Despite the wide variety of sweets there is, at least in the racial lexicon, only one major brand: the dark one. Thus America’s licorice and licorice-stick (and France’s jus de rélisse: licorice juice) which refer to a Black person. Thus too America’s brown sugar, as memorialised in the Rolling Stones’ song title, and toffee or taffy. Like brown sugar, most ‘sweet’ terms tend to the sexual, thus chocolate, chokker, choco, chocolate drop, hot chocolate, sweet chocolate, chocolate-bar, chocolate-chip, all of which refer to Black girls, who are doubtless seen as ‘good enough to eat’. Specific brand-names – Hershey-Bar and Tootsie-Roll (both best-selling American chocolate-based sweets) – underpin the image.
The fact that chocolate, like rum, sugar, tobacco, coffee and cocoa, was at one time the product of Black slave labour, only points up the ironies. Advertising furthered the image: a brand named ‘Assorted Chocolates’ was adorned by a picture of a couple of ‘cute’ Black girls, while in Germany a variety of chocolate cake termed itself ‘the edible negro’. In an American book of comic stories entitled Chocolate Drops from the South (1932) its author, Edward V. White, asserted that America’s ‘greatest source of laughter and good humor’ was her Blacks. For ‘he looks funny, he acts funny, he is funny. Moreover, he is serious about it all.’ White, presumably, would have lauded the term nigger spit, another way of describing lumps in cane sugar. Other sweets, such as Canada’s eskimo or South Africa’s eskimo pie – both meaning what in Britain is termed a ‘choc-ice’ – refer to the Inuit, for whom the name Eskimo, it should be recalled, means those who eat their meat raw – hardly an especially ‘sweet’ concept.
One anomaly in this toothsome list is the Mexican jelly bean. No sweet this, but a vintage Chevrolet lowered in the rear and fitted with a Mexican window shade (a Venetian blind) in the rear window. Not strictly a sweet, the peanut is best noted here. Peanut itself meant a black person; the obvious link is to the growing of peanuts in the south, and to the black agronomist George Washington Carver, whose introduction of peanuts and sweet potatoes essentially saved the southern economy. However, peanut can also mean a person of small value, and relates to such cognate terms for black as dink and jit. Dink itself, which was also used by US troops to describe the Vietnamese, is an abbreviation of the slang rinky-dink: worthless, second-rate. Another ‘peanut’ image is that of goober-grabber, used as a catch-all term for the south. The word goober, widely used for peanut, probably comes from the Congolese nguba: a type of peanut. As for jit, it is an abbrevation of the slang term jitney, meaning five cents; the black person is equated with the low-value coin.
Like sweets, what one might term ‘national’ desserts also seem to have a bias towards the Black. Thus the American niggers in a snow-storm: stewed prunes and rice, and the cowboys’ favourite nigger-in-a-blanket: a dish made of raisins in dough. Prunes by themselves refer to a black person or to a black head, and nigger-toes are brazil nuts. The French phrase Anglais á prunes refers less to a dish than to a characteristic: meanness. (Prunes translates strictly as ‘plums’.) To the amusement of the French, the English – careful, penny-pinching travellers – note the highly priced fruit in restaurants and ask instead for a handful of (cheap) plums as their dessert. This image of parsimony persists elsewhere: faire une anglaise: to do it English style, refers to the practice of tossing coins to decide on who is to pay for a round of drinks, or to divide the bill (like impecunious students) in exactly equal portions. French cabbies talk of Anglais de carton: a mean (English) tipper.
There is more to dessert than prunes or plums. The Scots call their English neighbours pock-pudding or poke-pudding, which is a synonym for bag-pudding (from the Scots poke: a small bag or sack and thus any pudding boiled, like a Christmas pudding, in a bag), while in Canada French Canadians are mocked as johnny-cakes, a term that can be found in a doggerel verse, popular amongst Montreal children around 1900: ‘French peasoup and johnnycake / Make your father a bellyache.’ The cake, which exists in Canada, America, the West Indies and Australia and which is made of maize or wheat-meal and either toasted at a fire or baked in a pan, may be of black origin; the ‘Johnny’ may also be a red herring: some authorities claim that its original form was ‘journey-cake’ and, given its basic ingredients and the simplicity of its cooking, this may well be true. A French pancake is not, alas, a crêpe, but is in fact a rectangular academic hat or a beret.
Dairy products in language as well as the marketplace typify the Dutch. Thus Britain’s butter-mouth (1547), butter-box (1600) and butterbag (1645) all meant a Dutchman, on account of the vast quantities of dairy products consumed and produced in Holland. A Dutch cheese is a bald person, as is the South African cheesehead or, in Afrikaans, kaaskop. A limburger, the very smelly yet paradoxically bland cheese is a German (although the cheese is a Belgian speciality). Still with butter, there are a number of African-American terms, notably butter baby or melted butter, both of which mean a mulatto ‘yellow’ girl; butterhead: a Black who, for whatever reason, is considered an embarrassment to his race. Last in the butter stakes comes Jew butter, which is not actual butter, but goose grease, the equivalent of dripping and a popular spread on bread. The Jews’ own term for such a spread is schmaltz, literally ‘fat’, and which, while devoid of racial overtones, can be found as a pejorative itself, implying excessive and mawkish sentimentality, especially in the world of show business.
With a few exceptions, words based on grease refer exclusively to the unfortunate Mexicans. British service slang adds gippo, gippy and gypoo which can mean variously stew, gravy, bacon fat, butter or any form of greasy sauce. Quite why the gypsies should be, as it were, smeared with the term is unexplained, but it may come from the simultaneous World War I use of Gyppo to mean an Egyptian, a race who, being Middle Eastern, might, in the way of such slurs, be presumed to be greasy. From there on the focus is strictly on Mexico. Aside from frito, meaning fried and itself emphasising the Mexican love of fried food, and oiler, which refers to the cooking rather than the commercial liquid, Mexicans have been greasers – supposedly from their ‘greasy’ appearance – since the 1840s. Similar terms include greaseball, which has also been used for a Greek, just as greaser can occasionally denote an Italian, grease-gut and grease-boy.
Rice, being the staple it is, means Chinese or Oriental, especially as ricer, rice-belly, rice-eater and riceman. A rice queen, in gay use, favours Easterners as lovers, while the recent rice rocket refers in America to a Japanese-made off-road or four-wheel-drive vehicle. Less common is rice Christian, which from the 1890s to the 1930s described those inhabitants of rice-growing countries who volunteered for conversion less through religious fervour and more through a desire to obtain food from gullible missionaries. Sago, a form of starch prepared from the pith of various palm trees, and much used as a food in the Pacific, is found in Australia as a slur on the natives of the Pacific Islands.
Buckwheat, a species of Polygonum (P. Fagopyrum) and a native of Central Asia, whence it was introduced into Europe by the Turks in about the thirteenth century, is used in Europe as food for horses, cattle and poultry; in North America, however, its meal is made into buckwheat cakes, regarded as a dainty for the breakfast table. In slang it also means a black person, either another play on the Black/White jokes that produce ‘lilywhite’ and ‘snowball’, but possibly an acknowledgement of ‘Buckwheat’ Thomas, the black actor in the ‘Our Gang’ Saturday morning movie series of the 1930s. Wheatfolks, an occasional name for White Americans, appears to link in to buckwheat, as well as punning on the common description ‘white folks’.
Unlike the majority of these terms, which identify the properties of a given food or drink with the perceived deficiencies of a given nation, the bulk of terms that deal with tea and coffee seem more preoccupied with the drinks themselves. Thus, other than pepsi, which in Canada pokes fun at the French Canadians’ alleged propensity for the fizzy drink, cocoa, meaning a black person and black teapot, which referred to the black servants who were once the fas
hion accessory in any smart European household, the rest seem to deal with intrinsic quality – or lack of it.
English winter and cold English are both iced tea, although the American phrases, albeit subconsciously, underpin the British reputation for sang-froid; an English martini is tea spiked with gin. Scotch coffee is not coffee, but hot water flavoured with burnt biscuit, while Negro coffee is coffee senna. Indian coffee, a ‘Wild West’ coinage, is coffee made from old grounds; the derisive assumption was that such coffee was all an Indian deserved. Cowboy coffee, on the other hand, was properly brewed. Brazil-water, another term for coffee, sounds a little better (especially given Brazil’s much touted reputation for the stuff), but the construction probably does no more than reflect such phrases as scandal-water, which to the eighteenth century meant tea. In mainstream use Brazil water was in fact the reddish dye extracted from the local species of the Sappan tree, native to eastern India. Indeed it is this dye that gave its name to the entire country, which was originally named terra de brasil: red-dye land. Why the dye itself was termed ‘brasil’ remains conjectural. It may come from the French briser, to break (since the wood tended to crumble on its voyage to Europe), from the Spanish brasa: a glowing coal (indicating its colour) or even from the Arabic wars: saffron.
Utensils do not figure highly in these lists, but there are a few noteworthy terms. A stove-lid is an African American, as is a skillet (otherwise a large stew-pan, often made of cast-iron); a skillet blonde is a Black woman in a blonde wig. The Japanese knife trick is the use of one’s knife to convey food to the mouth, presumably reflecting on the obtuse ‘trickiness’ of any Oriental, as well as on the fact that the Japanese do not customarily use Western knives and forks. A Spanish spoon is either a long-handled dipper or narrow shovel, while a Spanish toothpick is a nickname for Bishop’s-Weed or Ammiviznaga, a form of ‘hot’ herb. Straying briefly to Papua New Guinea the North Solomon Islanders, who generally play the role of the Irish in Britain and the Poles in America, are known in Tok Pisin as blak sospen, a black saucepan (from the darker tone of their skin) and are further insulted by the phrase as bilong sospen, literally ‘your arse belongs in a saucepan’, which carries a dual meaning; on the one hand ‘your skin is so black it looks burnt’ or ‘you are such an appalling person that you deserve to be tossed into a cannibal cooking pot’.
The American term joint, which began life in the mid-nineteenth century as a cant term, meaning a place where criminals could get together or ‘joint up’ and later as an opium den, before becoming more generally a room or place, gives Chink joint (a Chinese restaurant). In England both Chinese and Indian mean the restaurant and the meals it serves, thus the common ‘Let’s get an Indian’. However chinois, in France, means no more than a cafeteria, irrespective of the menu. The Afro-American equivalent is a nigger joint (a cheap, low-class café, and thus one frequented by poor blacks). Synonymous are nigger juke or jook, both of which incorporate the term juke (also found in jukebox) which means variously the cheap, raucous music played at similarly inclined roadhouses, cafés and brothels (and which give the term juke it: to play piano in a cheap bar or brothel), to dance, to have a good time and to have sex. From there it came to mean any building used for drinking, dancing and generally enjoying oneself. The origins of juke are debatable but may lie in Africa – in the Bantu juka or Wolof dzug – or possibly Scotland, where a jouk is a place into which one may dart for shelter. It is in such a café that the patrons eat blackplate, a synonym for soul food and, as such, traditionally black dishes. Blackplate puns on the mainstream blueplate, usually as ‘blueplate special’, coined during World War II, which refers either to a restaurant dinner plate divided into compartments for serving several kinds of food as a single order, or a main course (as of meat and vegetables) served as a single menu item.
Other restaurants include America’s wophouse, which uses wop, Italian to pun on flophouse: the lowest level of transient hotel used by vagrants and tramps, and Australia’s steakdahoyst or steaka-da-oyst, mocking Italian speech patterns to describe an Italian restaurant specialising in steak and oysters. In Australia, a Greek is known as a grill, from the number of immigrant Greeks who run cheap cafés specialising in mixed grills, while in America a Greek hash-house is a lunch-stand. This last gives what is called hash-house Greek, a reference not so much to the café’s owner, but to Greek in the same sense as it has been used since the sixteenth century: an unintelligible jargon, in this case that of short-order cookery. Such jargon includes slaughter in the pan: beefsteak, red mike with a bunch o’ violets: corned beef and cabbage, two of a kind: fishballs and Adam and Eve on a raft and wreck ’em: scrambled eggs on toast.
When it comes to gluttony, and for a people so heavily identified with food, the French themselves get off rather lightly. Perhaps the rest of the world has swallowed their propaganda: France remains synonymous with good food. But not invariably: there is Frankish fare, meaning excessive or over-generous amounts of food. The Dutch, seen as undiscriminating if enthusiastic trenchermen are credited with a Dutch palate: a coarse palate, with no appreciation of the finer comestibles, while their South African cousins, the Boers, talk of a Kaffir’s tightener to mean a heavy meal, which, despite the reference implicit in kaffir, could hardly have been an exclusively black phenomenon. (The slang term tightener itself had been coined, with no racial overtones c.1850, and do a tightener meant to gorge oneself.)
From excess to deprivation, and starvation gives as many ‘national’ words as does gluttony. Typical are a variety of notional ‘meals’, the point of which is that there is no meal whatsoever. To show slang’s affection for the joke, there are some ‘occupational’ breakfasts as well.
Thus America’s Mexican breakfast or Australia’s Pommy’s breakfast, both of which entail no more than a cigarette and a glass of water. With an accent on the outback or the ‘never-never’, Australia also offers the dingo’s breakfast: ‘a piss and a look around’, and a drover’s breakfast in which a cough is substituted for the passing of water. Other starvation breakfasts include the Norfolk breakfast, the seagull’s breakfast and the duck’s breakfast. The rabbiter’s breakfast involves smoking a cigarette while defecating and the bullocky’s breakfast follows a similar ritual, but without the cigarette: after the lavatory one merely tightens the belt. The bushman’s breakfast has, if nothing else, a variety of choices: these are ‘a shave and a spit (or shit) and a good look around’, a ‘hitch in the belt and attention to natural requirements’ and a ‘drink of water and a good look around’.
The ‘Pommies’ have their alternatives too, a vegetable breakfast and a Spitalfields breakfast, both of which refer to judicial hanging. The Spitalfields meal is a ‘tight necktie and a short (wind) pipe’ while the ‘vegetable’ in question is an ‘artichoke (hearty choke) with caper sauce’. (The sheriff’s breakfast, again ‘eaten’ on the gallows, has the same definition). An Irish or Irishman’s dinner is no dinner at all, a phrase that emerged in America and was reinforced by immigrant memories of the deadly famine of 1845–6, although a modern joke describes such a dinner as ‘a boiled potato and a six-pack of beer’. The slightly longer have an Irishman’s dinner is to be forced to forgo an expected meal.
Finally, there are some slang breakfasts that offer something (though not always solid) to chew on. There is the Cockney breakfast, no food, but a glass (or more) of gin or brandy and soda water; the California breakfast, a cocktail and a shoeshine, the jockey’s breakfast, an Irish treat defined as ‘a rasher and a ride’, in other words sexual intercourse and a slice of bacon. Best of all must be the Kentucky breakfast, so named for its being the supposed favourite breakfast of the classic ‘Southern gentleman’. Popularly defined as ‘three cocktails and a chew of terbacker’, one may substitute whiskies for the cocktails. A further variation is ‘a bottle of bourbon, a three-pound steak and a setter dog or bull-dog.’ Why, one may ask, the dog? It’s there to eat the steak. Slightly off-topic, but surely linked, is the Burketown mosqu
ito net. Based on the outback town of Burketown, Queensland it means the day’s final relaxation: a bottle of rum and a cow-dung fire.
The Spanish, perhaps on the grounds of their much-celebrated pride, seem to volunteer starvation – echoing those who claim that one can never be too rich nor too thin. Thus to take a Spanish supper is to tighten one’s belt rather than actually offset one’s hunger with food (thus France’s un ventre à l’espagnol, ‘a Spanish belly’, is one that is swollen, but only from starvation.) To pursue the motif of emaciation, African Americans have termed Whites the thin people while they in turn have been called bones, although this presumably refers to the ‘Mr Bones’ character, once a staple of ‘black’ cross-talk vaudeville acts between ‘Mr Bones’ and ‘Mr Jones’. (The original ‘Mr’ or ‘Brudder Bones’ played in minstrel shows on the castanet-like ‘bones’ that were a feature of such entertainment.)
The appetite must be satisfied. There are gourmands and there are gourmets (supposedly different – the former gluttons, the latter culinary aesthetes – but the French, who should know, use them interchangeably). Then there are geophages. Geophagy, literally earth-eating, has been found in various parts of the globe, typically Tierra del Fuego, but as these terms indicate, it has also cropped up in the so-called ‘civilised’ West, specifically the poorer states of America. Thus clay-eater means a poor white, especially a native of North or South Carolina or Georgia; a synonym is grit-sucker, while clover-eater, substituting grass for earth, is a nickname for a Virginian. Similar are rosin-chewer and hay-eater. Equally strange is an appetite for wax, found in the American candle-eater, meaning a Russian. This, however, may not be quite as bizarre as it appears. The candles that the Russians ‘eat’ may well be a simple reference to the burning of candles in Russian Orthodox churches.
The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human Page 20