Slang’s shelves are weighed down with tempting bottles, but we can’t open them all. Reluctantly, we must pass over beer, whisky and wine, but of all the major liquors, gin might be said to the most innately slangy. Like modern-day drugs, gin in its eighteenth-century heyday was not just a drink, but a whole culture, closely knit to degeneracy, excess, poverty and the moral panics that the fantasies about such things tend to create. It was not simply mother’s ruin (a term that for all Hogarth’s celebrated drawing of Gin Lane, with its gin-soaked mother blearily watching her baby tumble from her arms, is not recorded before 1917) but badged as the collapse of an entire society. Its drinkers were as addicted as junkies.
Queen Gin: Oh! what is this that runs so cold about me?
A dram!—a dram!—a large one or I die.
’Tis vain [drinks hastily]
O, O, Farewell [dies]
Mob: What, dead drunk or dead in earnest?
Finale of The Deposing of Queen Gin, with the Ruin of the
Duke of Rum, Marquee de Nantz and the Lord Sugarcane,
&c. by Jack Juniper
Those were the days, eh? Gin in parliament (with a much-reviled act which engendered those lines; nantz by the way being brandy, from Nantes), gin on stage, gin in ballads, gin in the press and of course gin in Hogarth’s Gin Lane – the one with the poxed drab, the falling baby, the skeletal lush, the collapsing house, the run-down pawnbrokers and similar snapshots of Merrie England. And gin wasn’t even gin. Not as mixed with tonic at the cockers-p. or as turns up in your over-priced ‘Shove-Me-Up-Against-the-Wall-Rip-My-Clothes-Off-Sod-That-You’re-Too-Pissed-to-Get-It-Up’ down Ayia Napa. No. Gin was genever, which was Dutch for juniper and thus en-slanged as Hollands or the Dutch drop or Geneva (even if that is in France) and a heavy drinker was taking his drops or reading Geneva print.
Nor was that all. Far from it. It was Old Tom which memorialised Thomas Norris, who was employed at Hodges’ distillery and who opened a gin palace in Great Russell Street, Covent Garden. It was daffy, not because that was its effect (though it was) but from Daffy’s Elixir which was otherwise a proprietary remedy popularly merchandised as ‘the soothing syrup’. It could also be duffy, which also stood for a quarter-pint measure, or it was deady, again nodding to its effects, but this time from a distiller, one D. Deady of Sol’s Row off Tottenham Court Road. Tom and Jerry, in Life in London, went East to debauch at All Max, which not only punned on the West End’s fashionable Almacks but played with max or old max, which meant gin. A max-ken sold the stuff and the drunken clientele were maxy.
It was transparent; it came in colours: blue or white; some saw it as a form of textile. The first led to brilliant, which was raw and undiluted (raw was another name), and clear crystal and thence flash or strike of lightning or thunder and lightning (which added bitters, but came also to mean treacle and clotted cream and the flaming brandy that decks the Christmas pudding) and strikefire.
Transparency gave see-through which moved on to whiteness, and asking for white port or white wine in the wrong tavern might not get what you expected. The ‘port’ and ‘wine’ were meant to be euphemisms, so was the later twankay or twankey which in tea-trade jargon meant green tea. It might lie behind the name of pantomime dame Widow Twankey who first appeared in Aladdin in 1861, portraying the hero’s mother and running a Chinese laundry in what was still called Peking. Bunter’s tea referred to the bunter, a run-down old whore or a female rag-scavenger.
It could be true blue or light blue and a century on bluestone which in standard English means copper sulphate or even sulphuric acid. The textiles suggested smoothness and were coloured as well: blue or white ribbin, i.e. ribbon, which played on the earlier blue or white tape (which might have been underpinned by taphouse) which could also be red tape (though ‘red’ in drinks was usually brandy), and white velvet or satin (later appropriated by Sir Robert Burnett as a trade name). A yard of satin or of tape was a glassful. The main blue was blue ruin, which had the same effect on mother, though another synonym was mother’s milk, as were cold cream and cream of the valley.
Less appealing was rag water, so called as Captain Grose explained because ‘these [are] liquors seldom failing to reduce those that drink them to rags’. Not that one might always boast even a rag: stark- or staff-naked suggested raw alcohol, ‘unclothed’ in congeners or mixers, not to mention the poverty of its drinkers. Strip-me-down-naked was synonymous. Some saw it as a universal panacea: meat-drink-washing-and-lodging.
The effects provide a regular flow of imagery: busthead, crank (which mixed gin with water and ‘cranked you up’), kick in the guts, roll-me-in-the-kennel (a kennel being a gutter), gunpowder (you head ‘went off with a bang’), heartsease, kill-grief (but also kill-cobbler which suggests a professional propensity), tittery, which in dialect meant tottering along on the verge of collapse, and wind which ‘caught your breath’. Diddle was another one that meant unsteadiness, and the diddle-cove or -spinner was the landlord of a diddle-ken. Then there was the simply uncompromising: ruin, misery or poverty, though royal poverty suggested that at least for a while you would ‘feel like a king’. Much later came South Africa’s Queen’s tears, a Zulu term back-referring to the tears Queen Victoria supposedly shed after her troops’ defeat at Isandhlwana in 1879.
As in the martini (not to mention the camp if defunct English martini wherein tea is mixed with gin), gin works as an ingredient. There’s the dog’s nose (like the animal’s nose, the drink is black): beer warmed nearly to boiling, sugar, ginger and gin or wormwood (the basis of absinthe); absent wormwood, substitute brandy. It also referred to an alcoholic whose preferred tipple is whisky. Another gin-and-wormwood combo was purl (possibly linked to standard purl, a rill or whirl of water) which used the dog’s nose ingredients plus sugar and ginger. It was a popular morning pick-me-up and a cut-down version, early purl simply heated beer with gin. So popular was the combination that there were purl-shops, specialising in the drink, which were run by purl-men.
Gin and beer could also be huckle-my-buff or -butt which uses dialect’s huckle, to jog along, thus making it literally ‘jog my skin’ or ‘my buttocks’. Sometimes eggs and brandy were included (though the gin was then left out). Piss quick – either from its resemblance to urine or the fact that it made the drinker do exactly what its name suggested – is gin mixed with marmalade topped up with boiling water. Twist blends brandy and gin.
Ever-popular was hot, described by George Parker in his London guide Life’s Painter of Variegated Characters in Public and Private Life (1789) as ‘a mixed kind of liquor, of beer and gin, with egg, sugar and nutmeg’. He added that it was ‘drank mostly in night-houses, but when drank in a morning, it is called flannel’. Like the material flannel ‘kept you warm’ and if you were wrapt in warm flannel you’d had too much. An older name, which underpinned flannel, had been lambswool. And for the really desperate, there was alls, which came either from all nations, as in ‘flags of . . .’, or more basically ‘all the leftovers’. (Up the market Victorian wine merchants talked of omnes, Latin for ‘all’, the odds and ends of various wines.) Either way it consisted of the dregs collected from the overflow from the pouring taps, the ends of spirit bottles and similar leavings; it was sold cheap in gin shops where female customers, misogynists claimed, were particular devotees.
A cocktail composed of gin and ice, with a little sugar and a trace of water was a monkey-chaser; a steel bottom (perhaps from the need for such a lining to one’s stomach to drink such a thing) was a cocktail of gin and wine; mahogany, from the colour, blended either gin and treacle or brandy and water; finally bitter-gatter mixed beer (gatter, from Romani gatter, water) and gin.
By 1736 the gin craze, boosted by unlicensed production and heavy duties on imported spirits, proved too much: Parliament passed the Gin Act, adding high taxes to what had been a poor man’s tipple. The drinkers rioted. The tax was removed in 1742 but the spirit was in decline. Further legislation in 1751, which limited sales, was
a law too far.
‘Ye link and shoe boys clubb a tear,
Ye basket-women join;
Grubb-street, pour forth a stream of brine,
Ye porters hang your heads and pine;
All, all are damn’d to rot-gut beer.’
Timothy Scrub ‘Desolation, or, The Fall of Gin’ 1736
Now for something not really all that different. The tone is lowered, refinement a far-off chimera. Let us talk slang’s tipple of choice, the blue, the blushful cru argotois, let us talk meths. In formal terms, denatured alcohol, or ethanol with unpleasant additives that in theory, but theory remains a good way from practice, stop you knocking it back.
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim.
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen.
This is taken from Keats’ ‘Ode to Nightingale’. Seemingly irrelevant but the poet got two things spot-on: the geography and, or nearly, the colour. Because while the chilly north, i.e. the UK, seems reticent in its naming of this ethanol/methanol mix, the warm and Southern lands of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are far more creative. And denatured alcohol, thanks to those nasty extras, is very often purple, or at least a variety of muted violet.
It can be very simple: the simple meths itself, otherwise found as meth (not to be confused with über-speed methedrine) and metha. But, and perhaps here we owe something to its effects, there are other possibilities. The slang lexicon has swallowed the lot.
Australasia’s contribution is marked upon its own map. There is bush champagne, defined as a pannikin of methylated spirits mixed with river water and a spoonful of sal volatile (the latter being better known as smelling salts). An alternative is the similarly constituted Northern Territory champagne. The salts give it that larky fizz. There is bidgee, from the Murrumbidgee River, and presumably those drunkards who frequent its banks, and the urban Fitzroy cocktail, celebrating a suburb of Melbourne. Decant methylated spirits as preferred, and add some form of mixer to mediate the taste. Meths could also be round the world for a dollar, with alternative prices listed as threepence, fourpence or ninepence. In all cases the ‘trip’ was provoked by meths, or a very cheap but almost equally potent wine.
Other terms from the lucky country have included Jessie’s Dream and Johnny Gee. Jessie is lost to etymologists but generic Johnny is seen as ‘gee-ing up’ the drinker. So too does jump-about. Then there has been fix bayonets, a New Zealand term from World War I, a meths and orange juice mix used as a form of Dutch courage; lunatic soup or broth (which also denotes cheap red wine); World War II’s fong or fong-eye, underpinned perhaps by Australia’s ongoing terror of the so-called Yellow Peril. Goom is attributed to the Jagara language of Queensland, in which goom, less intoxicatingly, means simply water; bombo, which can be meths or cheap wine or a combination of the two, ‘knocks one out’. Atom-bombo, of the late 1940s, simply puns on the drink and the recently empowered weapon. The white lady, otherwise a cocktail composed of two parts of dry gin, one of orange liqueur and one of lemon juice, can also, context permitting, be plain meths as well. Steam is another meths-and-wine cocktail, while steamboats rejects the wine and adds tea – Chinese, Indian or even Australia’s own post-and-rail – to the ethanol base.
South Africa’s standout term is vlam, from the Afrikaans for flame, but there are a variety of others: ai-ai (a mispronunciation of ‘A.A.’: nothing to do with temperance but ‘absolute alcohol’), queer stuff, mix, fly machine (presumably from the effect of the drink) and speed trap. The meths drinker is a spiritsuiper, literally a ‘spirit swiller’. But if these are relatively few, the country makes up with its accentuation of colour.
There is bloutrein (sometimes Englished as blue train), a dubious tribute to the Blue Train, a luxury passenger train running between Cape Town and Pretoria; those who drink meths are seen as boarding the ‘fast train’ to death. Slower but considered equally sure is blouperd, using Afrikaans perd, a horse. There is blue ocean and die blou, i.e. the blue. There is also, from New Zealand, the blue lady and from Australia pink-eye. A rare exception to the usual ‘blues’ is Red Lizzie, which dilutes the methylated spirits with cheap port.
There is Ireland’s blow or blowhard, and chat, all apparently from the garrulousness that meths drinking can promote. Feke, meaning fake, and thus representing ‘fake alcohol’, was a favourite of the Thirties; drinkers usually added it to beer. If the meths was diluted with water it was known as milk, since the pure alcohol became cloudy.
America’s best-known synonym is canned heat, or the proprietary Sterno (as in the original ‘Sterno-Inferno’ alcohol burner); its drinkers were the canned heater and canned-heat stiff. Jack is another US term and has been extended to cover a variety of illicitly distilled liquors, e.g. tater jack (potatoes), prune jack and raisin jack. There is also jake, which doubled as Jamaica ginger, an alcoholic but still legal high much favoured during Prohibition. The legs of habitual consumers became paralysed, leaving them jake-legged. Finally, fittingly, there is finish. Which, so it would appear, does to the drinker exactly what it promises on the label.
Pulp Diction: ‘A roscoe coughed’
HORSE AND CARRIAGE? Once upon a time. Love and marriage? If you say so. Slang and crime. Now there’s the union made in heaven. It’s there at the beginning, in the first glossaries of the language of beggars, it’s there in ballads, in so-called confessions and memoirs, in plays and novels, in newspaper sensation, in police procedurals, in noir, in TV and movies, in fanfic.
But it has never been there the way it was in pulp. The downmarket monthly million-sellers that dominated the news-stands before World War II. The opposite of slicks. Wood-pulp stock, lurid covers and mainly geared to working-class men instead of something shiny aimed at middle-class women. Born in the Twenties, reached their peak in the Thirties and Forties, and screwed in the Fifties, like much else in US popular culture, by the new juggernaut: TV. A theme for every market so long as it was down: military pulps, scifi pulps, mystery pulps, adventure pulps, sports pulps, western pulps, softcore pulps, romantic pulps (for the girls) and crime and detective pulps. A working-class market needed working-class language and every flavour of pulp dipped its toe into slang, but nothing used it, nothing needed it like the crim and detective pulps.
You might argue, and I do, on the basis of truffling out slang from all sorts of sources, that the books, short stories, and TV and movie scripts that can be grouped as ‘pulp’ or in the case of the visual stuff, noir, are the only example of a wholly slang-led cultural form. Slang had always been among the driving forces of various criminal tales – in fact or fiction, it was vital for authenticity, even if not everyone got it right – but pulp took things to another level. More than characterisation – minimal at best – or plot – sketchy if resolutely sensational – language was what drew people to the pulps and delineated what they were being offered. In a word, slang. And in two: hard-boiled, rough-edged, two-fisted . . . above all, tough slang. If the fictional likes of Dan Turner or Flashgun Casey might be seen as possessing a personality, it was that which they, or at least their creators projected in their conversation. Even Philip Marlowe, for all that his creator Raymond Chandler would philosophise about mean streets and the type of men who chose to walk them, showed his style in his speech.
Before we go on, to explore the vocabulary, let us have a look at pulp itself.
The use of wood pulp as the basis of paper-making is an invention of the mid-nineteenth century. Prior to that modern paper had been based on rags and other fibres, ever since the process had been discovered in China, around 105 CE. The move to wood pulp had been attempted in the later eighteenth century, but without success. Then, in 1844, two men, one American, the other German, succeeded in making the theory practice. Using the same processes, but substituting wood fibres for those of rags, they created a revolut
ion in paper-making. Couple that to another novelty, the rotary printing press, plus the century’s expansion of mass literacy, and the possibilities of profitable, mass-produced popular literature – whether fiction, non-fiction or as seen in the vast range of new newspapers and magazines – were infinite.
Pulp had one drawback; produced cheaply, it made for a cheap and ultimately ephemeral product. It was acidic, which meant that in time the pages would first yellow, then crumble to the touch. Publishers of upmarket books and magazines would still opt for rag-based paper, and charge accordingly, but the mass market made no such demands. Like the jerry-built housing that underpinned the growth of the great cities of the industrialised west, and which would house the readers of these new pulp-based media, it was form not content that counted. The future was not on the agenda.
The writer’s work is not usually identified with the material on which it is produced. Who, other than book dealers and their customers, cared what the words were printed on. In magazine terms there was pulp or there was what the US called slicks and the UK glossies, high-end magazines – typically those devoted to women’s fashion – printed on shiny stock. And even then, the reference was to the smooth, shiny surface rather than the underlying production process. Not quite digital vs dead-tree, but certainly disposable vs at least potentially longer-term.
The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human Page 22