There are a range of boxes or at least some sort of container. The box itself (which gives out of one’s box, crazy), the bonebox, cheesebox, dreambox, facebox, fusebox (for a bright spark?), pepper box and pepper-caster, and, as noticed, the thinkbox, which can be thinking box or thinkpad. There is the prosaic tin can, and a number of containers, usually for liquid: the pan and pannikin, the canister and the pipkin (an earthenware cooking pot). Crock is also a pot, and another that, as off one’s crock, means out of one’s mind. The conk, also meaning the nose and in that guise usually a recipient of violence, most likely comes from Latin concha, a shell, and Greek kogcha, anything hollow. Mazard comes from standard English mazer, a hard wood (usually but not invariably maple) used as a material for drinking cups, otherwise known as noggins, another word for ‘head’.
What it contains is the brain, and that makes the head a brain bucket, brain barrel and, for boxing fans, brain canister. It can be a brain pot, an idea-pot and a knowledge-box; the mysterious geranium presumably mispronounces cranium. A nous box uses the Greek nous, long-since adopted in English and defined as instinct or common sense, as opposed to actual learning. As machinery it drives the rest of the human system, among other things the guessing gear.
It sits at the top of the body and takes a number of slang names from the heights, human and otherwise. Such terms include attic (with its extension queer in the attic, meaning both mad and drunk; craziness is also implicit in the modern rats in the attic), garret, coop (the image is of pigeons), cockloft (literally the room over the garret) and simple loft, gable and belfry (in which of course one may be bats). Architecture underpins dome, turret, cupola (a rounded vault or dome forming the roof of any building or part of a building). Altitude adds topknot, top piece, topflat, top deck, top end, top-loft, top storey and upper storey, upper extremity, upper apartment, loft, works and crust. The weathercock is the highest head of all, though that may be the sky-piece. After chimney and lid nature offers kopje, a small hill, and crag, a high one. There is tree, usually found as out of one’s tree, another hint at instability, and finally the punning crown office, which leads to the phrase the Scotch greys are in full march by the crown office, the lice are crawling on one’s head (Scotland being invariably linked to such infestations) and get into the crown office, to get drunk.
The head is a lump or chump, otherwise a short thick lump of wood chopped or sawn from timber, a block (thus off one’s block) or, still woody, a knot. There is also doorknob and bonce, originally a large marble. It is also equated with a range of edibles. These include biscuit, crumpet, scone, bean, beanie or beano, coconut and its variations coko-box and coco, squash (though squash-headed is foolish), turnip (a popular bet was ‘all one’s head to a turnip’) and swede (US rutabaga and thus crash the swede or set the swede down, to go to sleep), onion (an eccentric is off his or her onion), costard (meaning a large apple and as such the root of that prime user of Cockney slang, the costard or coster-monger), and pumpkin. Other foods include the cauliflower, which elsewhere denotes a large white wig ‘such as is commonly worn by the dignified clergy, and was formerly by physicians’ (Grose, 1785) as well as the foaming head of the glass of beer. Elsewhere still the vegetable can mean the vagina, and we are again grateful to Captain Grose for telling us why: ‘The reason for this appellation is given in the following story. A woman, who was giving evidence in a case wherein it was necessary to express those parts, made use of the term cauliflower, for which the judge on the bench, a peevish old fellow, reproved her, saying she might as well call it an artichoke. Not so, my lord, replied she, for an artichoke has a bottom, but a **** and a cauliflower have none.’
Along other food-based synonyms are gourd, which also means pumpkin, as does calabash, with roots in the Persian khar-buz, meaning ‘melon’, and occasionally ‘water-melon’; packy, another term, is used in dialect for the calabash. Last comes casaba, which in standard English is cassava, defined by the OED as ‘a plant, called also by its Brazilian name Manioc [. . .] two varieties (or species) of which are extensively cultivated . . . for their fleshy tuberous roots’.
From fruit, as ever, to nuts. Acorn and filbert are both en-slanged but neither, however, come near approaching nut itself, which is especially productive of combinations that show the head in a variety of roles, often violent or deranged.
Nut is especially fond of psychiatric institutions: These include the nut bin, box, college, factory, farm, foundry, hatch (underpinned by the well-known asylum at Colney Hatch near London, opened in 1851), hut and place. The nut alley (in a prison), nut ward and nut wing (in a hospital) are all specialist departments. The inmates include the nutbag, nut-boy and nutball, the seemingly edible nutbar, nutburger and nut cake, plus the nuthead, nut-job and nut-nut. Even their supervisor, the nut doctor, sounds dubious. The nut wagon and the nut train, both of which one ‘rides’ are insanity itself. To go off one’s nut is to go mad, or at least lose emotional control, which can also be blow, do or go off one’s nut.
Is it all madness? No. Among other compounds – nut job, a head-butt, put or stick the nut in or on, to give that blow – there’s a trio of Australianisms: the nut ducker, one who deliberately ignores a friend in the street, the nut worker, who works out ways of avoiding hard work and who the horny-handed equate with the white-collar worker, and the act of nodding or ducking the nut (as well as the scone, the head and the skull) all of which mean to plead guilty.
The images keep on coming. The presence (or lack) of hair gives wool-grower, mop and moppery, barber’s block, the wooden ‘head’ on which a barber placed a wig as well as wig (or wig-block, wig-box and wig-stand) itself. Hats offer headpiece, hatpeg, -rack or -stand, kadoova, which may be linked to kadi, a hat, and its variation kaboona, and derby, which as well as the head is a hat in itself. Kabeeza may be associated to these. There are egg, pimple and poundrel, though why? It means a pair of scales. Bazooka recalls the anti-tank rocket launcher, first used in World War II; it may come from Dutch bazu(in), a trumpet, though that seems to indicate the mouth rather than the entire head.
Thomas Harman’s sixteenth-century glossary included nab (nab-cheat, i.e. ‘head-thing’ was a hat) and nob follows a century later (its use as a synonym for toff emerges c.1800.) Plus noll, which was once standard but turned slang these lead to noddle, another former standard use, but only for the back of the head, noodle (also a fool), and nuddikin which comes from noodle-ken, where ken means a house or home and could suggest another institution. Napper, plus knapper, napper box or case, nopper and nappertandy, which played on the real name of an Irish revolutionary, seem part of this group.
There are more, but let us conclude with just a couple of others. Boko is either a play on beak and/or coconut and is better known as a nose. The origin may lie in the trademark gesture of the great clown Joseph Grimaldi (Dickens adored him and wrote a biography) which was to tap his nose and utter the comment, C’est beaucoup, that’s plenty. Finally sconce or sconce piece, with roots either in sconce, a lantern or sconce, a fort or earthwork.
The Legs
The first recorded slang term for legs is stamps (1567), taken directly from their function; it was followed by pins (from the primary meaning of pin as a peg, and gave such phrases as on one’s pins: to be feeling well, or in good form and the underworld’s fake a pin, to injure one’s own leg in order to obtain some kind of medical discharge or support. After that came gams (1780, from French jambes, thus flutter a gam: to dance), and hams (from the standard use of ham: the bend in the back of knee, which progresses to mean the buttock and upper thigh taken together and thence to the whole leg). Hams thus creates ham-cases: trousers, perhaps using Romani hamyas: knee breeches, ham-bags: girls’ drawers (c.1900, and presumably a pun on handbags) and ham frills (c.1925 girls’ running shorts). Ham hocks and hammers are modern developments. The pestle of pork borrows from standard English pestle, the leg of certain animals used for food, especially the haunch of the pig.
Rhyming slang
for legs, with a possibly coincidental pun, offers ham and eggs along with bacon and eggs, scrambled eggs and scotch eggs or pegs both of which are found as scotches, plus clothes-pegs, cribbage-pegs, Dutch pegs, Easter eggs, fried eggs, mumbly or mumblety-pegs (a game based on one’s feet and the throwing of pocket-knives just near them), Gregory Pegs (from movie star Gregory Peck) and Mystic Megs (the clairvoyant), and wooden pegs.
A group indicates the leg’s role in moving or holding up the body: wheels, locomotives and propellors, pillars, bracers, stand-ons, supporters, underpinners, underpinnings or understandings and uprights. Other terms include drivers, stumps (nineteenth century, and found mainly in the rather archaic phrase stir one’s stumps), cabbage stumps (nineteenth century), timbers (originally only wooden but soon any leg), trams (twentieth century), trespassers and pods (which usually referred to children’s legs; thus podding: toddling). Shanks’ or Mother Shanks’ pony, mare, nag or naggy are all usually found in ride shanks’ pony, to walk and punning on standard English shanks: legs. There is also the US regional use: to ride one’s mother’s colt, granny’s colt, mother’s pony and so on. Sticks leads another subset, which includes drumsticks, bunting sticks, poles, props, spindles, stems (a noir-ish term for a woman’s legs), stilts, twigs and backer-sticks (from days when tobacco was sold in short twists a few inches long. Chalks, which come in sticks and are best known in the phrase walk your chalks, to move or leave, seems to be part of the group.
Slang can be very specific, especially when it comes to mockery. Who would have thought it would notice so many varieties of ‘non-standard’ leg? To have knock-knees was to be cross-legged or baker-legged: the condition was seen as a side-effect of the job, while in folk myth knock-knees are one of the ‘proofs’ of effeminacy; knees themselves were marrowbones or the rhyming biscuits and cheese. To be box-ankled was to have legs so made that the ankle-bones knock together. Bandy legs were queer gams (queer as in odd, not gay) and cheese cutters and those that had them were said to buy their boots in Crooked Lane and their stockings in Bandy-legged Walk. Those with crooked legs were buckle-hammed, from buckle, to warp or bend and to walk dandy-dude was to kick out one’s leg when walking, perhaps a one-time affection of some lost species of exquisite. One who was splay-footed was a skew-the-dew or marley stopper, from the image of stopping a marley, i.e. marble with one’s foot.
Those with catsticks or trapsticks (both from popular games) had thin legs, they were spider-shanked (thus spider-shanks, a man with very thin legs, although spider’s legs, in Scotland refers to very thin hand-rolled cigarettes). There was the nickname spindleshanks and the phrase calves gone to grass, which produced the once-jocular remark ‘veal will be cheap, calves fall’ on noticing a man whose calves fall away. Australia adds lolly-legged (from lollipop, or at least its stick) used for thin, spindly legs, and by extension one who is physically uncoordinated.
Thick legs are piano legs, tamp braces (unattractive female legs) and spiddock pot legs, which pot was large, made of earthenware and had a hole through which one pushed a spigot. Otherwise it was all Irish: Irish arms, Irish legs, Irish stamps and the phrase beef to the heel like a Mullingar heifer (Mullingar being an Irish town). Men who wished to comment on a passing woman retreated to backslang to remark appreciatively: doog gels, good legs.
In a world before prostheses, the solution of a peggy, a one-legged individual, was the wooden leg which was an ammunition leg, queer timber or a timber-toe, which made the wearer half-timbered or half-a-foot. Depending on which leg was missing (and this extended to arms), the sufferer was either a rightie or leftie. The wooden appendage was also a jury leg which seems to follow the pattern of the nautical jury-rig or jury-mast, temporary rigging or mast, a short-term arrangement that replaces equipment swept away in a gale or during a battle. Finally there was the nickname dot and carry one or dot and go one: in an era before properly moulded ‘feet’ were available, the dot is the impression made by the bottom of the wooden leg, while the good leg is ‘carried’.
A lame leg was a swinger or gammy leg. The term seems to come from gam, but in dialect gammy is left-handed – always seen as a defect – and the Irish lexicographer Bernard Share suggests geamhchaoch, bad from the tinker’s language Shelta. Stumps are legs and stumpy hints at single-leggedness but means only short, which brings in duck-legged (duck legs being short legs) and the duck’s disease: like a duck, one waddles around with one’s buttocks close to the ground. Scotland offers gipe, otherwise an awkward person or a fool, for one who has long legs.
Finally, since the foregoing has been relatively free of sexism, there are of course a couple of terms that equate the woman, and her sexuality, with her legs. Margarine legs and peanut butter legs: both are ‘easy to spread’ with the difference that the latter are also ‘smooth and brown’.
The Feet
Slang has its exotica, but in these bodily parts it is equally practical. As with the legs, many terms for the feet look at their primary role: walking. This gives walkers, pads, paddles and padders, creeps and creepers, shufflers, stampers and stomps, steppers, toddlers, scrapers, trods and trotters (and rhyming slang Gillie Potters, named for a music hall star and later radio comedian, real name Hugh Peel). A foot could be an everlasting shoe, and the crossover with footwear, generally heavy boots, gives mud-faker and mudhook, plus mud-hopper, -masher, -splasher, -splitter and -squasher, all of which meant both the human appendage and a heavy shoe or boot. The same multi-tasking goes for various terms for large feet: barges, boxcars, canal boats, steamboats and battleships, clod-hoppers and -mashers, ant-killers, beetle-crushers and -squashers. The use of trilby for a foot, and a briefly fashionable woman’s shoe (men wear the trilby hat, from the same source) takes the name of the heroine of the eponymous 1894 novel by George du Maurier: her feet cited as being particularly attractive. Big feet were also airy-fairies, a jocular reverse on the term’s usual meaning, on the same lines as calling giants tiny and shrimps lofty. Properly small feet have been tootsies, a playful or affectionate name for a foot, and expanded into tootie, tootsey, tootsie pootsie, tootsie-wootsie and tootsum-wootsums. There are probably other variations: baby talk is inexhaustible.
Shanks’ pony aside, most terms for walking relate, with complete logic, to the feet. Terms include the ankle express and ankle excursion, the hobnail express and the shin stage. One can hoof it or beat it on the hoof, travel by Mr Foot’s horse or in Australia per Harry Pannell, which firm manufactured stout walking boots. Walking as performance gives black America’s slidewalk, a specific style of walking: one foot takes normal paces, the other drags; one hand is tucked into the side, the other is positioned with the wrist pressed to the waist and the elbow sticking out. This is a variation on the better known pimp walk, or pimp strut, less a walk than an elaborately choreographed stroll. As explained by the slang collector J.L. Dillard: ‘The gait is slow, casual and rhythmic . . . almost like a walking dance, with all parts of the body moving in rhythmic harmony.’
Like those of the leg, the foot’s imperfections naturally appeal to slang. Clumsy feet are curby hocks, which in a horse are the hock or other part of a horse’s leg which is afflicted by a hard swelling. To have a club-foot is to be bumble-footed, thus to bumble-foot, to stumble, while the afflicted foot itself is a double-breaster or an Irish hurley, which puns on the Irish game of hurley or hurling, in which the ball is hit with a stick or club. A flat-footed person is either a gut-foot or kidney-foot, and one who walks flat-footed has been to Palmer House, a nod to the walking done by the hard-working waiters of Chicago’s Palmer House Hotel; the flat feet themselves are Palmer Houses. A council-often, from the Council of Ten, a secret tribunal of the Venetian Republic (1310–1797), are the toes of a man whose feet turn inwards when he walks.
Deformations aside, a number of phrases depend on the foot. California socks or overshoes (as used by tramps and/or unsuccessful gold prospectors) were and perhaps remain makeshift ‘socks’ created by wrapping the feet in sacks, often f
lour sacks, over which boots can then be put on. To have a foot up one’s ass is to be treated unfairly or, to be victimised and one escapes by taking the foot out of one’s ass and ridding oneself of ill treatment, victimisation and exploitation. To make feet for children’s shoes was to have sexual intercourse, the assumption being a pregnancy. The Caribbean’s cock up one’s foot or feet (semi-synonymous with standard English’s put one’s feet up) is to sit around looking important while others work. It can also be used of a woman who sits with her legs sprawled in what is considered an indecent manner.
To play footsie (or footie-footie, footie or foots) is to nudge someone’s foot with one’s own – out of sight of companions – as a possible prelude to further intimacy. It can be found in South Africa as voetjie-voetjie and footchy footchy. A shrimper is a foot fetishist – the toes are supposed to resemble pink shrimps – thus shrimping is sucking toes for sexual satisfaction. The hot foot, however, is far from sexy, but a malicious trick played on an unsuspecting sleeper. Matches are thrust end-first into the gap between the upper and sole of the shoe (or between naked toes if vulnerable); the matches are lit, and the shoe ‘catches fire’ or the flesh is painfully singed.
The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human Page 14