The Arm
Perhaps slang’s most widely known use of arm comes in the short arm (which can also be the middle or third leg), and specifically the short-arm inspection. This, of course, refers not to the arm but to the penis, and the health check to which military, prison and other authorities submit it.
In truth the arm mainly shows up in slang as an adjunct to other terminology, typically that of injectable drugs. Thus we have go on the boot, to leave the needle in one’s arm after injecting a drug, then jerk the needle so as to draw blood, and Grand Central Station, a pun on the numerous tracks to be found at the New York terminus, and the tracks to be seen on the scarred arm of a long-term heroin user.
The arm as arm is relatively under-described. There are pipes and a brace of hookers, the props, the flapper, the flipper, the meat-hook and the pumphandle. There is the rammer, the smiter, and less aggressively, the wing (thus the nickname wingy, for a one-armed man). Lost but once a staple of baseball writing was the soupbone or souper. Rhyming slang provides a few more: burglar alarm and fire alarm, chalk farm (from the north London district), Indian charm and lucky charm, five-acrefarm, Emmerdale Farm (from the UK soap opera Emmerdale Farm, now renamed Emmerdale) and Warwick Farm (from Warwick Farm, a Sydney racecourse).
To walk arm in arm is to link it, to latch on, to crooky (the bending of the couple’s arms) and if a man has a woman on each arm, he is carrying milk-pails (the image is of a milkmaid with her yoke and two pails). The US campus adds escargot, a man walking arm in arm with his date, which either looks to the French escargot, a snail, suggesting that such couples appear as tightly curled up as a snail in its shell, but the word may simply elide ‘his cargo’, implying that the woman is something the man carries along. The Armstrong heater refers to one’s arms when embracing a loved one and puns on strong-arm and the brand-name of a stove; Johnny or Captain Armstrong is a corrupt jockey who holds back his mount to (lucrative) order.
To have long pockets and short arms is to be miserly, mean, and to make a pot with two ears is to set one’s arms akimbo. To cross-fam was an underworld term that described a method of picking a pocket by crossing one’s arms in a particular position. Still with crime, a mason’s maund (from maund, a wound, probably counterfeited to gain sympathy) was a fake sore, placed above the elbow and counterfeiting a broken arm caused by a fall from a scaffold. To chuck a scrammy is similar, an Australian term for pretending to have a withered arm (from dialect’s scram, withered) so as to get off work (a scrammy is someone who actually has such an arm). Batwings or bingo wings are a cruel hit at the excess flesh that accumulates on the upper arm of an older woman (an old bat, but that may be coincidental), and, in the case of the second term, is seen as she stretches her arm upwards to claim ‘House!’ at the game of bingo or lotto.
A fit in the arm was a blow and to have a fit in the arm was to aim a punch or blow. The lexicographer James Redding Ware explained it in his dictionary of 1909: ‘In June 1897 one Tom Kelly was given into custody by a woman for striking her. His defence was that “a fit had seized him in the arm”, and for months afterwards backstreet frequenters called a blow a fit.’ Finally Saturday night palsy, Saturday night-itis or paralysis: this is the temporary paralysis of the arm, especially a weakness in the wrist, after it has rested on a hard edge for a long time, as during sleep following a bout of drinking.
The Hand & Fingers
Offer slang a point of view and one can be pretty sure that it will take the negative. Thus the words it has found to describe the hand and its fingers (bracketed together since it is often only context that makes it clear which is meant in a given use) are not those of stroking, caressing, soothing and similar aspects of human kindness rendered physical. Instead we have a range of terms that can be summed up as promoting self-gratification. Self-gratification, as will be seen, in every sense.
Eats first, morals after, said the playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the first thing at which slang’s hands grab is food. There are biscuit hooks and snatchers, and the same duo are attached to bread; crumb-snatchers, clam-diggers, flesh-hooks (which may be sexual but more likely edible), jelly snatchers, lunch-hooks or grabbers, meathooks, potato grabbers, -grablers and -stealers and grubbing utensils. The fingers are Adams’ knife and fork, greasers or fangs and the index finger the lickpot.
There are, however, no morals, only immorality. We find pickers and stealers (from the mid-sixteenth-century catechism: ‘To keep my hands from picking and stealing’) and plain stealers, thieving hooks, cornstealers and cotton-pickers, grabs, grab-hooks, grabbers, grapples, grapplers, grappling irons and gripes (from gripe, the act of grasping). There are claws and clampers, nabblers, divers and the fork, the last couple in the context of pickpocketing where to dive is to thrust one’s hand into a strange pocket and the diver is also the pickpocket in person. To fork was a technical term, meaning to pick pockets using the fore and middle fingers, extended like the tines of a fork, which are thrust into the pocket, then closed tight on any object within; this is then withdrawn between the ‘fork’. Glom can be a hand, but glom or glaum have meant to grab or steal since the late nineteenth century and all uses come from Scots glaum, to snatch, to grab, to seize with the jaws, to eat greedily. A possible link to Irish gabhlach, a forked instrument used in fishing, used in modern Irish slang as golly-fishing, may lie behind the seventeenth century’s goll.
Among other veterans are the bunch of fives (also box of fives and set of fives), the daddles or daddlers and thus tip someone a daddle, to shake hands, and the dukes, usually found in the context of fist-fighting, and properly part of rhyming slang where duke of York equals fork. Prize-fighting also likes mauley, mawley and later maulers, which comes either from standard English maul, the Gaelic lamh, the Shelta malya or the Romani mylier, each of which means hand. Mitt, yet another boxing term, cuts down mitten, which was borrowed from winter’s hand-warmer to mean boxing glove a century before it became a fist. Although forefoot was popularised by Shakespeare, the earliest of all hand/finger terms was famble which appears in the mid-sixteenth century as hands, and gives fambling cheat (‘hand thing’) a ring.
Grabbing, stealing and . . . groping. The hand was a pussy glommer (again from glom or glaum) long before the 45th President, as were fingers slanged as cunt scratchers and cunt-hooks, gropers, feelers, ticklers and wigglers. Yet slang prefers staying nearer home and the masturbatory hand is well catered-for. There are the dick-beater and dick-skinner, the wanking spanner, wanker’s spanner and wanking paddle. Grasping at least a fantasy of female involvement there is the dry-mouthed widow, Miss Fist and Mother Fist (each with her five daughters), Mother Five Fingers and Mrs Hand, lady five fingers, five-finger(ed) Mary or Annie, Mary Fist and Mary or Minnie Five-Fingers. To masturbate is to audition the finger puppets or the hand puppet, or to lay a little five-on-one (that’s five fingers, one penis or vagina). For girls only, is the button finger, used to stimulate the clitoris or button. But the palm (there is no avoiding it) goes to the family of that name. There are to be found Mrs Palm and her five daughters, Madam Palm and her five sisters, and the alluring Rosy Palm (who has her own five sisters or five daughters) which also give the phrases have a (big) date with Rosy Palm, date Rosy Palm and her five sisters, entertain, get off with or visit Rosy Palm and her five daughters. Sometimes the Palms are Palmers: Rosy Palmer, Patsy Palmer and both Mrs and Mr Palmer, who has his five sons.
Both hands and fingers find a role in rhyming slang. The former has brass band, frying pan, German bands (a staple of British entertainment that vanished abruptly with the declaration of World War I, and the departure of the once popular German bands from British streets), Margate and Ramsgate Sands (popular day-trip destinations for the East End), Ray Milland, Mary Ann, and Martin-le-Grand (one of the last vestiges of St Martin’s le Grand, a monastery and college founded c.1050; its bells rang the nightly curfew, and prisoners on their way from Newgate to Tyburn regularly passed it; those who managed to escape were able to cl
aim sanctuary within its walls – thieves and coiners were accepted, Jews and traitors were barred. It was suppressed in 1540, and its only memory is a street name). Since a hand can also be a fin, there are Lincoln’s Inn and strong and thin.
The latter includes bees wingers, bell ringers, comic singers, lean and lingers and longer and lingers, melody lingers and wait and lingers. Australia gives manly-warringahs (from the Australian Rules football club Manley Warringah; warringah, a term from the Guringai language means ‘sign of rain’, ‘across the waves’ or ‘sea’) and onkaparinga (from the brand name of a make of woollen blanket).
The fingers also find a place in gesture, the best-known of which is to give the finger, which simply involves raising the middle digit in a gesture of contempt. Synonyms are to give, flip or hand someone the (big) bird, and to flag, flip, give or shoot a bone (the reference being to the bones that are inside the finger). New Zealand prefers to give someone the ta-tas (ta-ta meaning ‘goodbye’). South Africa’s zop is a gesture of derision created by poking the thumb between the middle and index fingers and the equivalent of the Italian fico, which means both fig and cunt. There is the gross smell your mother! insult, usually accompanied by waving the middle finger under the insultee’s nose; the implication is of recent sexual foreplay. Still sexual is play at pot-finger, to stimulate a woman by sticking one’s finger in her ‘pot’. This in turn leads to stink-finger (also stinky-finger, stinky-pinky) which is manual stimulation of the female genitals by the middle finger, an experience the Beatles famously (in ‘Penny Lane’) apostrophised as finger pie.
The Face
Since the face has no direct functions, but plays host to such organs that do such as the mouth and nose, it largely lacks the images that other parts of the body have borrowed from standard English. The exceptions are index, title-page, chart and map, noting the way in which facial expressions can indicate emotion. The phiz (variously found as fiz, fizhog, fizz, fizzog, phis, phisi-miog, phisog, phizzog, physiog, and phyz) adds to this list. Its source, the standard term physiognomy, originally meant the art of judging character from a study of facial features (for some this also allowed prediction of the future). So too, perhaps, is frontispiece, though that favourite of prize-fighting reporters and fans suggests hiding rather than revelation. Boxing also gives furniture. One can also argue a case for clock and dial, as well, since these are actions with which we associate the face, as for kisser, smiler and feed-bag.
Other early terms go their own way. Muns simply borrows German mund, the mouth; nineteenth-century sellers of hot-cross buns used in their sales pitch: ‘One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns, / Butter them and sugar them and put them in your muns.’ The first half has survived, the second has not. Mush was once thought to come from the softness of the flesh; it is more likely to have come from regional French muse, the mouth or muzzle. Muzzle is used on its own merits. Jib (and its developments chiv, chib and chivvy), like much early slang, is a Romani term, chib or jib, the tongue, which in turn like many Romani words comes from Hindi, in this case tschib, meaning language. Mug, which remains popular, apparently comes from a variety of eighteenth-century drinking mugs, bearing a grotesque human face, although Anatoly Liberman has noted Scots mudgeon, a grimace.
It is hard to discover many links between the rest. Esaff is backslang, beezer a possible development from bowspirit, the nose, and can mean nose itself, balloon and chump (a lump of wood) are based on the shape, mattress seems to take the original slang meaning, a beard, and apply it wholesale, mag, originally chatter, seems to do the same. It is hard to see how mulligan fits, unless it was used exclusively for Irish faces. There is no need to look at the remaining few terms grill, dot, grip, kite, coupon chopper – the same disconnections emerge.
The face does attract a good deal of rhyming slang. Such terms include boat-race, airs and graces, roach and dace and kipper and plaice, cherry ace and deuce and ace, chips and chase and handicap chase, Jem Mace (the UK prize-fighter Jem Mace (1831–1910) and chevy chase (plus chibby chase and chivvy chase) which borrows the proper name Chevy Chase, the site of a celebrated seventeenth-century border skirmish and thus the subject and title of a popular ballad. The jaw gives jackdaw and rabbit’s paw but rabbit, as rabbit and pork, more usually means talk or speech.
The chin is variously the button (originally prize-fighting jargon), and the rhyming Errol Flynn or Gunga Din. The nineteenth-century nutcracker denoted a Mr Punch-like profile with a curving nose and protruding chin. Cosmetics, with which the face is adorned include lippy (i.e. lipstick), slap (originally theatrical) and war paint.
The face underpins a few phrases. One can have a face like a blind cobbler’s thumb (covered in pockmarks, resembling needle-pricks), a hatful of bronzas (i.e anuses, from the colour), a stripper’s clit, like a bum (‘dirty and daggie’, from dags, bits of excrement hanging off a sheep’s posterior), a douchebag, a toilet seat, a wet week, a busted or twisted sandshoe, a bucket of smashed crabs, a smacked arse, a bull’s bum, a festering pickle, an abandoned quarry, a painter’s radio (streaked with dirt), a stopped clock, a yard of tripe, half-past-six (the ends of the mouth point down) and yesterday. Many are Australian; none are desirable.
There is the derogatory Croydon facelift, a British female hairstyle which pulls the hair back tightly from the face, supposedly giving the effect of a facelift; it is stereotyped as that of working-class young women. The older Whitechapel shave again stigmatising the working class, whitening applied to the face to lighten the ‘five o’clock shadow’ since the poor cannot afford a barber to shave them. The face also suffers at the hands of a chalker, an Irish thug, the equivalent of a London Mohock, who specialised in roaming the streets and slashing the face of any unfortunate victim; thus chalking, carrying out this species of urban terrorism or ‘amusement’ as Grose grimly notes it in 1785.
The Mouth
The mouth is practical. It holds the teeth and tongue, it leads to the throat, it permits eating and speech. On occasion it can kiss. Such are its functions, such are the bases of its descriptions in slang.
Teeth first: the bonebox, domino-box, the ivory box or case and box of ivories, the prosaic but factual toothbox. The teeth themselves often rhyme – Bexley, Hampstead and Hounslow Heath – but also offer chatterers, choppers, crunchers, gnashers, grinders, mompyns (fifteenth century, literally ‘mouth-pins’) and the pearly gates among several others. For speech the mouth can be the spoke-box, the oration trap or box, clack-box and rag box or shop, both rag, which ‘waves’ and clack being terms for tongue. It is the chaffing-box or closet (there is also the chaffer, but that tends to be the throat as in moisten one’s chaffer, to take a drink). The saucebox, which might suggest food, but is surely sauce as in cheekiness or teasing. The feedbox is unarguable, as is the gob box, which uses one of the veteran terms for mouth, gob, which reaches back to 1550, though the gob might refer to another meaning: clots of sliminess and thus the mucus that one spits. The sausage box is specific, while the lung-box and bacca-box recall a less prohibitive attitude to smoking.
Speech has also brought the flapper, screech, yawp, gab, blabber or bullshitter, chatterer, clacker, giggling or laughing gear and laughing or talking-tackle. Jib has been noted for face, it also works for mouth, as do map, muns, muzzle and napper. The mummer was once one who mutters and murmurs and thus an actor in a dumb-show; slang has given them a voice.
If gob is a veteran, so too is trap, though a couple of centuries the junior. Shut your trap, be quiet, remains a slang regular. What it traps is food, though there is room for clapper-trap, where clapper is the tongue, and flap-trap, its action, plus talk-trap, flatter-trap and kissing-trap, coined ironically in the violent world of prize-fighting. Smacker, usually a kiss, also means a mouth, as does busser from buss, to kiss. Claptrap seems another but it is not. The clap here is applause and the term suggests some piece of theatrical, and later social business that will milk that applause from an audience; the image of nonsense is contemporar
y, both existing since the early nineteenth century. Flytrap is a joke and presumes a gawping mouth, while clam-trap or clamshell suggest the bivalve, opening and shutting. The rest is consumables. The grub-trap, which could be a shop, a street, a mill and a grubber. Both beer and gin traps (though a gin-trap also referred to a snare for rabbits and such) and rabbit-trap qualifies here too; a meat-trap, -mincer or -safe, a bread-trap and a bun-trap, a hash-trap (hash as stew, not dope), a pudding trap and duff trap (duff being stodgy and based on suet, much relished in the navy), a turnip-trap and, less conventionally tasty, an opossum-trap and a rat-trap. Potatoes are the big one: potato-trap, -box, -jaw, pratie-trap and tater-trap.
The final container is the hole into which we shove our food and which gives bacon-hole, porridge hole, pie-hole and piechopper, doughhole and the most popular: cakehole (another one to ‘shut’). Faghole and smokehole deal with cigarettes, and wordhole and blowhole (for blowing off or boasting) with speech. The gap and gapper go here too, as must the pan.
The mouth qualifies as a place and as such becomes a cavern or tunnel, a gate or wicket which can be locked up by a dub, a key, which in turn gives dubber. Given the link of wicket-gates to churches the use of graveyard, where the teeth are the tombstones, is logical. The garret seems out of place, it’s usually the head, and the gazabo requires a stretch: does the mouth really resemble a form of garden hut, or a turret on the roof of a house? That, however, is properly spelt gazebo, while gazabo can be slang for fool. The link is still tenuous.
Beak, nib or neb all link the mouth to a bird’s equivalent and maw is usually used of non-human animals. Otherwise the concept of eating gives feeder and biter, cafeteria and dining room, grog-shop and gin lane, coffee-mill and the feedbag, usually a horse thing, which one ‘puts on’. Beefeater is another prize-fighting creation: ‘Tom sent his sinister mawley upon Bill’s beef-eater’ reported the Sporting Times in 1860. Beefeater, Yeoman of the Guard aside, could also mean a true Briton, man or woman, and the first recorded use, in 1623, notes it as a translation of the French rosbif, still found, though the country’s image has changed from what goes into the mouth to what comes out of it and les rosbifs are now les fuckoffs. The sexual sense of eat, to administer oral sex, gives cocksucker and cunt.
The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human Page 15