The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  Among the remaining terms for downmarket areas were the back slums, favouring criminal over poverty-stricken locals, pig town, crap-town, lousetown and bunkum-town. Codfish flats suggested the poverty of fishing communities though it should not be confused with New England’s codfish aristocracy, a mocking description of those nineteenth-century nouveaux riches whose fortunes sprang from the Massachusetts cod industry. There was hunger street or lane, bedbug alley, rag-cat alley and cancer alley, the last noting that poverty was made even grimmer by the pollution pouring from nearby factories. Death alley wasn’t necessarily homicidal, but you could never be sure, while pepper alley, from pepper, to beat up (and sometimes shoot) suggested at least a degree of violence; a real Pepper Alley, on the south bank of the Thames, was equated with crime, violence and debauchery though its origins were most likely in the spice trade. Jim town (perhaps from gimcrack, shoddy) meant a shanty town, though sometimes a Hispanic area. A cigar box suggested flimsiness, in this case of the buildings constructed for the poor: cigar-box row was a whole street of them. The houses were close, probably terraced, and there was much neighbourly conversation. This gab, or chat, gave gabby row. A dead-end street, however, was nothing to do with the city; like another landmark, mutton hill (from mutton, the female flesh), it meant a vagina.

  On a global scale we have the arsehole or asshole of the universe (see page 79, Mystery Tour: Far Away Places); downsized to a locality we have the armpit, though arsehole / asshole works too. A place can also be rough as a docker’s armpit. One such place (though it stood in for many) was the bloody bucket, otherwise the bucket of blood or blood-tub. There actually had been such a tavern, the nineteenth-century Bucket of Blood, in Havre, Montana; its reputation spread and the term became generic for similar establishments. But it was not really the first. London historian Peter Ackroyd reports on London’s Water Lane, one of the main streets of the Alsatia sanctuary, which boasted ‘a dwelling . . . known as “Blood Bowl house”’. This notorious pub, properly known as the Red Lion, is pictured in plate IX of Hogarth’s Industry & Idleness. Here we see the ‘idle ’prentice’ Tom Rakewell at the moment of his betrayal by his mistress Moll. He sits, debating the merits of a hatful of stolen trinkets with a villainous, patch-eyed accomplice; around them a soldier pisses against the wall, a dead, or certainly unconscious body is tossed through a trapdoor, a gang of fellow villains enjoy a tussle, brandishing chairs at each others’ heads, a serving woman, her nose covered by a mask (has she lost it, we wonder, to the pox?) carries in a pot of ale while at the head of the stairs, for we are in a basement, a constable slips a coin into faithless Moll’s outstretched palm.

  Blood Bowl House had a history. One version cited a countryman who was taken there and had his pocket picked; when he complained, he was told that if he did not shut up, the ‘blood bowl’ would catch the flow from his slit throat. Alternatively, according to the engraver’s biographer, it derived ‘from the various scenes of blood that were almost daily exhibited, and where there seldom passed a month without the commission of some act of murder’. In either case it was a long-established centre of fencing, or selling off stolen goods.

  Beyond the city, the small town. No love was lost in urban eyes. There was hog island or hog-town, which suggested a pig-sty and meant any small, impoverished, out-of-the-way settlement; thus the description hog-wallowing, which referred to an inhabitant of such a place. Dog town (a town whose inhabitants numbered ‘one man and his dog’) was both a small town and a rundown, possibly criminal area of a town. It began life as theatrical jargon, an out-of-town (i.e. out of New York City) theatre used to try out a new show before ‘bringing it in’. Prior to that one ‘tried it on the dog’. Dogpatch, perhaps influenced by dogtown, was created as the name of the hillbilly settlement in which the syndicated cartoon strip by Al Capp, L’il Abner (1934–77) took place. The hick town, or Hicksville, took its name from hick, a generic name for Richard and used of peasants, it lay beneath the celebrated Variety magazine headline noting a small-town distaste for films about their own world: ‘Hix Nix Stix Pix’, a concoction that included another word for the back of beyond: the sticks. Frogtown suggested the village pond while a jay town or jayville used jay, a sucker, to underline the rubbernecking vulnerability of visitors to the big city. There was the one-horse or one-pub town: neither ran to anything more plentiful for either transport or entertainment, the slab and the two stemmer: based on the big city’s Main Stem, such a town had only two streets.

  The railroad lay behind two more synonyms for insignificance: the jerkwater town and the tank town. These small, rural locations, through which trains passed but stopped only to pick up water rather than passengers, had a trackside water tower and a trough from which a train could scoop or ‘jerk’ water from between the tracks without actually stopping. An alternative etymology, based on earlier railroad practice, suggests that the crew had actually to leave the train and jerk the water in buckets from local wells, then run with it to the waiting locomotive. A further suggestion, perhaps least likely, cites buckets that were attached to the locomotive by a leather strap and that were used to jerk the water from streams running alongside the track. The tank town played the same role, and one can note the late nineteenth-century theatrical use of water tank show, a small touring company.

  Last is cruellest: the bad or narrow place or spot in the road. Could anywhere have been less important? The phrase probably boasted more variations than the towns did populace: aside from these were crack in the track, stop in the road, broad place in the road, and, returning to the railroads, whistle stop.

  Still rural, but far back in time, is the mysterious and quite lost deuseaville, the countryside, the age of which is indicated by the variety of its speculative spellings – deasyville, deausaville, deuceaville, dewsavell, dewse-a-vile, dewse-a-vyle, deyseaville, duceavil, deusavil – and the problem of finding out just where it came from. The -vile /-ville suffix is easy enough, it came from Latin and meant town, but after that all is up for grabs. Eric Partridge suggests a corruption of daisy-ville but dewse = deuce = the devil and thus a generic negative; given that London, the big city, is Rum ville, literally ‘good town’ (though the connection here might be a proposed equivalence to mighty Rome itself), might not the country, its opposite, be ‘bad town’? What we do have is deuseaville stampers, who were members of a criminal gang who wandered the country roads and frequented country inns in the hope of picking up information about possible robberies.

  There are obviously many proper names ending in -ville, but recent slang use, as it does for certain aspects of -city, opts for something more abstract. Most suggest the world of beatniks, i.e. the 1950s and, like -city, what the -ville denotes is set up by the noun or adjective that goes with it. Thus there are dragsville, very boring; sticksville, very rural or suburban, and endsville, variously the best, the ultimate; the limit, the end, as far as one can go, and thus death; absolute, irretrievable failure; and of a place, out-of-the-way, without quality, thus extended as east of Endsville. Endsville can also be gonesville: knocked out, whether literally or figuratively; vanished, escaped, gone or dead; eccentric, insane; emotionally carried away and like endsville, used to decry a distant or unimportant location. One also finds weirdsville, anywhere considered strange or out of the ordinary; a bizarre situation, creepsville, any unappealing place or situation and skidsville, from on the skids, a state of poverty.

  Rum- or Romeville aside, and passing by its role as the ultimate town (the country bourgeoisie, consciously teasing, also used the village), London, fount of all English-language slang, has generated a number of nicknames. The best-known is probably the Smoke or Great Smoke (and thus the rhyming slang version, the Old Oak, with its sense of something both old and solid). The source was the pall of pollution that, before the clean air legislation of the 1950s, hung over the industrialised city, generating smogs that in turn gave it such names as the Big Fog, Fogtown, Fogville-on-Thames and the Gilded Fogpot. Its natives,
the Cockneys, have given Cockneyland and Cockneyshire and it is those Londoners, proud and parochial, who term the world beyond the stones, i.e the London streets, as over the border, or even China. And as borrowed by New York, there was the Start, which had been used a century earlier to refer to Newgate prison. This may modify the etymology: in that context it may have signified the start of a condemned person’s ride from Newgate to the gallows at Tyburn, several miles to the west, but it might also have borrowed start as meaning a shock or surprise, in other words that experienced on entering prison. A link to one’s starting a new life, for better or worse, on leaving Newgate for freedom seems a little optimistic for slang.

  For a vocabulary which prefers to tell it like it is, little or no philosophising on offer, slang’s take on the city’s thoroughfares is surprisingly abstract. After -city and -ville, we reach street. There are, of course, a variety of concrete expressions, though these often reach beyond the named street in question. For instance Dream Street, a term coined by the short-story writer and chronicler of Broadway, Damon Runyon (1880–1946) as a nickname for 47th Street, New York City, between 6th and 7th Avenues; the block, recognised as the headquarters of American vaudeville, was the site of the stage door to B.F. Keith’s Palace Theater. Wall Street and Sydney’s Bourke Street stand for the world of finance, Threadneedle Street for the Bank of England, while Queer Street stands for a variety of difficulties, economic ones included. Problems are also found at the Chequer Inn or King’s Head Inn in Newgate Street, otherwise known as Newgate prison, up King Street, from King Street, Sydney, the site of the Supreme Court, which hears bankruptcy cases (the equivalent of London’s Carey Street), and via London’s China Street which gave a China Street pig, properly known as a Bow Street officer. Then there is plain shit street, a land-locked version of that unfortunate location shit creek.

  Yet slang’s street is less solid. It deals with a concept rather than a map. Like road, (used without an article) which has succeeded it, it represents the mythologised world of ‘real life’, which exists on the streets, rather than in the protected environments of home, office, family and the rest. The university of life, as it were, and the school of hard knocks. Before that it meant freedom, the unrestricted street that follows one’s release from prison, a concept known equally as ‘the world’ and thus popularised by soldiers awaiting their discharge from foreign duties. Unchained one could run the streets, spending one’s time in self-indulgence, partying, drinking and enjoying the freedoms of a non-domestic life.

  Thus one is streetified, well versed in the ways of the urban lifestyle as seen on the inner-city streets, and has street cred, which was coined in the rock business and is popular in any of the industries that target the young consumer. One can have street smarts, the ability to survive on the streets; one is streetwise. There is street legal, which may be technically illegal, but wholly acceptable in the ‘real life’ context of the street. In all senses this use of street reflects a core belief, that the ‘artist’ must relate genuinely to the ‘people’, i.e. the working-class youth of the streets and housing estates and thus, opting sincerely or otherwise for mass culture over a privileged elite, he or she must at least assume an air of rebellion and informality.

  It is the mindset that gives hold court in the street, ostensibly launching a gun battle (and implying that even death is preferable to prison), but underpinned by the sense that the traditional court, with its wigs and formalities, is not to be trusted and that the public arena is all that counts. Alongside is front street. An actual Front Street, once a mercantile centre, can be found in New York, but it is irrelevant here. Front Street is to do with fronting up, with front otherwise known as attitude, individual honesty or its pretence, exposing oneself, being on public display and thus open to attack, whether verbal or physical; a situation in which one must be responsible for one’s words and deeds. The concept gives play on front street, to abandon pretence, to act openly, put one’s business on front street, take it to the street or more bluntly put one’s shit on the street: the phrases can mean to make indiscreet disclosures about oneself or another person, to trick or deceive or to confront and defy.

  Next junction: the alley and the lane. It would appear that the narrower the street the coarser grows slang use of the image and both terms seem to adapt naturally to bodily parts, notably the vagina, the throat and the anus.

  Slang can be restrained but it prefers otherwise. Thus the plain and simple cunny alley denotes the vagina, with its geographical variations coney court, cunny court, cunny gate or gateway, cony-hall and cunny hall. It may be assumed that Gropecuntlane, a name found in several British cities, and currently offering the earliest (c. 1230) use of cunt, belongs in this group. (Although cunt was the only ‘obscenity’ not to cross unremarked from Middle to Early Modern English – around 1450 – the word was once considered as unremarkable as cock or piss, which would not go ‘off-limits’ until the eighteenth century.) Fans of romance fiction might prefer Cupid’s alley, and its extension take a turn in Cupid’s alley and Hair Court, to have sex, but harsh modernity plunges headlong down spam alley. (Cupid is predictably keen on cunt; synonyms include Cupid’s anvil, arbour, arms, cloister, feast, furrow, grotto, warehouse, nest and pit; Cupid’s kettledrums are the breasts and Cupid’s spear and battering ram, the penis.)

  The smock, now associated with artists, was a female undergarment, thus an early pornographic work The Nun in her Smock, otherwise known as Venus in the Cloister. There was an actual Smock Alley, running off Petticoat Lane in London’s East End: it was well known for its brothels and as well as signifying the vagina (also known as smock castle), the term also stands for any brothel area. Smock was a useful term, standing in for sex and in particular prostitute in a variety of compounds: among them the smock shop was a brothel, smock servants and smock vermin were whores, the smock hunter, hero and soldier were womanisers and the smock merchant, agent, attorney, pensioner, tearer, tenant, smocker and smockster were pimps.

  A smock fair, otherwise a marketplace, was the red-light area; synonyms included the punning easy street (the girls rather than the life) and the unlikely maiden lane, while in Australia Sydney’s Palmer Street was known as douche can alley, noting the use of douches by the street’s prostitutes and punning on music’s Tin Pan Alley.

  Other terms for vagina included long lane (a real Long Lane still runs next to the Smithfield meat market though the pun is probably coincidental) and leather lane (again there is a real Leather Lane, a street market and in this case, the wordplay, on leather, human flesh, was certainly intentional: Clerkenwell, where the market is situated, was notorious for commercial sex). Spew alley is hardly congratulatory, but is a little early for the campus use of spew as semen. The thatched house (under the hill) is another pun, between the pubic hair and the actual Thatched House Lodge, Surrey, built for the keepers of Richmond Park in 1673 and subsequently owned by prime minister Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745). There was love lane, which gave the laboured take a turn in Love Lane on Mount Pleasant, to have sexual intercourse and shooters hill (another real place and yet another pun, this time on shoot, to ejaculate). Again one could take a turn . . . along the narrow by-way, as one could down or in cock alley.

  The real-life Cock Lane (again just by Smithfield), was in the fourteenth century the only street on which London’s prostitutes were licensed to ply their trade in public. In 1666 the Great Fire was supposed to have stopped at its junction with Giltspur Street, while in February 1762 thousands of the curious flocked to number 33 Cock Lane to hear the scratchings and knockings of the alleged ‘Cock Lane Ghost’. A committee of investigation, among them Samuel Johnson, duly pontificated. Disappointingly, it was all a trick.

  After the vagina, the throat. Spew alley appears again, this time more logically. Among other terms are gutter alley and peck alley (from peck, food), and both beer street and gin lane (a century on in use but presumably acknowledging William Hogarth’s celebrated engravings of 1751).
Gutter lane may have echoed an actual street, but Eric Partridge preferred a link to Latin’s guttur, the throat and to the Devonian dialect gutter, to eat greedily, as well as to guttle, to eat heartily and to guzzle. Those who wished to go down gutter lane were drunkards or gluttons. Lane meant throat by itself but was better known as the red lane, plus the narrow lane, red lane alley and red lion lane.

  As for the anus, it is pretty much all puns and proprietary names and an unwavering focus on the infantile link between excrement and chocolate and slang’s infatuated sniggering at sodomy. The exception is the dirt road or dirt run, usually in the phrases go up the (old) dirt road or the dirt route. Otherwise we have the Cadbury alley and Cadbury canal, the Bourneville Boulevard and the Hershey Highway. Rocky road evokes the popular chocolate-flavoured ice cream. Those who lack the sweet tooth have the Vegemite valley (Vegemite being Australia’s home-produced alternative to Marmite). The use of Vaseline to ease anal sex, and a possible play on California’s Silicon Valley gives the Vaseline valley, which is defined as the gay cruising area of Central Park in New York or a stretch of Oxford Street in Sydney which is acknowledged as the city’s gay centre.

  Whether in its uses of city, ville or town, or the images such conurbations and their thoroughfares provide for human bodies and functions, slang and the city are intimate friends. No city no slang to be sure, but slang amply repays the debt.

  On the Road: Tramps & Hobos

  IN THE MAIN, for a term to qualify as slang – if we leave out such alternative registers as dialect or colloquialism – the assumption is that it should not be linked to a specific user group. If you want a term for the parts of the body, or for drunkenness or eccentricity, then the speaker’s job is irrelevant. But some terms do spring from specific jobs. These are defined as jargons, a word that may have begun as meaning, in French, the twittering of birds, but has long since meant the specialist slang of specific occupations. And job-generated slang, say that of programmers, coal-miners, printers or lawyers, all of which are rich in such coinages, stands outside the mainstream. Such is the theory. The reality is otherwise.