The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  Eat to live? Live to eat? The choice is yours and slang plays no favourites. Food, or the imagery that it offers, plays a major role in the vocabulary. Taking in compounds, phrases and allied formations, the simple word meat, for instance, has 202 meanings, fish, 144, and fruit 84; vegetables, perhaps predictably in slang’s ostentatiously macho world, a mere half- dozen. Go to individual foodstuffs and the story continues: beef offers 150 meanings, apple 90, cabbage 66, banana 55, chicken 41 and so on.

  Meanwhile, straight across the lexical street, we find another human appetite: national pride. Patriotism, the scoundrel’s ultimate refuge as the great Dr Johnson put it. That nationalism notches up the terminology will offer no surprises. Each against all the rest is the rule, and there’s always been time for slang to take advantage of the appearance of a new national enemy. The French (117 terms), the Dutch (104), the Spanish (41), the Germans (21), the Italians (16) . . . and for that matter, for the English English speakers, the Scottish and Welsh, although of England’s neighbours only the Irish are considered worthy of concerted assault with 126 (the Scots notch up a mere sixteen).

  It would be good to stop short at national borders but slang works with the broadest of brushes and nation can easily segue into race and thence religion and all are equally identifiable by what they consume. So like slang itself, we must declare the borders open. In a perfect, or at least efficiently categorised world we could eschew the Jews. Anti-semitism, never far away, is gleefully and openly flaunting itself once more and I see no reason to offer its advocates, whether left or right, a vocabulary. Let those among them who are literate grub for their own foulness. They will find more than enough in slang. We would extend our free pass to Islam, though that may come by default: such delicacies (the mythical sheep’s eyes notwithstanding) as are considered ‘Islamic’ do not seem to have played a part in our savaging of that faith. (Such an oversight is doubtless down to ignorance. It is hard otherwise to believe that slang would have missed the possibilities of cous-cous, although, thanks to the peerless Roger’s Profanisaurus, we do have the badly packed kebab: An untidy vagina that looks appetising only after ten pints.’)

  Nor would we have to consider people of colour, whose role in slang’s vocabulary of vilification outweighs even that of the Christ-killers. We would stick to nations, who, we may assume are big enough to stand up by themselves. It is in the nature of Nation A to disdain Nations B to Z. Slang has always capitalised on this. The word barbarian, as used by Greeks and Romans, suggested those who lacked the civilised attainments of Greece and Rome, and comes allegedly from an echoic use of the sound ba-ba-ba, the stammering mispronunciation of Greek or Latin. To stick to national entities also remedies an omission: slang’s seeming inability to critique anyone seen as ‘white’. At least on the grounds of their whiteness. The term white, after all, meant upright, honourable, trustworthy and much akin and it has only been relatively recently that this has been said with the necessary irony. Resisting slang’s vocabulary of racial and religious abuse also sidesteps the inevitable howls of those, besotted with the masochistic self-martyrdom of identity politics, who have wilfully discarded the ability to differentiate between the messenger and their message.

  It is not a perfect world. So what follows, the use by slang of foods and those who eat them to conjure a lexis of loathing, is all-embracing. Everybody’s ass, as the comedian Lenny Bruce once made clear, is up for grabs. Everybody’s palate too.

  National slurs are based on establishing then reinforcing the concept of ‘the other’ and what better means than the other’s food, in its ‘funny’ and ‘foreign’ incarnation. What might otherwise be wholly appealing is rendered quite unpalatable. Gastro-nationalism, as it were, gets the benefit of several antagonistic worlds: not simply racial difference, but those ever-absorbing bones of contention, manners and taste. The cartoonist James Gillray had it down: robust John Bull gorges on a mighty side of beef, scrawny Lewis Frog can only pick at something green, quite probably his namesake, and almost certainly engulfed in garlic. What you are, as the old 1960s slogan used to proclaim, is what you eat, and never more so than in this arena of squabbling particularism. In some ways, of course, it is also a reverse on the traditional snobberies of consumption, in other words it’s not so much a matter of whether or not you know how to eat, say, an artichoke, but whether or not you’d want to be seen ingesting the wretched alien object in the first place.

  As is usual with slang, irrespective of type, there are certain ‘inevitable’ stereotypes: the chilli-chomping Mexicans, the British rosbifs, French frogs and German potato-eaters – each locked into the demands of their stomachs, but no one, whatever their personal culinary preferences, has any monopoly here. With so many contending ‘dishes’ on offer, our best resort is to read the menu.

  Soup (best known for the neutral in the soup) is pretty much limited to the French, and specifically French Canadians who are known variously as Johnny-peasoup, Jean Potage, Johnny Soup, French-peasoup, peasoup, and peasouper. Quite why they crop up remains a mystery, but such immigrants may (or may not) have fascinated the American gangster Dutch Schultz, whose last words – a long, rambling and ultimately disjointed tirade – requested, ‘Come on, open the soak duckets; the chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword. Shut up, you got a big mouth! Please help me to get up! Henry! Max! Come over here. French Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone.’ If anyone knew, all lips were zipped. On the other side of the Great Lakes America offers metzel, a German immigrant, from Metzelsuppe, a soup made with sausage. Still in America the Borsht Belt describes that part of the Catskill Mountains where the great Jewish resort hotels were once bursting with vacationers from New York City. The name comes from allying a staple starter, Borscht – chilled beetroot soup with sour cream – to their clientele. Presumably it has shifted to the menus of the Russian restaurants now pushing for space on Long Island’s Brighton Beach.

  After soup, pasta, and in particular macaroni.

  Pasta, literally paste, i.e. flour moistened with water or milk and kneaded, comes from the Greek πασταί (pastai): barley porridge, via a Latin use that meant ‘a small square piece of a medical preparation’. The usual story is that Marco Polo brought it back from China, where it appeared in the form of noodles, at the end of the thirteenth century but the reality is that Italy, Germany, France, Japan, China and Korea each lay claim and all cases rest. No matter: pasta, in its many and varied forms, remains a staple of Italian cooking and pasta, or at least its two best-known varieties – spaghetti and macaroni – has become synonymous with Italians too. Spaghetti itself, plus spaghetti-bender, spaghetti-eater, spaghetti-head and the abbreviation spag all mean Italian. With garlic-flavoured sauce it becomes an Italian hurricane (the garlic itself is Italian perfume). The spaghetti western, of course, is any of those movies, pioneered by Sergio Leone at Cinecittà in Rome, and initially showcasing the young, monosyllabic Clint Eastwood, which depend on maximum violence, minimum chat and the moodiest of scores. Spaghettiland can mean Italy while an Italian special, or less affectionately a wop special, means a dish of spaghetti in the world of short-order cooking. It is possible that spick, used of both Italians and Hispanics, comes from spiggoty, which takes us back to spaghetti, though a case has been made for the immigrant’s apology: ‘no spicka de English’. Yiddish lukshen, noodles, means Italian, as does ice-creamer, from ambulant gelati salesmen, as did the once self-evident banana peddler and the baloney-bender, which refers to Bologna sausage.

  As for wop (and its feminine wopalina) there’s nothing culinary, other than its furthest roots. It probably comes from Latin uappu, literally bad wine and by extension, and used as such by Horace, a good-for-nothing. This moved on to Spanish guapo, a dandy, and when Spain occupied the island, was adopted in Sicily where guappu meant arrogance, bluster and unpleasantness and in time would be used by immigrants to the US to characterise their Italian work bosses. The work the immigrants did was ‘guappu work’ and guappu
metonymised to mean the workers themselves. (In black America work like a wop meant to work very hard.) Clipping guappu to guapp’ we have wop. We also have the rhyming slang grocer’s shop.

  Of all pastas, slang has best loved macaroni. The mac in mac and cheese, but much, much older. Linguistically it boasts the longer pedigree. It crossed from the Italian kitchen into the English dictionary with the institution of the Macaroni Club, which, as Lord Hertford explained in 1764, is composed of ‘all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses’. The travelling, suggests the OED, probably gave the members a taste for foreign foods, hence the name. They dressed extravagantly – towering blue-powdered wigs, red high-heeled shoes – and gambled for high stakes. Their club, Almacks, became today’s Brooks. The essayist Joseph Addison attempted to make a link with another Italian word, maccherone in its senses of ‘blockhead, fool, mountebank’ (and an earlier use of macaroni did mean a jolly fool, usually Italian) but it does not exist; Addison was perhaps writing facetiously. The macaroni, delighted as he was in his own image, was never popular. In 1770 the Oxford Magazine noted that ‘a kind of animal, neither male nor female, [has] lately started up amongst us. It is called a Macaroni.’ It talks, added the magazine, ‘without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion’; Horace Walpole, in 1774 when the craze had passed, remarked dismissively, ‘They have lost all their money . . . and ruin nobody but their tailors.’ By the end of the nineteenth century it meant no more than ‘an over-dressed, or gaudily dressed person’, an effeminate fop. More recently the term has dropped all references to fashion and like spaghetti means simply ‘an Italian’. In Australian slang it has meant nonsense or meaningless talk.

  Fish

  As with the Jews and pork, so the Catholics and meat, an item which, for the truly pious, is off-limits on Friday. Fish, on the other hand, is mandatory. Such fish-days, or fasting days once included Wednesdays too, and were – religion aside – a way of dealing with the realities of Medieval and Tudor economics. Thus fish-eater, guppy-gobbler, mackerel-snapper and mackerel-snatcher all mean Roman Catholic.

  That said, aside from the conch (from the Greek koncha: a cockle or mussel) which has served variously as a nickname for the natives of the Bahamas, for West Indians in America and for a ‘poor White’ native, often a fisherman, living in the Florida Keys or North Carolina, the remaining fish terms concentrate on the herring. In Canada a herring-choker is a Newfoundlander or a native of any of the Maritime Provinces; the same term is used in America for a Swede. Still in the US, a herring-snapper is both a Swede and occasionally a Catholic, while a herring-punisher is a Jew and a herring-destroyer or herring-choker a Norwegian. In the West Indies a herring-Jew is a Jewish or Syrian immigrant, referring to those that made their fortunes peddling salt-fish. Jews themselves call a herring a Litvack, a Lithuanian, a reference to the Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jews who were so fond of the fish. A Dutch red is a smoked Dutch herring and a pickle-herring a Dutchman. The herring pond, of course, is the Atlantic (although to cross the pond at the King’s expense referred to transportation to Australia). Nicknames for the herring, masking its common-ness with a variety of terms that reflect a rather more luxurious table, are Alaska turkey, Billingsgate pheasant, Californian pheasant, Crail capon, Digby chicken, Dunbar wether, Glasgow magistrate, Gourock ham, Halifax mutton, North Sea rabbit, Peruvian quail, Taunton turkey and Yarmouth capon, all referring to centres of the herring industry. The Californian links the herring’s ‘red’, i.e. gold colour with the Californian Gold Rush, while Catholic Ireland’s Protestant herring is not fit to eat. The cod, much-beloved by Bostonians, is an Irish goose.

  Meat

  Like fish, which in mainstream slang can refer both to a woman or her vagina (and indeed carries a wide variety of alternative definitions), meat also comes with sexual overtones, in this case extended to racist fantasies. Dark-meat, black-meat, a piece of dark meat, a hot piece (of dark meat) and a rare piece of dark meat can all signify a black woman, viewed invariably as a sex object. White or light meat can mean just the same of her white sister. But in terms of meat as food rather than, as the sex-related US slang term has it PEEP (‘perfectly elegant eating pussy’), the language throws up a whole platter of possibilities.

  To continue in the world of black America, nigger steak is liver (substituting cheap offal for the more expensive ‘white’ cut), while the short-order chef’s nigger and halitosis is steak and onions. Alligator-bait or ’gator-bait refers viciously to any black human being, especially a child; an Aussie steak (at least to the Australian army) is a piece of mutton, predictable, given the vast number of sheep ‘Down Under’. A Dutch steak, taking Dutch for Deutsch, is a hamburger, while a German dog refers to the great American creation, the hot dog, and a French pie, presumably as a result of some heavy-handed culinary humour, is stew (France’s Strasbourg pie was filled with foie gras). The West Indian nyam-dog, however, is a Chinese person, from nyam: food and a reference to a stereotyped appetite for canines. Goulash means a Hungarian. In the world of poultry, a German duck (in late eighteenth/early nineteenth century England) was half a sheep’s head boiled with onions; the term (which in less appetising contexts referred to a bed-bug) acknowledged the popularity of the dish amongst the German sugar-refiners and confectioners of London’s East End.

  Sauerkraut, a form of pickled cabbage and served, as a larger dish, with a variety of boiled pig-meats, gives kraut, still popular as a nickname for a German, kraut-eater, kraut stomper and krauthead. Krautland is Germany. Sausage also meant a German in late-nineteenth-century England and baloney or boloney, meaning nonsense or rubbish and which is generally accepted as referring to a Bologna sausage (although the OED claims the connection is ‘conjectural’), appeared in the 1920s. Against the Oxford verdict, lexicographer Ramon Adams refers in his dictionary of the American West, Western Words (1968) to ‘bologna bulls: animals of inferior quality whose meat is used to make Bologna sausage’, while Eric Partridge suggested Romani peloné, testicles; thus balls or ballocks, which can also mean nonsense. The baloney’s shape leads to penis, and a range of sexual phrases meaning either masturbate (beat the balogna, bop one’s baloney), have sex (hide the baloney, ride the baloney pony), anal sex (a boloney colonic) or fellatio (smoke the baloney pony).

  Classic Mexican dishes, perhaps through their popularity as fast food, seem especially prone to negative and nationalist equations. Chilli, chile or chili con carne (a stew of Mexican origin containing minced beef flavoured with chillies) gives several terms for Mexicans, who are thus disdained as chilis, chili chokers, chili eaters, chili-pickers, chili-beans, chilli-bellies and chilli-chompers. A chili chaser is a US border patrolman, employed, absent the Trumpian wall, to prevent Mexicans entering the country illegally. Chilli itself does not, popular belief to the contrary, refer to the nation, Chile, but is a Mexican word, in place long before the Europeans arrived. Other Mexican favourites give more grounds for sneers. The taco (a Mexican snack comprising a fried, unleavened cornmeal pancake or tortilla filled with seasoned mincemeat, chicken, cheese, beans) gives taco-eater, taco-head and taco-bender. (A taco wagon is an automobile with the rear end ‘chopped’, i.e. lowered and seen as a Mexican creation.) The enchilada (literally ‘seasoned with chilli’, and in practice a tortilla served with a chilli-flavoured sauce) gives enchilada-eater; peppers in general lead to pepper, pepper-gut and (hot) pepper-belly; a hot-tamale (in culinary terms made of crushed Indian corn, flavoured with pieces of meat or chicken, red pepper, etc., wrapped in corn-husks and baked) is an attractive girl. Chilli is also used figuratively to mean second-rate (since Mexican) and thus gives a chili chump, chili pimp, chili-bowl pimp, chili-mac (no relation to pasta but from mack, a pimp and ultimately from the Dutch makelaar, a merchant), a pimp who has only one girl working for him or an inexperienced pimp. Such a pimp may be of any background, but the reference is to the supposed incompetence of small-time Mexica
n pimps.

  For a bird of such weighty stolidity, sitting stuffed and uncomplaining on so many Christmas and Thanksgiving tables, the turkey has a surprisingly confusing background. In the first place it suffers from a fundamental misnomer: it doesn’t come from Turkey. Its first appearance seems to have been as the Guinea-cock or Guinea-fowl, known to Greeks and Romans alike as meleagris. The reference to Guinea reflects the fact that the Portuguese began importing the bird from Guinea, in West Africa. The synonym turkey-cock appeared in the sixteenth century, and in turn underpinned the fact that Guinea, at that time, was under Turkish rule. The sixteenth century also saw, in 1518, the conquest of Mexico by Spain; among the booty the Spaniards enjoyed was the bird that would become known as the American turkey, and which had already been domesticated for some time. When Carl von Linné (1707–78), better known by his Latinised name Linnaeus, set about classifiying flora and fauna, he took the African name, Meleagris, and gave it to the Mexican bird. Its African cousin, a substantially smaller, slenderer creature, remained today’s Guinea-fowl.

  None of which has much bearing on the naming of the turkey around the world, but might cast a little light on what otherwise appears a rather confused system. The English turkey itself sets the pattern, leading generations into the erroneous belief that the bird began life in the eastern Mediterranean. France’s cant term Jesuite refers to the original importers of the bird: Jesuit missionaries. The majority of other names attach it to ‘India’, or perhaps (with a little more accuracy) ‘the (West) Indies’, which might just about stretch to Mexico. Thus the French coq-d’Inde or dindon, the German Indischer Hahn, the Italian gallo d’India and the Greek indianos, which can also mean ‘Red’ Indian. The same ‘Indian’ image persists in Arabic and in Turkish itself, where the bird is dajaj Hindi. Both Dutch and Germans underline the theory with Kalkoen and Calecutischer Hahn (the ‘Calcutta hen’). Indeed, the eighteenth-century Italian traveller Padre Paolino believed that Calcutta, or Calicut as it then was, meant ‘Castle of the Fowls’. Back in the States Native Americans, in the eighteenth century, referred to turkey (and venison) as a White man’s dish.