The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  Nonetheless France hit back. Faced by the German Franzosen she retaliated with prussiens: ‘Prussians’, to characterise the disease, while aller en Baviere: ‘to go to Bavaria’ is to be treated for syphilis; an extra punch was given to the phrase by the pun on French baver, to drivel, a fate that tended to overtake advanced sufferers as the brain gradually imploded. Similarly aller en Suede: ‘to go to Sweden’, which meant to take the once popular sweating cure for syphilis, embodied an inbuilt pun, in this case between the proper name Suede and the French suer, to sweat. The French have also termed the illness the Italian disease and a pair of Italian cities provide the backdrop for Portugal’s mal de Napoles, and France’s mal florentin, respectively the maladies of Naples and of Florence. The onguent napolitain: ‘Neapolitan ointment’ was a salve, the active ingredient of which is mercury, which was used in the treatment of syphilis. Probably quite unconnected is the US term for Scandinavian immigrants: salve eaters.

  It’s a truly international pursuit. It just depends on those a given nation hates and like sport, an accusation of genital decay is a useful, if temporary substitute for war. Japan has mankabassam: ‘the Portuguese sickness’, and Portugal opts for mal de Costilla: ‘the Castillian sickness’, ancient Greece referred to the korinthion chanon: ‘Corinthian ill’, a knock at a people who were generally pilloried for their alleged decadence. England, as ever, targets Ireland, with Irish mutton and the Irish button (presumably a reference to the syphilitic bubo that develops in the groin; a Welshman’s button, however, is an artificial fly, used by anglers). There was also the Scottish fleas, which underlined England’s traditional disdain for Scotland as a land of infestations, known otherwise as Louseland and Itchland. Spain played its role as national enemy, which produced the Spanish disease, needle, gout or pip. This last is usually a disease of chickens, and the bots, with no national link, is also found, though this is properly a disease of horses caused by an infestation of botfly larvae in the digestive tract. In the county of Somerset any form of venereal disease was known as the Welshman’s hug. The Dutch, who fought many bitter battles against Spanish rule, used gezienhebben Spanje: ‘to have seen Spain’, to mean that one was suffering, although the phrase could also mean to have suffered punishments other than venereal ones. The Netherlands also uses Spaansche pokken, Spanish pox. Germany backs up its excoriation of France with that of Spain, offering spanische Krankheit: the Spanish disease, and the polysyllabic Spanischfliegenpflaster: literally ‘Spanish-fly plaster’, but here a syphilitic blister, and possibly linked to cantharides, the alleged aphrodisiac known as Spanish fly, with its roots in Greek cantharis, the blister-fly.

  Not every name has been nationalistic. To return, and stay with English, the aching symptoms gave the bone-ache, often extended by ‘Neapolitan’, the loss of the nose led to the nautical break one’s boltsprit, and to lose one’s hair was to moult one’s feathers. A diseased whore who transmitted her own syphilis was thus a barber, which also played on the imagery of the barber’s shaving water and the whore’s vagina being ‘hot’. To piss out of a dozen holes evokes the rotting penis (thus the contemporary take or spring a leak, to be infected), to play a game at loll-tongue was to have one’s saliva checked for traces of syphilis (the treatment, salivation, was known as sal). We have the familiar old joe and the old rale or rail (possibly from dialect rail, to stagger) which notes the way in which the developing disease gradually impairs mobility. The old dog ‘bites’ the sufferer, while to be one of the knights projects the disease as weakening one’s ‘sword’. The belief that those who went on long sea voyages suffered from fevers, possibly intensified by the image of the genitals being in the ‘southern’ part of the body, gave to go under the South Pole, to suffer from syphilis or venereal disease. A last example was the deeply unpleasant full hand, full house or nap hand: card imagery that was defined as a simultaneous dose of both syphilis and gonorrhoea; sometimes body lice and/or pyorrhea joined the fun.

  Where would we be without a dose of rhyming slang. It is not always clear which of these refer to syphilis or to gonorrhoea, given their relatively modern coinage, but no matter. Rhyming with pox are band in the box, boots or shoes and socks, cardboard box, coachman on the box, goldilocks and jack (in the box), which in turn gives the jack, and the state of being jacked up. Proper names include a pair of clergymen: John Knox (Scottish and Presbyterian) and Ronald Knox (English and Catholic), the music hall duo of Nervo and Knox (Jimmy Nervo and Teddy Knox, once members of the much-celebrated Crazy Gang, a staple of 1940s variety shows) and the journalist Collie Knox. Finally Surrey, Tilbury or Whitehaven docks. Bang and biff and Will’s whiff (a long defunct miniature cigar) come from syph, bumblee from VD, and handicap and horse and trap from clap, which is usually gonorrhoea.

  The gentleman’s complaint, as some termed gonorrhoea, was and remains first and foremost the clap, occasionally clapper. The word comes from Old French clapoir, a venereal bubo, which also gives clapoire or clapier, a place of debauchery and the illness one can contract there. Standard English until the late sixteenth century, it starts appearing in cant/slang lists by 1800; in 1611 the Dictionary of the French and English Tongues defined clapier as a ‘rabbits’ nest’ (as well as a name for ‘old time Baudie houses’) which thus punned on standard coney, a rabbit and slang’s cony, both vagina and whore and both possible sources of disease. Clap gives clappy, suffering from venereal disease, clapster, a regular sufferer, and clap-trap, both vagina and brothel. The meaning of nonsense has nothing in common: it began life in the theatre where it was defined as any bit of business that milked the applause: it ‘trapped the claps’. Coincidentally, slang’s applause, gonorrhea, is a heavy-handed pun on clap. A bullhead clap was an extremely severe dose.

  As well as the clap there was geography. Just as prostitution gave slang a succession of terms that depended on its current ‘headquarters’, e.g. Fleet Street houri, Bankside lady, City Road African, Drury Lane vestal and Haymarket hector (a pimp), venereal disease had its personalised London. Covent Garden yielded up Covent Garden ague or gout. Drury Lane, nearby, had ague too. (The Covent Garden abbess was a procuress or brothel-keeper and a Covent Garden nun or lady a whore.) Nor was it only London. There was the Barnwell ague, which came from Barnwell near Cambridge. Defined as ‘a place of resort for characters of bad report’ it gave rise to the University decree of 1675: ‘Hereafter no scholar whatsoever [. . .] upon any pretence whatsoever, shall go into any house of bad report in Barnewell, on pain [. . .] of being expelled from the university.’ The town of Tetbury, Gloucestershire, was similarly unsavoury: according to Captain Grose, a Tetbury portion, i.e. an inheritance, was ‘A **** [cunt] and a clap.’

  Gonorrohoea hurts. You piss broken glass or failing that razor blades or pins and needles; you could also have picked up a nail. It manifests itself by tokens, whether a discharge or gangrenous spots, and which one can tip to an unfortunate partner. What you see is a whitish discharge. For women this is either the yellows or the whites. Neither bode well. Thus the seventeenth-century news sheet Mercurius Fumigosus, telling in 1654 how ‘Mistris Squirtington, so miserably troubled with the yellows, that she lives in perpetual fear lest her husband should act the Town-Bull of Smithfield, and ride every jade he comes near.’ For men it was gleet or gleat, borrowed from old French glette, slime, filth, purulent matter and known to medicine as urethritis. Gleet may be linked to gluts, defined by the Swell’s Night Guide of 1846 as ‘to be sick of a mot’, i.e. rendered ill by a woman.

  The discharge has also been known as glue, creamies, drip, drips or dripsy and the disease is thus the dripper. The pus can also be a running horse or nag. Running meant oozing, while the horse referred to horse-pox, an especially severe strain of the disease. The Mercurius Fumigosus of May 1655 launched itself on an orgy of double entendres, mixing horse images and the slang sense of ride: to copulate. ‘[They will supply] Oysters . . . to strengthen the backs of the Horse-coursers, that are Ranke Riders, In requitall whereof, t
hey have promised to finde them a Teame of Running Naggs, to help them home with their Ware, which Running Naggs shall be so fleet, that they shall run faster than a Winchester Goose can flie.’

  An oyster was a prostitute (or her vagina), ware meant the penis, and the Winchester goose or Winchester pigeon was no bird but VD and reminded people that the popular brothels of Southwark came under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester; abbreviated as goose, it was the basis of a reference to a well-known whore: ‘No Goose bit so sore as Bess Broughton’s’. (Goose, as in poke or tickle, is different: the image is of pecking.) If the disease produced spots, then it became a botch, a Biblical term meaning ulcer or plague-spot and found in Deut. 28:27 ‘The Lord will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods [i.e. haemorrhoids], and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed.’

  The terminology did not always specify the problem. In many cases one simply cops a non-specific dose. Among the older synonyms are the crinkums or grincomes (among a wide range of spellings) which come from the crinkum-crankum, the vagina in slang and a narrow twisting passage in standard English, and which emphasises the sense of twisting pain that accompanies the disease, and the flapdragon, which plays on a game: flapdragon or snapdragon, in which, explained Samuel Johnson, ‘they catch raisins out of burning brandy and, extinguishing them by closing the mouth, eat them’. In this case it is the penis that is ‘hot’. Haddums comes from the punning phrase ‘been at had ’em and come home by Clapham’. There is Venus’s curse and Cupid’s itch plus scrubbado, from standard English scrub, ‘the itch’ – the Spanish suffix -ado, gives an underpinning of racist stereotyping, while Latin’s noli me tangere, ‘don’t touch me’ was popular in Scotland, although the Scotch or Welsh fiddle were English slurs. The fiddle or violin also symbolised the vagina, thus the seventeenth-century riddle commencing: ‘I’ve two holes in my Belly and none in my Bum / Yet me, with much pleasure, Italians do thrum . . .’

  More recent terms have included the African toothache, Chinese rot and plain cock-rot; the nineteenth-century’s Lingua Franca gave kertever cartzo, which comes from cattivo cazzo, ‘bad cock’. There is yook (perhaps from the exclamation yuck!), and the brophys, an Irishism which used the nickname of the supposed insects, relations of body lice or crabs, which allegedly carried the disease. The days when the London street Piccadilly was thronged with prostitutes (known as Edies, their smarter sisters in Mayfair proper were Toms) gave Piccadilly cramp. There are more, but perhaps the most unnerving was lobstertails or lobster-toes, African-American terms from around 1960. In Deep Down In The Jungle, his collection of ‘toasts’ (narrative poems usually featuring pimps and whores and created and recited in prison), Roger D. Abrahams offered this excerpt from the adventures of the trickster-hero Shine (itself a term for a black man): ‘He went to a place called ‘Dew-drop Inn.’/ He asked the broads to give him cock for a lousy fin. / She took Shine upstairs and she gave him a fuck, and all this pats. / He came out with the syphs, the crabs, lobstertoes, and a hell of a case of the claps.’ Quite why a lobster is unknown, perhaps its colour, perhaps its nipping claws; cock, in this context, meant the vagina, as it does in the Southern US, and refers to the coquille, a cockleshell or cowrie.

  Words that meant being infected focus on heat. The burning sensation in one’s dropping member, a penis that could no longer function due to pain. First recorded is burn, which would give the cynical nautical joke ‘to be sent out a sacrifice and come home a burnt offering’, to be sent off to fight for one’s country, but to return carrying venereal disease. To burn one’s poker or one’s tail (both meaning penis) was to catch a venereal disease. The flame or the fire were VD itself, to give it to one’s partner was to set them on fire and those who suffered, sometimes known as fireplugs, passed through the fire. Still with fire, or at least the light it casts, glymmar or glimmer meant a lantern (and much later an electric torch); for our purposes it became a dose of clap. Thus in 1612 the playwright Thomas Dekker, in his treatise of criminal language O Per Se O noted that ‘however cold the weather be, their female furies come hotly and smoaking . . . carrying about them Glymmar in the Prat (fire in the touch-bore) by whose flashes oftentimes there is Glymmar in the Jocky.’ Prat being buttocks and thus here the vagina, jocky, from jock, the penis; the touch-bore, more usually touch-hole, was the vagina, both terms meaning in standard English the vent of a firearm, through which the charge is ignited.

  To be infected was to knap [i.e. catch] the glim. To pepper was to infect and those who suffered badly were peppered, sometimes extended to an invasion of crab-lice. One who was pepper-proof was (temporarily) free of problems. One could be clawed off, defined as ‘swingingly Poxt’. Covent Garden has been mentioned, here we find break one’s shins against Covent Garden rails, yet another synonym for venereal misadventures. Modernity, as all too often, is less inventive; to give someone the clap is simply to fuck them up.

  Once infected one has a cold, is fly-blown, hot-tailed, loaded (up), piled (for French velvet), placket-stung, where placket refers to the slit at the top of an apron or petticoat and thus the vagina beneath) and in for the plate, a laboured play on horseracing jargon: horses that qualify for the plate (the main race) have first won the heat. Heat returns in sunburned and warm (and one can warm someone else). The burning pestle is a diseased penis, and the knight of the burning pestle a sufferer; Beaumont and Fletcher used it for a play title in 1607. Persisting in the imagery is scald. This began life meaning scabbed, afflicted with the ‘scall’ (any scaly or scabby disease of the skin, especially of the scalp; dry scall was psoriasis, humid or moist scall was eczema). In what is the first attempt at a slang glossary, Robert Copland’s Hye Way to the Spyttel House (c.1535) the porter at Bart’s Hospital describes the beggars crowded round the doorway as ‘Scabby and scuruy, pocke eaten flesh and rynde, / Lowsy and scalde, and pylled lyke as apes, / With scantly a rag to couer theyr shapes.’ The disease itself was scalder.

  There was also the idea of being the victim of a weapon. The seventeenth century borrowed the sea’s shot or hulled between wind and water. One could equally shoot one’s partner in the same place. The nautical phrase refers to that part of a ship’s side that is sometimes above water and sometimes submerged, in which part a shot is particularly dangerous. World War I added cop, get or stop a packet, which usually meant to get killed or wounded. According to Songs and Slang of the British Soldier (1930) by Brophy and Partridge, the origin was the ‘packet’ of gauze and lint that comprised the First Field Dressing that would be applied to a wound.

  Where did it come from? The assumption was a working girl. She could be a queer mort, where queer was an all-purpose negative with zero gender connotations and mort a woman; she could be a frigate on fire, which played on frig, to have sex, on fire, VD, and on the common equation of whores, ‘sailing’ the urban streets, with ships. If she was diseased then she was high, as in the stench of rotten meat (the meat being both the girl and her genitals), or in the modern Caribbean, having a gun in her baggy. Captain Grose’s dictionary, ever-anecdotal, explains the practice of docking, meted out to such unfortunates. It was ‘a punishment inflicted by sailors on the prostitutes who have infected them with the venereal disease, it consists in cutting off all their clothes, petticoat, shift and all, close to their stays, and then turning them out into the street’. Dock had no seafaring link but in standard English meant to cut off the tail. Like the apprentices who regularly pillaged and burned the brothels where they were otherwise such enthusiastic customers, the sailors had no problems with victim-blaming.

  Finally, treatment. There was no penicillin. Instead there was Mother Cornelius’ tub otherwise known as the Cornelian tub. Whether there was an actual Mother Cornelius is unknown; she could have been a nurse, but equally possibly, since such women were often known as Mother (e.g. Mother Damnable, whose house was in Kentish Town, Mother Midnight and Mother Knab-Coney, i.e. ‘snatch-sucker’), a brothel-keeper.


  On the other hand there is a mention of a male Cornelius in Travels to Bohemia by John Taylor, ‘The Water Poet’ (his day-job was ferrying passengers across the Thames): ‘Or had Cornelius but this tub, to drench / His clients that had practis’d too much French.’ Other theories suggest the physician Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1496–1535) a leading advocate of hot baths for medicinal purposes; the possible use of a hard dense wood, necessary to withstand the heavy salt brine used in ‘pickling’ patients, known as cornel-wood and ‘celebrated for its hardness and toughness, whence it was anciently in request for javelins, arrows, etc.’ (OED.) There were also possible puns on cornel and the ‘cornuted’ cuckold, implying either than the sufferer has been given not just the horn (the symbol of cuckoldry) but also the clap, or that one’s current incapacity is the result of one’s own horniness. The tub was also the powdering tub, borrowed from the standard English name for the tub in which the flesh of dead animals was pickled or ‘powdered’. Some doctors believed that vinegar was a cure and as well as internal or external use suggested that the mercury used in the treatment of syphilis should first be boiled in vinegar: those who received such treatment were yeomen of the vinegar bottle. To be laid up in Job’s dock was to be spending time in the venereal disease ward at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and like the Bible’s Job, suffering. As for the House of Lords, used in America, one can only attribute this to republicanism.

  Funny Foreign Food

  SLANG CAN, BUT these pages cannot, cover all the nationalist and racist vileness on offer. It would take a book and indeed in 1996 I wrote it; punning as ever, it was entitled Words Apart. The solitary review suggested that so unpleasant was the content it might have been best left unsaid. This was perhaps optimistic, and today’s resurgent hatreds suggest a reissue, probably much expanded. Race and nation and alongside them religion are among slang’s great stimulators. They cannot be ignored. Let us at least take refuge in a subset: the way in which the braggadocio of one nation’s myths blend into the stereotypes of another’s ‘typical’ foods. The way slang uses foods for insult. Call it a mixed grill (and that’s grill, as in taking the mick).