The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  The standard English use of on or upon the town suggests one who is enjoying the swing of fashionable life; slang’s use strips away the fashion, leaving only the dedication to urban pleasures, smart or otherwise. It has meant working as a prostitute and thus to take to the town, either taking up a life ‘on the game’ or living as a professional criminal. To be in town was to be well off. Thus the logical definitions of out of town: in prison, originally for debt, penniless, bereft of stimulation or excitement, mentally wanting and socially unfashionable.

  The far-seeing Captain Grose, never one to overlook a sneer at the impoverished Irish, gives us the town lands and stream’s town, which are in turn part of the Tipperary fortune: ‘Two town lands [the breasts], stream’s town [the genital area] and ballinocack [the anus].’ He could have looked closer to home, at London’s similarly impoverished East End, and found much the same: the Whitechapel portion, a woman’s inheritance and defined in 1698 as ‘two torn smocks and what Nature gives’ i.e. the female breasts and genitals.

  Despite an underwhelming and noticeably unappreciated effort to rechristen certain areas of London ‘mid-town’, presumably a misguided homage to New York, the triumvirate of up-, mid-and downtown remain an American concept. Specifics differ as to cities but slang has naturally adopted at least the first and last. Up means residential and rich, while down can be both the business area and the poor one. Thus uptown has meant sophisticated, worldly, rich and to go uptown (on) is to act in a snobbish manner (towards). In drug terms, at least initially, uptown meant cocaine, seen for a while as the drug of the wealthy and aspirational. Downtown, generic for the city government, the police department and similar authorities also means the police headquarters – ‘take him downtown’ – and, on a rough geography of the body, the female genital area, especially in the context of cunnilingus, for which one goes downtown. It can also refer to an area mainly lived in by the black community. In drug terms to go downtown is to use the depressant heroin. Paradoxically, though, moving downtown can also refer to social advance: newly prosperous Harlemites signified their new status by leaving the ghetto and moving downtown, i.e. to more prosperous parts of New York, by going ‘down’ one went ‘up in the world’.

  Like city, town can provide a range of nicknames. Too many to list every one; let us stick to initialdom: C-town, Cleveland, Ohio, D-town, Dallas, Texas, G-town, Georgetown, Washington D.C., H-town, Houston, Texas, K-town, Koreatown, i.e. the Korean area of a city, O-Town, Orlando, Florida, P-town, both Provincetown, Massachusetts and Portland, Oregon and V-town, Vallejo, California.

  A few more notable towns include Itchyamtown, Edinburgh, which is underpinned by slang’s inevitable characterisation of Scotland – Itchland, Louseland, Scratchland – as overrun by insect life, and Snoek-town from Dutch snoek, the snake mackerel (Thyrsitesatun), which thus represents Cape Town, once the home of the snoek fishing and processing industry. The treacle refiners of Bristol gave it the nickname Treacle Town, which also refers to Macclesfield (which apparently prefers Silk Town), of which legend recalls a day when a wagon full of treacle barrels overturned in the streets and the poor fought to scrape up the liquid as it oozed along the gutters. Tinsel Town usually refers to Hollywood, capital of La-La-Land, but the name also works for Sydney, Australia, especially in contrast with its slow-paced rival Adelaide, known as Tortoise Town.

  There are more variations on the urban theme, notably ville, but before looking at them, let us consider the many subsets of town and city life which note areas by ethnicity or economics and as well as -town incorporate a variety of allied suffixes. They also have names all of their own.

  Racism has its own finely calculated degrees of what makes ‘white’ and what ‘black’ – Jews, for instance, fail to qualify as the former for the diehard supporters of the neo-Nazi fan-club – but slang is happy to go with the usual divisions. That said, in terms of dwellings, white, being the default setting, doesn’t get much of a look in. There is hunkie- or honkytown, a black term that is based on honkie, a modified form of bohunk, the original name of the middle-European immigrants (Bohemians and Hungarians) who worked in Chicago stockyards, and Peckerwood Town, from the red woodpecker, symbol of whites, rather than the black crow, symbol of blacks. Synonymous Broomtown is more recent; perhaps it refers to a predilection for cleanliness? For the rich, who chose more salubrious dwellings, there was Swell Street, the West End of London and thus wealth in general, or Nob Hill, from nob, an aristocrat. Both New York (near Bowling Green) and San Francisco boast a Nob Hill, the latter first colonised by wealthy veterans of the California Gold Rush. Wealthy New York Jews had Allrightnik’s Row, Riverside Drive, based on English (doing) all right plus the Yiddish suffix -nik, a person, although Yiddish had its own olraytnik, an upstart, a parvenu.

  Black town, that part of a larger urban area in which the black community lives, is far more productive. The rule is simple; take a piece of racist vilification and compound it with, usually, -town. There you are. In alphabetical order we find boogie town, browntown, coontown (or coonsville and coonville), darktown and darkytown, dinktown, possibly from dinge, a dingy or black person, and jig-town, from jigaboo, itself either from jig, a dance and ultimately French giguer, to leap, to gambol, to frolic (the classic nineteenth-century black stereotypes); or modelled on bugaboo, which, in the thirteenth century, was the name of a demon, and since the eighteenth century, the fear of demons in general; or Bantu tshikabo, a meek and servile person, used derogatively by slaves.

  Little Africa fits the model of Little Italy, Little Korea and others. Catfish Row refers to a supposed staple of a black person’s diet. The N-word gives nigger row and nigger town, nigger hill and niggerville. Nigger yard is any rough slum area; the original use was Caribbean, for that area on a plantation where the slaves were quartered. Shine, from the tone of a dark black skin, brings shine-town and spade, as in ‘black as the ace of . . .’, spadesville.

  In addition there is the black belt, which can either refer to a specific black community or a whole geographical area. Black bottom and coon bottom come from bottom, the low-lying riverside area in which such settlements were often established. Buttermilk bottom, first used of the black section of Atlanta, Georgia, depended on the stereotyped link between buttermilk and black appetites. Finally the jungle, a term as stereotyped as any right-winger might wish, but with meanings that far transcend basic black. It can mean a city’s black zone, but its use began as nothing more than the suburbs or backwoods. It has also meant any unpleasant place, a very cheap London lodging house for tramps and in South Africa a knife. Perhaps best known is the hobo use: that area of a town or city, often outside the city limits, where criminals, tramps and vagrants jungle up, that is congregate together.

  All these are essentially negative. The one black coinage is not. This is chocolate city, coined by George Clinton, founder of the funk band Parliament-Funkadelic and playing on the colour and ‘sweetness’ of dark chocolate. Originally Washington D.C., it can be applied to any centre of African-American life. Of these one remains best known: Harlem, H Town, Soul City, the land of darkness, focused on 125th Street and on what 1940s Harlemites termed the Big Red with the Long Green Stem, Seventh Avenue, between 130th Street and 150th Street, the centre of Harlem nightlife. In that same elaborate language, listed in full in jazz journalist Dan Burley’s Handbook of Harlem Jive (1944), any 7th Avenue corner was categorised as a three-pointer of the ace trill in the twirling top. Big Red was New York, long green referred to money, while main stem, drag or stroll meant a main street, and modified as the main drag of many tears it reflects the bars and theatres where otherwise depressed and frustrated people can attempt to drown their sorrows. Harlem also hosted Sugar Hill, that area of Harlem otherwise known as Coogan’s Bluff, between Amsterdam and Edgecombe Avenues, between 138th and 155th Streets. As well as the rich, many black intellectuals and artists chose to live in the area, known for its grand apartment houses, once the original white population had mov
ed out during the 1920s. The name had its own punning alternative: the heavy lump. The sugar was money. Sugar Hill, with sugar redefined as sex, was used in the South for the brothel and ‘red-light’ area of the black part of any southern town. New York City also had San Juan Hill, from the Battle of San Juan Hill (1898) in which many black troops were involved, covering those blocks between 10th and 11th Avenues, between 59th Street and the low 60s. Rap would term Harlem New Jack City, along with any other city with a thriving ghetto lifestyle.

  It was jazz too that seems to have originated New York’s most enduring nickname: the Big Apple, on which Harlem’s Big Red was a play. The ultimate etymology remains debatable but the consensus traces it back to the jazz phrase, playing ‘the Big Stem in the Big Apple’, the Big Stem being Broadway. (Broadway was also known as mazda lane, a reference to the ultra-bright lights that also made it the Great White Way). The first recorded use so far is from the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, in 1927: ‘Broadway is the Big Apple, the Main Stem, the goal of all ambition, the pot of gold at the end of a drab and somewhat colorless rainbow.’ However he equates the phrase with Broadway only, and the direct link to the whole metropolis would have to wait a further year.

  Other terms for New York include the big town and big burg, the real puddle (a play on ‘a big fish in a small pond’ and its antithesis), up top (as seen from the perspective of the South), York, and the Start. This was usually linked to London and was a tramping term; the city being the start from where one set off on one’s wanderings around the country. It first appears in America in a slang dictionary of 1859, and it may be that the author, police chief George Washington Matsell, simply ‘Americanised’ the earlier use.

  Compared with black America, no community has gained the same density of terminology. Even the Jews, usually hard on black heels when it comes to slang’s vilifications, rate only kike-town, Jew town and little Jewrusalem, with New York City regularly punned as Jew York and Hymietown (from Hyman, a ‘typical’ Jewish name). Anti-semitism is on the up in post-Brexit UK but we have yet to see a resurgence of an old favourite: Jerusalem the Golden (plus Jerusalem-by-the-Sea, Jerusalem-on-Sea), a name for Brighton, from the large number of Jewish people who retire to Brighton and other towns along Britain’s south coast. Nor have Asia Minor, named for the wealthy Jews who bought themselves luxury houses in London’s Belgravia, nor the holy land, used of any Jewish area, yet come back to life; the north London suburbs of Abrahamstead, Cricklewitch and Yidsbury remain purely historical, though one still encounters Goldberg’s Green for Golder’s Green, perhaps the most visible of Jewish concentrations.

  For the rest it is as one might expect; the Poles in Polack-town, the Italians in Wop-town, the Germans in Dutch, i.e. Deutsch town or cabbage town, tipping the hat to a supposed love for sauerkraut. Irish bucktown is seen as the home of bucks, youthful tearaways, though the name has also been used for Brooklyn and Dublin, the capital of the Republic of Ireland, and worked for Irish ex-pat centres too. Fiction offered Pig Alley (there was a real street, in what is now Tribeca) in what was the first organised crime movie: The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912). With a gangster ‘hero’ named Jack Doogan, the milieu was definitely Irish. The name Hogan’s Alley, backdrop to the late nineteenth century ‘Yellow Kid’ newspaper cartoons, suggests much the same.

  Pigtail alley was all-purpose poor, and the reference was presumably to the presence of at least some Chinese, though the reference may have alluded to porcine standards of living; the name was certainly given, though far from exclusively, to New York’s Chinatown, based around Mott Street. Lastly Hispanics, who live variously in dago town, dago center or dago hill, Mex town, Spicktown, Taco Town or Tamaleville. Still using food stereotypes, Mexicans can also live in Beantown, which brings one round to another centre of bean-eating, Boston, Massachusetts, ‘the home of the bean and the cod’.

  Baltimore, Maryland, was known in the nineteenth century as mob town, although the mob in question was the unchained masses rather than the US Mafia. Still, there are plenty of names for criminal zones, effectively no-go areas for the law-abiding and upright. The first, from London, was the rookery, a general term for any such and based on the standard rookery, a gathering-place and breeding centre (usually high in a tree), for rooks; on the other hand there is the cant term rook, to defraud, to over-charge and that, while not the origin, may well underpin the term’s urban recycling. London boasted a number of rookeries, the two best known being Alsatia and St Giles, otherwise known as the Holy Land.

  For Alsatia one may consult page 86, Mystery Tour: Far Away Places, where it features among the fictional or semi-fictional places that feature in the slang lexicon. St Giles was (and is) situated at the bottom of Oxford Street, covering the area around the eponymous church – Giles was the patron saint of beggars – and now covered by New Oxford Street and Centre Point. It took its nicknames from standard English holy ground or land, an area within church jurisdiction in which villains or persecuted people could gain sanctuary. One of its main buildings – suitably verminous and over-populated – was known as Rat’s Castle, and like the Alsatians locals were big on criminal slang, known to outsiders as St Giles Greek, in which Greek, as in ‘it’s all Greek to me’ was generic for wholly incomprehensible. The occupations and cynical devil-may-care philosophies of the inhabitants are summed up in the chorus of an old ballad, allegedly very popular in the area: ‘For we are the boys of the holy ground / And we’ll dance upon nothing and turn us around.’ Dancing upon nothing required a gallows and a rope and feet that moved but failed to find purchase on supportive earth: such was the fate of many holy-landers.

  Down the road lay Holborn Hill, an extension of Oxford Street, leading to the City proper and on its way passing Newgate prison. Thus the phrases walk or ride (backwards) up Holborn Hill, push or ride the cart up Holborn Hill, and sail up Holborn Hill. Prior to 1783 London’s main site of public execution was the great Triple Tree (a three-cornered edifice that could ‘turn off’ twenty-one villains at a time), positioned at Tyburn, now Marble Arch at the far western end of Oxford Street. Thus a condemned Newgate prisoner had to make their way west (one of the mooted origins of gone west, failed or broken), a journey – complete with three traditional stops for a pint of ale – which he or she made either standing in a cart, or sitting on the coffin that had been loaded with them. They sat backwards, either because it was believed to increase their ignominy, but more likely to avoid seeing the approaching gallows until the last possible moment. An alternative execution site was at Tower Hill (site of the Tower of London). This gave its own phrase: to preach on Tower Hill, an ironic use of preach and referring, perhaps, to the criminal’s last words on the scaffold: but no talking was implied, it was simply to be hanged.

  In modern America such rookeries, using the topsy-turvy world of criminal coinages, would have been known as right towns: any town or small city where the authorities – police, local politicians – have been bribed into allowing criminal activity to flourish. The opposite was a sucker town, a town or city in which any criminal activity is unwise – the authorities have proved impervious to corruption – the inference is that the populace, suckers, are too innocent to accept bribes.

  Otherwise we have a variety of terms. With the accent still on poverty, though the line between that and outright criminality is as fluid as ever, we have billy-goat hill (also billy-goat alley, goat’s gulch, goat town). Either the original inhabitants actually kept goats or their taste for various social excesses exhibits a certain ‘goatishness’. Usually such people were poor, but improvements were possible: one such goat’s gulch in Kansas was gentrified and re-nicknamed ‘Angora Heights’. Tobacco Road, the title of Erskine Caldwell’s once notorious novel about Georgia sharecroppers, published in 1932, was used for any primitive rural area and its inhabitants.

  Hell, less equivocal (though modernity has brought gentrifi-cation here as elsewhere) provided hell’s kitchen, hell’s half acre and hell’s bottom,
the first specific, the others more general. Hell’s Kitchen was the Irish-black slum area that covered part of the West Side of New York City from c.1850 to 1910; bounded by the Hudson River and 8th Avenue, it ran from 39th Street to 59th Street. The name may have applied initially only to a single tenement or it may have been picked up from the name of a saloon in the red-light area of Corlear’s Hook (itself one of the possible origins of the slang term hooker, a prostitute, given the number of girls who used the area as their base). The toughest part of Hell’s Kitchen was known, at least to the writer O. Henry, famed for his short stories of New York life, as the stovepipe, a narrow enclave running along 11th and 12th Avenues. Hell’s half acre could be applied to any disreputable area or place, for instance the slum area of a town or a specific low-class dancehall or bar. Writing in his gold-rush memoir Land of Gold (1855) the British visitor H.R. Helper noted that ‘Among the more fanciful names that designate localities in various parts of the mines are the following: [. . .] Mad Ox Ravine, Mad Mule Canyon, Skunk Flat, Woodpecker Hill, Jesus Maria, Yankee Jim’s Diggings, Death Pass, Ignis Fatuus Placer, Devil’s Retreat, Bloody Bend, Jackass Gulch, Hell’s Half Acre.’ Hell’s bottom, hell’s point or hell’s hollow were other ways of labelling a disreputable or out-of-the-way area.

  Like bottom, hollow, similarly invoking the ‘lower depths’, is another useful brand, appearing in a variety of compounds which describe an area of a town or an out-of-the-way place, usually combined with a reference to poor or foreign groups. Examples include dead man’s hollow, frog hollow, Irish hollow, piggy hollow, punkin hollow, skunk hollow, sleepy hollow (celebrated as the title of Washington Irving’s 1820 story ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’), smoky hollow and snuff hollow.