There are few rhymes: east and south, north and south, queen of the south, sunny south and salmon and trout. Moey is from Romani mooï, the mouth, Australia’s chook’s bum describes pursed lips as more appealingly does the rosebud, and Ireland’s puss is a sulky look. Transporter was a criminal thing: the image was of the sentence of transportation that comes from a judge’s mouth. The alligator mouth is to be avoided, it went with boastfulness: he’s got an alligator mouth and a hummingbird (or canary) ass is another version of all mouth and trousers, while the wise advise, don’t let your alligator mouth overload your ass.
Finally the productive chops, which begins as a standard English term for ‘jaw’ but has been borrowed by slang for the mouth. One can beat or bust one’s chops (or gums) and thus talk incessantly, work very hard or make a great fuss about something. To bust someone else’s chops is to nag, to criticise. One can be down in the chops which is depressed. To flap one’s chops is to talk too much or to gossip, while to flog one’s chops returns to hard work or unchecked talk. To run one’s chops about is to complain and slice one’s chops to chatter. Lick the chops should mean food but it is a musician’s term: to tune up before a performance, and the chops are musicianship, a reference to the use of one’s mouth and lips in playing a wind instrument.
The Eye
Windows to the soul, says the popular cliché and who is slang to argue? The eyes can be the front windows. But the soul plays little part in slang’s world-view and as with the rest of the body, much is down to functionality. The eye sees, it is a lookout or a seer which may suggest something prophetic, but probably does not.
As such a number of slang’s synonyms simply borrow from standard English: blinkers, winkers, leerers, oglers, peekers, peepers and peeps (thus peel one’s peeps, to keep a lookout) and squinters. Clockers clock, or take notice of what’s happening, gagers gauge the situation, gogglers goggle and spotters spot. There are glimpses and slanters, which take a slant. There is the simple optic and prize-fighting’s ogle. The gig reverse-engineers gig-lamps, spectacles, while gim is either a misspelling of glim, a light, or a pair with gim, to stare.
In through those windows comes light and the eyes, which can be simply lights, conjure up a number of compounds that reflect the fact: deadlights, domelights, glasiers, headlamps and headlights, skylights, toplights, the modern, artificial duo of neons and dimmers, and the long-established shutters. The flowery day-opener comes from boxing. Light illuminates them, they shine and become glisteners, sparklers, twinklers, beads, pearls and oysters. Immies reflect immy, a highly rated marble, made to resemble a semi-precious stone, and killem-shots suggest the killing glance of a pair of sparkling, and traditionally female eyes. Saucers is less romantic, though eyes as big as saucers was coined in the fourteenth century. Baby-blues, sometimes icy blues are generic, they can be brown, green, whatever. Banjo eyes suggest the round, white drumskin on the instrument and denoted large, wide-open eyes.
To squint was to have a boss-eye, queer ogles or peepers, squeench-eye or squinny-eyes. Bright, clear eyes were rum ogles. One who was cunt-eyed, the image being of a slit, squinted. Francis Grose, who includes a number of such conundrums in his dictionary, defined the seven-sided animal as ‘A one-eyed man or woman, each having a right side and a left side, a fore side and a backside, an outside, an inside and a blind side’. Grose is also responsible for the threat, ‘I’ll knock out your eight eyes’ and explains it as ‘a common Billingsgate threat from one fish nymph (the far from traditionally nymph-like fish-seller, or, in slang, fish-fag, itself incorporating faggot, a woman) to another: every woman, i.e. according to the naturalists of that society, having eight eyes, viz. two seeing eyes, two bub-eyes, a bell-eye, two popes-eyes, and a ***-eye.’ Bub-eyes are bubbies, the breasts, bell-eye the belly and a pope’s eye the lymphatic gland in a leg of mutton, regarded as a delicacy; here presumably the urinal and anal orifices. The final, censored term remains mysterious, it is presumably and despite its three letters, since Grose was always squeamish in this area, a reference to the vagina.
There is rhyming slang: baby’s cries and a range of puddings and pies both sweet and savoury: apple pies, jam pies, lamb’s fries, meat pies, mince pies, mutton pies, pork pies (porky pie too, but that’s usually a lie) and mud pies. There is Nelly Blighs, from Nellie Bly, the pseudonym of Elizabeth Cochran Seaman (1864–1922), a famous pioneering feminist newspaper reporter, who took her pen name from the title of a Stephen Foster ‘minstrel’ song, featuring a black maid.
Of all the face, the eye seems most prone to injury. Blows to the eye include the poultice over the peeper as well as the blinder, blinker and bung. To star or mill the glaze originally meant to break a window for the purpose of stealing whatever lay behind it; borrowed by prize-fighting it meant to knock out someone’s eye. The result of all this violence: the black eye. No other injury (as much as slang even notices them) has received so exhaustive a coverage.
The simple black eye can be a beefsteak eye (the traditional palliative being a raw steak laid across the painful optic), a bruiser and a bunger. It is a casualty, a goog (the bruised eye resembles a goog, Australian for egg) or a graper (another supposed resemblance, to a plump black grape), a shiner (generating the rhyming slang: morris minor; the term is currently favoured as meaning fellatio) and a stinker. A mouse suggested the greyish tones of a burgeoning bruise and a Monday mouse was the tangible aftermath of Saturday or Sunday night’s (drunken) fight. The witty half a surprise plays on the musical hall star Charles Coborn’s song lyric (c.1886), ‘Two lovely black eyes/Oh what a surprise’ (adapted from the slushy ‘My Nellie’s Blue Eyes’). On stage Coborn dressed as a somewhat leery toff: fair enough, he also wrote ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’.
To give a black eye was to darken someone’s daylights or skylights and to get someone to go to bible class, which pun referred to the well-known rowdiness and horseplay of a printer’s ‘chapel’ or workshop. Raspberry-jam indicated an unfortunate double: black eyes and a bleeding nose (a cranberry eye was merely bloodshot, while gooseberry eyes are blank and lifeless), while a pair of spectacles resisted the blood. Blackness indicated a person in mourning. Thus the full suit of mourning, a pair of black eyes, half-mourning, a singleton (the bruise might have turned purple which fitted the hierarchy of Victorian costumes: half-mourning being that colour) and the peeper in mourning.
The late eighteenth century ascribed such wounds to a stereotype: the drunken, fighting Irish. Thus the Irish beauty, a woman with a pair of black eyes and Irish wedding, a brawl, where, to quote Grose once again, ‘black eyes are given instead of favours’ and the Irishman’s coat of arms, a black eye and a bloody nose. There were other coats of arms, given the make-up of the first Australian convict vessels, possibly Irish too: the Botany Bay coat-of-arms, a broken nose and black eyes, reflected the violence that was prevalent at the convict settlement; it was also known as a colonial livery. The painful eye and nose was also Lord Northumberland’s arms, in this case the joke was on the red and black spectacle-like badge that is the basis of the Percy family, i.e. Lord Northumberland’s arms.
The eye generates a number of slang phrases. Probably the best-known is the military coinage eyes like pissholes in the snow (variations include . . . in a snowbank and two burnt holes in a blanket). Such eyes, deeply sunken and often bloodshot, are taken to reflect a night of excess. This also left one with eyes set at eight in the morning, i.e. staring in different directions. To have big eyes (for) is to experience a great desire (for); bedroom eyes, come-to-bed eyes and sweet eyes indicate an unrestrained sexual come-on and another militarism, a little bit of eyes right (playing on the similar bit of all right) is an attractive girl.
Sore eyes can be pabble-blinkers (perhaps from pebble, one feels as if there is a small rock beneath the eyelid), bung-eye is an eye infection caused by flies, and duck’s meat is mucus. To be gravy-eyed is to be bleary-eyed, and gives the nautical gravy-eye, the notoriously tedious 0400–0600
watch. Bung eyes protrude as do bug eyes and glarum goggles. To eye-shoot is to stare aggressively, possibly with a coke stare, the rigid, highly aggressive gaze that may overtake the more paranoid cocaine user. The eye-limpet (it sticks to the socket) was an artificial eye and the punning guccis, in gay South Africa, are bags under the eyes.
One eye and a winkle was a blind person or a person with one eye, and the winkle is presumably the penis. There is the Nelson: a score of 111 in cricket, the digits represent the much reduced admiral’s ‘one eye, one arm and one arsehole’. The link of a single eye to the penis is productive. It gives such images as one-eyed bob, the one-eyed guardsman, one-eyed pants python, one-eyed rocket, one-eyed brother, one-eyed or hairy Cyclops which is of course tautological, since all Cyclops are one-eyed, one-eyed monster, one-eyed stag, one-eyed (wonder) worm (or one-armed trouser worm) and the one-eyed zipper fish. The supreme example of the form, as fans of Barry Humphries’ Aussie ex-pat Barry McKenzie will know, is the one-eyed trouser-snake, though Bazza is not responsible for its synonyms: the one-eyed bed snake, one-eyed trouser mouse, tan trouser snake and trouser serpent. That the hapless Bazza, one of life’s great virgins, fails ever to make it spit, is quite another story.
Pox: Knocked by a French Faggot-Stick
PLAYING, RATHER THAN being doctors and nurses (see Doctors & Nurses) has a downside. At least for grown-ups. Not, thanks to developments in modern medicine, as far down as once it might have been, but pleasure still brings some possibility of pain. Those who revel in such outcomes proclaim the triumph of morality; the rest of us prefer to eschew superstition and reach for the penicillin. Either way what we have is STDs: sexually transmitted diseases.
Slang doesn’t do morality. It does God and his boy Jesus, but only in terms of turning them upside down in its usual manner and furnishing the angry world with a range of words and phrases that, if you believed, would be listed under blasphemy, but on the whole come across as something of a joke: ’slight! (God’s light!), ’snails (God’s nails!), gadswogs (God’s wounds!), plus where the five ‘n arf? based on the old measurement of 5.5 yards, a rod, and thus a rhyme with God.
The words ‘morals’ and ‘morality’, like the fugitive ‘love’, are conspicuous only by their absence. There are less than twenty-five instances of ‘immoral’ or ‘immorality’, and these, predictably, are men’s judgement of women’s choices. Breechy, for instance, usually used of cattle that are liable to break through the pasture fence; in this case it’s the woman who ‘jumps the pasture fence’.
As far as ethics are concerned it certainly doesn’t lay down the law. (Those supposedly immoral women are if anything, in this male-orientated language, objects of approval and to be taken advantage of.) If it deals with a topic then it lays out a stall, nothing more. It is up to the speaker to buy, or walk on. Thus the vocabulary of venereal disease, the misery that devolves upon pleasure.
So alongside health and its administrators (see Doctors & Nurses), let us look from another angle at the physically ailing. Nor just any ailment, for that is not slang’s choice. It deals, as we have noted, with mental problems, but slang does not really bother with such problems as the common cold. There’s the rhyming slang silver and gold or warrior bold, and one can be bunged up while to sit in the garden with the gate unlocked means to catch a cold, but that’s about it. There are a few terms for influenza (dog fever, dog’s disease, the rhymes inky blue and lousy lou) and the Antipodean wog which has nothing to do with race but uses an earlier meaning: a germ or parasite, an insect, in other words a ‘bug’. The two wogs are wholly different but, frustratingly, neither offers a concrete etymology. The illness may be linked to dialect’s wog, to twitch, while the long-approved, but far from proven backdrop to the human, usually from the near East or Indian sub-continent, is ‘westernized (or wily) oriental gentleman’. That is if it isn’t a clipping of golliwog, that distinctly non-PC blackface doll.
Of the great childhood diseases – chickenpox, mumps or measles – nothing. Only AIDS/HIV gets anything like attention, and that probably because slang sees it as sexually linked. Terms include A-word, big A, cowie (in Scotland), gangster, the monster, the germ, the gift that keeps on giving, the package, the plague (thus plaguer, a victim), the virus, high five (a hiver is living with the illness), and the inevitable rhyme: shovels and spades.
No. Our topic is pox. Once pocks, which was what indicated a variety of illnesses that revealed themselves via a rash of spots such as smallpox, cowpox or chickenpox. This is none of those. What it refers to was and remains syphilis, sometimes known as the ‘great’ or ‘grand pox’ and nicknamed for the first recorded time in 1503. As Francis Grose once branded the word cunt, ‘a nasty name for a nasty thing’.
A moment’s pause. There is the clap clinic and clap shack and pox hospital, and the late seventeenth century’s nimgimmer who seems to be a pox doctor. But what of that mysterious figure, the pox-doctor’s clerk? That flashy, over-dressed peacock of a man, against whom any male, irrespective of occupation, may be compared: males who are considered done up, dressed up, got up or mockered-up like a pox-doctor’s clerk. Not only that but one might be drunker than a pox-doctor’s clerk, have a face like a pox-doctor’s clerk, lucky as a pox-doctor’s clerk (which despite what we might assume meant very lucky) and, less so, smell like a pox-doctor’s clerk, doused in cheap perfume and not so distant from the equally odiferous tart’s boudoir. Did he exist? Did such specialists in venereal diseases even have clerks? Was he no more than a figurative evocation of some social horror? Regretfully, no illustrations appear online (a search offers a strange selection, the best being a plague doctor c. 1348: he seems to be dressed in a bird mask). We must accept that there is no answer. Pox on’t!
When it comes to pox, we’re talking France. The French disease, a neat piece of nationalist stereotyping that emerged with the publication in 1530 of a poem Syphilis, sive Morbvs Gallicvs (‘Syphilis or the French disease’), by Girolamo Fracastoro (otherwise known as Hieronymus Fracastorius and living from 1483 to 1553), a physician, astronomer and poet from Verona. The poem tells the story of the shepherd Syphilus, supposedly the first sufferer from the disease. Fracastoro then used the term again – now as a definite piece of medical jargon – in his treatise De Contagione (‘On Contagion’, 1546). The poem arrived in English in 1686 when it was translated by the future poet laureate Nahum Tate with the title Syphilis: or, a Poetical History of the French Disease. The pox itself was long established.
There are possibly more Francophobe terms wherein modern slang’s nudge-nudgery equates ‘French’ to fellatio, but the link to syphilis, found mainly around the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, offers a substantial list. There is the Frenchman, the French gout, French disease, malady of France, French goods (which can also be brandy, given the source of the liquor) and the French pox; the French chilblains, French marbles, French measles, French cannibal, French morbus and French razor. To learn French or take French lessons is to contract the disease, and frenched or frenchified means infected. The French pig refers to the disease in general, but specifically to the syphilitic pustule or bubo (thus bube, a generic for the illness and from pintle, the penis, which in turn goes back to Dutch punt, a point; a pintle-blossom was a pustule and pintle-fever VD in general) that indicates its existence. The French crown, otherwise curse or gout, and properly known as the Corona Veneris, focuses on the crown, a ring of spots that appears around the forehead. A blow with a French faggot-stick refers to the loss of one’s nose through the advancing ravages of the illness, and one whose nose has already rotted away has been knocked with a French faggot (despite the modern slang use of faggot as homosexual, this means nothing more than stick and may thus be the origin of stick, VD, though not up the stick, where the stick is the penis and the phrase means pregnant). The only odd one out is French fits, which means delirium tremens, but even this may hint at the insanity attendant on syphilis; on the other hand it may suggest an excess of that quinte
ssential French drink, brandy.
Why so French? Spain was the current national enemy and given that Europe’s first cases of syphilis are linked to Naples (where it was contracted and then spread by French troops) such alternative slurs as the Naples canker, scab or pox are marginally more accurate. A Neapolitan designated one who carried the disease. Still, syphilis was not what slang-users primarily associated with the ‘bum-firking Italian’, a figure more generally linked to ‘Italian tricks’, i.e. sodomy. Nor had the cliché that made French a synonym for dirty/sexy yet arrived. The disease, first carried northwards by those French soldiers, has to be the primal ‘dirt’ and all else followed. One might have added oral sex, also ‘dirty’ for some, but that link came even later.
Straying briefly from English, the France / syphilis association was a cross-Europe phenomenon. Danes and Norwegians refer to Franzoser: the Frenchman, and den franskesyge: the French disease. In Poland it is franca, once more ‘the Frenchman’, while in Russia frantzukaya boiezn means the French disease, as does francuzljiv in Croatia, o gallico in Portuguese, französische Krankheit in Germany and fransos in Iceland. Spain, Italy, Slovakia, and speakers of Yiddish all use something similar. With so relentless an identification, it is hardly surprising that St Denis (in his more respectable guise the patron saint of France and of its capital city Paris) is also patron saint of syphilitics.
The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human Page 16