome of middle-American values, the adjective Nashville can also refer to any unsophisticated, suburban, middle-American town or person. Beer City or Beer Town, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the celebrated ad for Schlitz, ‘the beer that made Milwaukee famous’) and Rubber City, Akron, Ohio (its primary industry, tyre-making). After those, Burrito City, El Paso, Texas and named for an imported Mexican dish, seems a little forced and Sin City, which stands for any centre of vice and corruption but particularly Las Vegas, Nevada, like wishful thinking.

  It’s not just an American thing. For the use of banana as an urban nickname, see page 199, Funny Foreign Food. The Holy City, from the city’s many churches, is Adelaide, South Australia. Sun City, however is not the luxury hotel and entertainment complex near South Africa’s Rustenberg, but an ironic nickname for Diepkloof Prison.

  Finally Jersey City, twinned with Bristol City. But these have no urban link: usually as plurals they are rhyming slang for the female breasts, or as slang has it, titties.

  After the city, the town, a word that finds its origins in a variety of Germanic languages where terms indicated an enclosure, fence or fortification, and thus the buildings and ultimately people within. The idea of town as meaning somewhere culturally unique, i.e. ‘not country’,
begins with Chaucer around 1400 as does that of town as meaning those who live there, i.e. ‘not peasants and farmers’ and with that the default, if unspoken identification with London. It is this last that underpins slang’s uses, and slang’s take on London is not so much that of the great centre of government and wealth, but the home of louche urban pursuits and individuals, and those who fall into their clutches.

  Thus we find a selection of whores; the town-crack, from crack, the vagina, the town miss or lady (and the lady or woman about or of the town). The more recent town pump (otherwise town punch or punch board) is probably not professional, but her amateurism is unrestrained (nor is she limited to London). The whore requires a pimp, she finds him in the town trap, which plays on trap, to ensnare, and the town bull, though he, named for the bull housed in turn by the cow-keepers of a village, is as much a lecher and womaniser as actual flesh-merchant; his gallivanting gives the phrase lawless as a town bull. So too is the town stallion. Satisfied with her own, or perhaps her husband’s money, the town tabby is simply a smart, rich old woman; tabby, one of so many terms that equates a woman with a cat, is in fact far from feline (that develops later and from the same roots) and comes from tabby, striped or watered silk (originally produced in the Baghdad suburb of Attabiy). It occasionally means the female genitals and pubic hair too. More recently prostitution has given go all over town, otherwise known as go around the world. This sexual service, where the tongue does the ‘travelling’, denotes licking and sucking the client’s body, including the genitals and sometimes the anus.

  Preyed on by such as the town shift, a confidence trickster, constantly changing his address to keep ahead of the authorities and outraged victims, is the town toddler. This is not a baby (though the two coinages are pretty much simultaneous, around 1790) but one who, perhaps equally innocent, wanders around town, gawping and gullible. Two centuries on he might be helped by the presence of a town clown, a policeman, but this zany is American, and his town is the small one from whence the toddler came.