The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  The slang use of turkey, meaning a disaster or flop, emerged in American showbiz jargon in the 1920s, when it was cited in Variety magazine as ‘a third rate production’ and was known to professionals as a turkey show, a touring show, usually burlesque, mounted at a moment’s notice and staffed by a third-rate cast, even stage-struck amateurs. This bit of theatre jargon would seem to be the origin of the slightly later turkey: a stupid, slow, inept, or otherwise worthless person; in both cases the image is of a large, waddling creature, of no real worth. Turk, meaning an Irish immigrant (Greek was synonymous) was sometimes expanded to turkey. The synonymous saltwater-turkey underpinned the journey from Ireland, across the ‘saltwater’ Atlantic. Yet here again the turkey may be indicating a false trail. If one sense of turk, a low-class whore (with its synonym mahomet) and others focused on sex, notably anal sex, do seem lodged in the eastern Mediterranean, another, an unpleasant boor, may equally come from the Irish torc, a boar or hog. Food, yes, but meleagris, not at all.

  An unarguable Irish connection reappears in Irish turkey, meaning corned (UK: salt) beef and cabbage, a classic ‘Irish’ dish and one in which the image of poverty (as with various herring names) is deliberately contrasted with the presumed ‘luxury’ of eating turkey. Widely popularised via the US comic strip, ‘Jiggs and Maggie’ (properly Bringing Up Father, launched by George McManus in 1913) and sometimes known as a Jiggs dinner, the term is first recorded as one of the treats laid out in the ballad ‘Rafferty’s Party’, in the Donnybrook-Fair Comic Songster of 1863. The dish is also known facetiously as la bullie Hibernian (bullie as in French boullie, boiled, and sharing an origin with bully beef), pretentious menu French for a distinctly plebeian dish that is also known as an Irishman or simply a boiled dinner (a meal traditionally eaten on St Patrick’s Day). The Irish do no better out of Irish horse, which refers to tough, undercooked salt beef (especially as served to sailors) although that, in the gay lexicon, can also stand for an impotent penis. Junk, another nautical name for salt beef, means the genitals too though perhaps coincidentally. Only the Irish wager (or a buttock and trimmings), an eighteenth-century bet based on a rump of beef and a dozen bottles of claret, improves the national image. Normal service is resumed with chaw or chawbacon both of which mean variously a yokel, a peasant and an Irish immigrant. Finally banjo, an Australian coinage, refers both to the shovel wielded by so many of these immigrants (otherwise known as the Irish banjo and the idiot stick), and to a shoulder of mutton.

  Find a weak point and exploit it: this is slang’s mantra. The pig works as a problem-free food for millions. But not for all. Two of the three Peoples of the Book have chosen to avoid it. Whether this is based on the prevalence of pork-borne tapeworm in hot countries, or the anthropological theory that casts the pig as a ‘marginal’ animal, is still debated. Muslims, for whom the creature is also off the menu, seem to have avoided porcine labelling (if not the pigs’ heads tossed at mosques), but as for the Jews . . .

  ‘Let the goyim sink their teeth into whatever lowly creature crawls and grunts across the face of the dirty earth, we will not contaminate our humanity thus . . . Let them eat eels and frogs and pigs and crabs and lobsters; let them eat vulture, let them eat ape-meat and skunk if they like – a diet of abominable creatures well befits a breed of mankind so hopelessly shallow and empty-headed as to drink, to divorce and to fight with their fists . . . Thus saith the kosher laws, and whom am I to argue that they’re wrong.’ Thus also saith Philip Roth’s fictional Alexander Portnoy of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), and along with circumcision and a big nose, nothing defines the Jew like this abstention from pork. How could slang resist? As in the ‘jokes’ that term blacks snowballs, the charm is apparently in the opposition. The pig is the Hebrew’s enemy and pork and its other by-products Jew food, while the Jew himself is a porker, porky or pork-chopper. In the language of America’s short-order cooks, a sheeny’s funeral is roast pork. Sheeny being a Jew and possibly from the Yiddish shayner Yid. This term, meaning a pious (literally ‘beautiful-faced’) Jew was originally congratulatory, but as assimilation progressed, became used by the sophisticated to mock the new immigrants, still tied to their old-fashioned ways. The first half of the phrase, which the ‘uncultured’ Jews pronounced sheena rather than the more Germanic schön, was taken up by gentile Jew-baiters to create sheeny (and thus World War I soldier use: sheeny, a careful, extra-economical man).

  Beyond Jewry, where pork presents no further difficulties, the pig and its processing give smokey and smoked ham, for a Native American; pork-chop, for an African American and Pork and Beans, a term that means Portuguese, both from the approximate assonance and from the fact that during World War I this appeared to be their troops’ staple ration.

  Other than Scotland, otherwise known as haggisland, from the haggis (sheep or calf offal minced with suet and oatmeal, seasoned, and boiled like a large sausage in the maw of the animal) which is seen as a typically Scottish dish (although prior to 1800 it was equally popular south of the border), Britain, or rather England is the country of beef. France’s rosbif sums up the type, and the Dutch add Engelschgaar: the ‘English way’ when they mean undercooked or half-raw. The English have also been termed beefeaters (from as early as 1620), mixing the animal with the uniformed custodians of the Tower of London: the Yeomen of the Guard. These developed from the Beefeaters of the Guard, a name that referred, not especially kindly, to an earlier use of beefeater (or loafeater): a well-fed menial who earned his board and keep. Beefeater was even extended to describe a briefly fashionable woman’s hat, modelled on those worn by the Yeomen.

  Finally the East, which gives chow, meaning both food and a Chinese person and which comes from the Cantonese cha’ao: to fry. Thus Chowmeinland is China, referring to chow mein, the artificial dish concocted by America’s mid-nineteenth century Chinese immigrants as a sop to those unsophisticated Western palates who nonetheless wanted some ersatz Chinese food. Chop suey, which slang has adopted to mean a Chinese person or restaurant, is another piece of fakery. A dish of stir-fried meat and vegetables, created by Chinese chefs for their Western customers, it plays no part in any Asian cuisine, but was seen as adequate for the Western palate. The original Chinese is shapsuì, ‘mixed bits’. Irrespective of geography Jap hash, literally ‘Japanese food’ (hash originally meaning a mess or jumble), is in fact Chinese food while egg roll, still in the Eastern context, while ostensibly another form of Chinese food, refers to one of America’s most recent groups of Far Eastern immigrants, the Koreans.

  With a very few exceptions – black bean, a black person, nigger bean, a dark bean – beans primarily mean Mexican. Bean-eater and beaner have branded Mexican immigrants for a century. The same terms have been grafted onto the Cubans who have been appearing, in Florida rather than California or Texas, since the 1960s. Combinations with beaner give beaner shoes: huaraches, the typical Mexican sandals and beaner wagon: an old, dilapidated car seen as the basic form of immigrant transport. Frijole-guzzler, based on another Mexican dish, also means Mexican. The jargon of short-order cooking gives Mexican strawberries, reddish-coloured beans and the Mexican navy, as in the order ‘a bowl of fire and Mexican navy’: a plate of chilli and beans. Mexico notwithstanding, North America has its own bean-orientated enclave: Boston, Massachusetts. ‘Good old Boston,’ as John Bossidy’s nineteenth-century doggerel put it, ‘the home of the bean and the cod.’ Bostonians were also termed bean-eaters by 1800 while Boston itself is still known as Bean Town to American truckers. The one anomaly, though it blends two ‘poor/stupid’ stereotypes, is Irish nachos, fried potato wedges and (refried) beans (rather than the actual nachos: tortilla chips, cheese sauce and peppers).

  Cabbage-head, otherwise denoting a fool, referred to both the Dutch and the Germans in late-nineteenth-century America and like Bean Town, Cabbage Town meant the poor area; it could also mean that section inhabited mainly by German immigrants. A cabbage-eater refers both to a German and a Russian.

  Nigger-t
oe means a potato in America, and french fries refer to the Québecois in Canada. Freedom fries, that jingoistic coinage that followed France’s refusal in 2003 to lockstep after the US into Iraq, has no stated national slur, but the implication is unmistakeable: ‘our’ freedom is in being anything but ‘old Europe’. The term, predictably, is still to be found amongst the core Trump demographic.

  Germans love cabbage and sausages and get credit for both, but they also love potatoes and that seems to have eluded anglophone slang, although there are terms that equate German and ‘potato-eater’ in Poland, Italy, Russia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, Portugal and Holland. In English, however, the potato-eater is strictly Irish. And while the German delight in the vegetable seems to be linked simply to their gargantuan appetite for the tubers, Ireland’s link, as in so many other areas, is based on a sneer at peasant stupidity and poverty as much as at the actual food. Thus the snobbish usages Irish lemons, grapes and apples and Irish fruit in general (plus the Irish root and the inedible Irish football) all of which refer to the potato. So too does the Irish apricot, occasioning Francis Grose’s remark in 1785 that ‘It is a common joke against the Irish vessels to say that they are loaded with fruit and timber, that is potatoes and broomsticks.’ The Irish cherry, another fraudulent ‘fruit’ is in fact a carrot. Similar terms include bog-oranges and Munster plums (Munster being an Irish county). Navigators (and the rhyming slang navigator scot: potatoes all hot) refer to the job undertaken by many mid-nineteenth-century Irish immigrants to Britain, that of a ‘navigator’ (and thus the slang navvy): a labourer on Victorian Britain’s railways and canals. Contemporary life was further indicated in home-rulers, baked potatoes cooked and sold in the street, which emerged during the late nineteenth century, a period marked by Sinn Fein’s agitation for Irish Home Rule. That agitation also provided a Fenian, threepenny-worth of whisky and water, a pun on ‘three cold Irish’, that’s ‘cold’ as in dead and referred to the hanging of one of two sets of Fenians, i.e. fighters for Irish independence: either the ‘Manchester Murderers’ of 1867 or those who carried out their killings in Phoenix Park, Dublin in 1882.

  Spud, a popular nickname for a potato, was also one for an Irishman (the spuddy, a seller of bad potatoes in nineteenth-century London, possibly combined both) as was Murphy, which started with the person and moved on to the vegetable. Finally, predictably, comes potato-head. A potato-fingered Irishman is clumsy and maladroit and may be linked to the plain potato, used of a severely disabled individual, though the link here is possibly based on the similarly dismissive use of vegetable. Potato itself has been used in Canada of a native of New Brunswick: the province grows many potatoes; the implication is one of rural stolidness and stupidity and in New Zealand to sneer at Polynesians, seen as being ‘brown on the outside but white on the inside’.

  Vegetable, as noted, can be cruel, but it is not nationalistic and veggies play a minor role in this variety of slang. Spinach, at least in America, refers to a Spaniard. Being the Welsh national emblem, a leek has meant a Welshman since 1695 and to wear the leek means to be Welsh. America’s Indian turnip, also known as a Jack-in-the-pulpit, is a tuber which, when eaten raw, is burn-ingly pungent; just as ‘red’ Indians supposedly hid their true nature from the white man so the tuber hides its sharpness from its eater. A Jerusalem or ‘Jewish’ artichoke (also known as a Jerusalem potato) is a jewboy, although the slur is totally misdirected on both counts. The ‘Jerusalem’ is a perversion of Girasole Articiocco or Sunflower Artichoke. First cultivated in the Farnese garden in Rome, it began its spread around Europe in the early seventeenth century.

  The Jew’s ear is a form of edible fungus growing on wood and the Scotch bonnet is better known either as the ‘fairy-ring’ mushroom or a particularly hot chilli pepper (it supposedly resembles a tam o’ shanter; Guyana’s nickname ‘ball of fire’ is more to the point). A nigger killer is a yam (at least c.1895), whether from the resemblance of some varieties of yam to a club (which slang also terms a nigger killer) or to its sheer stodginess which might choke an eater to death, while an eggplant (or aubergine) is another name for African-American, a reference to the vegetable’s black-purple, shiny skin. A synonym molonjohn, often found as Moulie, used by Italians of blacks, presumably comes from the Italian melanzana: an eggplant. An eggplant can also be a Jew’s apple. Last of these vegetable terms are the Australian vegetable John, a Chinese greengrocer, of whom there were many prior to World War II, and a Dutch grocery is an ill-kept, run-down, third-rate grocery although given the usual Dutch reputation for financial acumen and a devotion to cleanliness, this seems paradoxical (it is, perhaps, another example of Dutch actually meaning Deutsch: German).

  Three fruits stand out as far as racial references are concerned: the pomegranate, the lime and the banana. Pommy, or in its most popular combination pommy bastard, is widely known to mean a British immigrant (or indeed visitor) to Australia. It is equally widely accepted that pommy is an abbreviation of pomegranate (itself from the Old French pommegrenate: the seed-filled apple). From there on the problems begin and no one seems properly to know why the term was adopted. The most popular assumption is that pomegranate ‘rhymes’ with immigrant, as does another once-popular nickname, jimmygrant, and certainly there are many citations of young people, now old, recalling shouting ‘Pommygrant’ after still pallid Britons, newly arrived from what, of course, was known as Pommyland. Certainly W.S. Ramson, editor of the Australian National Dictionary (1988), backs up this interpretation. Henry Lawson, one of the country’s best-known writers, had his own take, offered in a short story of 1921: ‘An’ the Pommy he says “Pom-me-word” [i.e. ’pon my word] – and that’s how I think Pommies got their name.’ Or perhaps not. A further suggestion is that it began life as pome, an acronym for Prisoner Of Mother England, but like so many concocted acronyms, designed to provide a neat etymology, this seems unlikely.

  The pome theory is further undermined by chronology: transportation to Australia had officially ended in 1868 (it had effectively ceased in the 1850s) but there are no recorded citations for pommy before 1900 where it serves as the title of a play. The ever-popular compound pommy bastard appeared in 1915 and whingeing pommy or whingeing pom, an allusion to what other Australians see as one of the primary characteristics of the newly arrived British (the other being a seeming reluctance to shower), in 1962.

  Lime juice, long recognised as a prophylactic against scurvy or vitamin C deficiency, was doled out to sailors who might otherwise have been struck down on the long voyages of the age of sail. Among them were those whose ships went from Britain to such colonies as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and this intake of limes gave rise to the nickname limey, first for the sailors and gradually for all Britons. It began in 1851 as lime-juicer, which meant both the sailor and his vessel, and the abbreviation followed around 1910. Lime-juicer could also mean a British immigrant to the US or Australia. Synonyms included lime-juice, lemon-eater and lemon-sucker and for a while Limeyland, in Australia, referred to the ‘mother country’.

  As for bananas, this fruit touches equally on the inhabitants of Queensland, Australia and Natal, South Africa. Thus banana-men, banana-benders and bananaskins are all Queenslanders. Bananaland is Queensland (and a Bananalander a native of the state), and Banana City is Brisbane, the state capital. At the same time Bananaland can mean Durban, capital of Natal, while bananalander or banana-boy refers to a resident or native of Natal as well as one of Queensland. A banana peddler, however, is American, and referred to an Italian immigrant.

  Still in Africa, if figuratively, an African grape is that most clichéd of foods, the watermelon, supposedly the African-American favourite, also known as a nigger special. A raisin can be a black person, perhaps a reference to the 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun by Loraine Hansberry (1930–65) though that puns on ‘raisin’ ’, i.e. growing up, while a Jew plum is properly known as an otaheite apple, which, while its flesh is edible, has rind that tastes like turpentine. Pineapple
, with little originality, refers in America to a Pacific Islander, while in New Zealand these same islanders are coconuts, another play on the ‘brown outside, white within’ trope.

  Bread means an Afro-American while one of the many definitions for negro- or nigger-head (both sailors’ terms) is a loaf of brown bread. A bagel or bagel-bender refers to the doughnut-shaped bread popular among Jews and logically means a Jew, as does motza, the unleavened Passover biscuits, which can also mean money. Lox, or smoked salmon, the ‘automatic’ accompaniment to bagels (and cream cheese) gives lox jock, another synonym for Jew. Bagel has another meaning in South Africa where it denotes a spoilt, wealthy, upper-class young man; his female equivalent is a kugel, the Yiddish for cake. Although such young people were originally (and mainly still are) Jewish, there are equivalents – at least among the girls – in the Black community (ebony-kugels) and among the Afrikaaners (boerekugels). The jargon they speak is kugelese. (Slightly distanced from food, but definitely related to the kugel is the JAP or Jewish American Princess, sisters, as it were, under the sun.) An Italian hero is a large sandwich (whether the distinctly phallic look of such snacks, usually in a long roll, reflects on Italian masculinity is debatable), while in the pidgin of Papua New Guinea bretskin or ‘bread skin’ is used by country people to describe someone from the capital, Port Moresby, who eats more bread than is felt to be necessary and is thus seen as self-indulgent, fat and lazy by his country cousins.