The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  A recent critic, Adam Gopnik, has compared Runyon’s use of language to that of another star of the slicks, P.G. Wodehouse, who also revelled in slang, whether such Edwardianisms as oojah-cum-spiff or rannygazoo, or the monosyllables of American low-life. For Gopnik, ‘Like Wodehouse, [. . .] Runyon inherited a comedy of morals and turned it into a comedy of sounds, language playing for its own sake.’

  Bellem used language for a simpler reason: to pay the bills. Runyon, an artist, lives on, Bellem, the hack, is quite invisible. Let him have the last words:

  Ordinarily I’m opposed to dames wearing trousers, but this doll was different. She was a tall and luscious red-haired tomato in a sleekly tailored emerald slack suit that made you want to howl like a wolf when you saw how it stressed her willowy curves, and her chiseled mush was just as gorgeous as her contours. She came drifting into the Trocambo on the Sunset Strip while I was inhaling supper, and the instant I lamped her I lost my appetite for fried chicken. She was that kind of cookie; she sent you. And after you’d been sent you had the feeling that you didn’t want to come back, ever.

  Tell Me a Story: Proper Names

  THE TRUTH, FRUSTRATING as ever, is that the bulk of slang, some 75 per cent or even more, is based on standard English. No elaborate coinages, no revolutionary groundbreaking inventions, nothing plucked all new and shiny from the air. Or pretty much not so. What so much of slang is about is manipulating those well-known words: playing and punning, twisting and tweaking, turning inside out and round about. Dog may have two hundred-plus uses in slang, but in the end they all go back to those well-known three letters (and to make things worse, a check with the etymologists shows that we don’t actually know where d-o-g comes from itself. Nor c-a-t either). As noted, slang’s vocabulary comes mainly from the exploitation and recycling of slang’s themes. Thus the multiple synonyms of so many.

  However, and we should definitely be grateful that this is so in a book entitled The Stories of Slang, there are exceptions. Sometimes there is a word, though usually some kind of phrase, that comes with a built-in tale. Whether that tale is true, well, that is, as they say, another story.

  Drunk, drink and drunkards are among slang’s central pillars. The founding father, booze, albeit as bouse, turns up in the first-ever slang glossary, penned around 1535, and is still hanging in, backed by around forty compounds (booze artist, booze hound, booze gob, boozologist, boozery . . . ). It comes either from Dutch (buizen) or German (bausen), which meant to drink to excess. The OED’s first use is c.1300, but this may only refer to a drinking vessel, rather than its contents (the Dutch term is also rooted in buise, a large drinking vessel). Either way, the term really came on stream when co-opted by the sixteenth century’s criminal canting crew.

  Stories, however, tend to accumulate round drunk, the adjective rather than the noun. Much depends on comparison, i.e. those to whom, as, bouyant yet scuttered, we pull a Daniel Boone or make indentures with our legs (which referred to the drunkard’s stumbling path, supposedly reminiscent of the custom of indenting the top edges of legal documents) we seem to resemble. In many cases slang takes on the animal, bird or insect role: drunk as a bat, a boiled owl, a coon (though this may be a racial slur), a cootie, a dog, a fish, a fly, a fowl, a hog, sow, swine or pig, a jaybird, a monkey, a mouse or rat, a skunk in a trunk or a tick. Whether any of these are exceptional tipplers in nature is unlikely. No matter: slang has little time for detail. As for the humans, it’s a matter of stereotyping: contenders include a bastard, a beggar, a besom (an old woman rather than a broom), a bowdow (possibly a misconstruction of Bordeaux and thus a nod to its vintners), a brewer’s fart, a cook, an emperor, a fiddler, a Gosport fiddler or indeed a fiddler’s bitch, as forty, as a little red wagon or a wheelbarrow, a log, a loon, a lord, a peep, a Perraner, a piper, a poet, a rolling fart, a sailor, a tapster (the nearest we come to publican), or a top.

  If none of these, at least as recorded, offers a story then others do. Let us start with Davy’s or David’s sow. According to the Lexicon Balatronicum, a slang dictionary of 1811, it went like this:

  ‘One David Lloyd, a Welchman, who kept an alehouse at Hereford, had a living sow with six legs, which was greatly resorted to by the curious; he had also a wife much addicted to drunkenness, for which he used sometimes to give her due correction. One day David’s wife having taken a cup too much, and being fearful of the consequences, turned out the sow, and lay down to sleep herself sober in the stye. A company coming in to see the sow, David ushered them into the stye, exclaiming, there is a sow for you! did any of you ever see such another? all the while supposing the sow had really been there; to which some of the company, seeing the state the woman was in, replied, it was the drunkenest sow they had ever beheld; whence the woman was ever after called David’s sow.’

  From misogyny, one slang staple, we turn to another, racism. In this case the exemplary lushington is one Cooter, also known as Cootie Brown. There are two versions. In the first we find Cooter living on the line that, in the US Civil War, divided North and South. This apparently made him eligible for the draft whichever side’s recruiting sergeant came calling. Cooter’s solution: to get drunk and stay drunk, thus rendering himself militarily useless for the duration. And so he did, with his story living on long after him. If that seems barely feasible, how about this? Cooter Brown was mixed race; half Cherokee, half African American. He was also all misanthropist, wholly drunk, and he too, though living far from the border in a shack in Lousiana, was unfortunate enough to encounter the Civil War. Given the situation he carefully dressed as a Cherokee and was as such considered a free man. Yankees and Johnny-Rebs both came to call, invariably found him drunk and shared his bottles. Cooter survived the war but not long after his shack caught fire and burned to the ground. There was no sign of its owner’s remains. Popular wisdom had it that so sodden with alcohol was the old man that he had simply evaporated in the flames. Drunk as cooter brown remains his memorial.

  Then, still souse-shaming, we have Chloe. Why drunk as Chloe? In truth, who knows. But again, there are theories. Given the phrase turns up in Australia, it may well be a back-handed reference to a notorious painting, Chloé (painted in 1875) which, having been rejected in 1883 by the Melbourne National Gallery – not only naked, she was also French and actually named Marie – had been bought by the city’s well-known Young and Jackson Hotel, where it became a point of attraction for many visitors, especially soldiers on R and R. However, back in 1789, in a poem ‘The Bunter’s Christening’, we meet a variety of low-lifes: ‘muzzy Tom’, ‘sneaking Snip, the boozer’ (and presumably tailor, since snip was slang’s term for the occupation), ‘blear-ey’d Ciss’ . . . and ‘dust-cart Chloe’. An excellent thrash ensues to wet the baby’s head and the poem ends thus:

  For supper, Joey stood,

  To treat these curious cronies;

  A bullock’s melt, hog’s maw

  Sheep’s heads, and stale polonies:

  And then they swill’d gin-hot,

  Until blind drunk as Chloe.

  Which gives us our final comparison: drunk as a polony. The simple interpretation of polony, as consumed by Chloe and pals, is a Bologna sausage. Such a sausage, like a drunk, cannot stand upright and polony, to underline the image, can also mean a fool. Thus the link. However there is an alternative. French slang once gave soul comme un Polonnais, drunk as a Pole, a comparison that supposedly mocked the Polish-French Maréchal de Saxe, a great tippler.

  Let us stay in Australia. And indeed at the bar. If that great but generally unloved tradition the six o’clock swill (the pubs shut at that time, you had to drink hard and fast for the brief period that followed five o’clock knocking-off time at work) is long gone, another, the shout, remains in place. Like the UK’s round, the shout means you buy drinks for your mates, and on occasion the entire bar. But the shout is perhaps even more ritualistic. It’s not just a matter of missing one’s round, but down in Godzone, nature abhors the solitary boozer. He even has a
name: a Jimmy Woodser (and very occasionally Jack Smithers), applied both to the drinker and the miserable, lonely glass he’s gazing into. It is not a much-loved state. As a newspaper versifier put it in 1916:

  When I ’as a ‘Jimmy Woodser’ on my own,

  ’Twas like someone shook the meat an’ left the bone,

  The bloomin’ flavour’s left the beer,

  An’ there isn’t ’arf the cheer.

  It’s like torking to yerself upon the ’phone

  As ever, there are rival etymologies. One ties him to an eponymous and ‘solitary Briton’ (yes, the whingeing pom, as ever), no friend of shouting, whose egregious lack of sociability was the subject of the poem ‘Jimmy Wood’, by B.H.T. Boake, published in The Bulletin on 7 May 1892. It wasn’t that he disliked drink: ‘His “put away” for liquid was abnormal’ (his tipple being ‘unsweetened gin, most moderately watered’) but ‘he viewed this “shouting” mania with disgust, / As being generosity perverted’ and ‘vowed a vow to put all “shouting” down’. There are fourteen quadruplets, we can’t have them all, but the bottom line was that Jimmy drank himself to death. The shout, however, remained undaunted.

  So that’s 1892. The problem is that in 1926 a correspondent of the Brisbane Courier offered his own take. This was from 1860. According to his story, around that date two rival publicans, John Ward and James Woods, had hotels [i.e. pubs] on the opposite corners of York and Market streets in Sydney. ‘Mr. Woods, in the course of business, refused to serve the female section of his customers, as by their habits they were giving his “house” a bad name, and they perforce transferred their libations to the opposition; hence the term “Johnny Warders”. Mr. Woods, having got rid of the women, had then for his customers the aforesaid barrowmen, gardeners, and casual hands and shoppers from the markets, and as the majority of these individuals, not being overburdened with wealth, usually drank by themselves, the term applied to them, and subsequently, even to the present day, given to “lone drinkers”, was “Jimmy Woodsers”.’ Perhaps, but Johnny Warder, at least as recorded, means not ‘woman’ but ‘drunken layabout’ (indeed its first recorded use features a female complainant, loath to join such figures) and it was those who made their way to John Ward’s boozorium.

  Enough of Australia, at least for now. Clerkenwell lies just north-east of the City of London. The area, just beyond the city walls, was the first suburb, and with its errant population, focused on Turnmill (sometimes Turnbull) Street running alongside the Fleet River (now Farringdon Road), once celebrated as the home of whores and villainy. Shakespeare’s Falstaff mentions it, as did many contemporary playwrights and the nineteenth-century sociologist James Greenwood, keen to set a story against the slums, used it in a novel. It gained, of course, a slang nickname: Jack Adams’ Parish, and Jack Adams alone and used generically, meant a fool.

  For once we have an undisputed back-story. Jack Adams was indeed a fool, a professional one, and in time made himself over as an astrologer and fortune-teller. Fortunes were apparently graded: the more pay the more play and a five-guinea prognostication was far more positive than a five-shilling one (logical enough given the wealth of one who could afford the former sum). He was sufficiently well known to bestow his name on a dance: ‘Do you know Jack Adams’ Parish’, which was still popular in the 1770s. In 1663 he brought out Jack Adams his perpetual almanack with astrological rules and instructions, directing to an exact knowledge of all future things till the morrow after doomsday. Together with his rare art of fortune-telling, and interpretation of dreams . . . A work much desired, and by a strange accident preserved, and now published for the illumination of posterity. Sold exclusively ‘by the Ginger-Bred-Woman in Clarkenwell-Green’ it carried the warning: ‘If you do refuse to buy / You’ll shew yourself more fool than I’.

  The first use of all my eye and Betty Martin emerged in 1780 (all my eye had been there since 1728). Other versions include all in my eye and Betty, all my eye and Elizabeth Martin, my eye and Peggy Martin, and oh Betty Martin, that’s my eye. Whatever the format Betty Martin herself continues to be a source of controversy. Eric Partridge suspected that she was a late-eighteenth-century London character and that no record of her exists other than this catchphrase. Other slang collectors – Jon Bee and John Camden Hotten – both refer to the alleged Latin prayer, Ora pro mihi, beate Martine (‘Pray for me blessed Martin’), i.e. St Martin of Tours, the patron saint of publicans and reformed drunkards. It has yet to be found in any version of the liturgy. Writing in 1914, Dr L.A. Waddell suggests another Latinism, O mihi Britomartis (‘O bring help to me, Britomartis’), referring to the tutelary goddess of Crete. Most likely, and predating Partridge, is the idea proposed in Charles Lee’s Memoirs (1805), that there had once been ‘an abandoned woman called Grace’, who, in the late eighteenth century, married a Mr Martin. She became notorious as Betty Martin, and all my eye was apparently among her favourite phrases.

  Buckley comes up twice in slang’s phraseology. There is the nineteenth century’s question Who struck Buckley? and the dismissive Australianism Buckley’s chance, coined in the 1890s and still going strong.

  The former is defined by John Camden Hotten as ‘a common phrase used to irritate Irishmen’. Setting aside the justification of such irritation, Hotten went on to explain it thus: ‘The story is that an Englishman having struck an Irishman named Buckley, the latter made a great outcry, and one of his friends rushed forth screaming, “Who struck Buckley?” “I did,” said the Englishman, preparing for the apparently inevitable combat. “Then,” said the ferocious Hibernian, after a careful investigation of the other’s thews and sinews, “then, sarve him right.”’ This form of equivocation seems to lie behind all Buckley-pertinent anecdotes: the violence, the sympathetic supporter, the judicious assessment of the assailant and the substitution of valour by discretion. The Spectator, in 1912, replaced the Irishman with an unfortunate junior boy at a public school and used it to critique Parliament’s failure to offer any more than empty bombast – and certainly no gunboats – when the horrors of the Belgian treatment of their Congolese subjects was revealed. A year later one Boris Sidis, writing about ‘The Psychology of Laughter’, resurrected the centrality of the Emerald Isle: in this case the sympathetic speaker was ‘a peasant, undersized but wrathful, and with his shillelagh grasped threateningly in his hand . . . going about the fair asking, “Who struck Buckley?”’ and again, on encountering ‘a stalwart and dangerous man,’ swiftly backed down: ‘Well, afther all perhaps Buckley desarved it.’

  Australian Buckley’s, often amplified as Buckley’s chance, hope or show, has elicited a wide range of theories. Of these, which (quite erroneously) include the Yindjibarndi verb bucklee, to initiate an Aborigine boy, especially by circumcision, the best hopes lie with William Buckley (1780–1856), an escaped convict (known as ‘the wild white man’) who spent thirty-two years living with Aborigines in South Victoria; or a pun on the name of defunct firm Buckley and Nunn (founded by Mars Buckley and Crumpton Nunn in 1851) which states that one has two chances: ‘Buckley and Nunn’, i.e. none. The main problem with William was that the phrase doesn’t turn up until nearly forty years after his death, and in any case, whatever the vagaries of his life – both before and after his return to ‘civilisation’ – chance, whether bad or indeed good doesn’t seem to come into it. The journal Ozwords (produced by the Australian National Dictionary) deals with the whole topic in its October 2000 edition (available online). Suffice it to say that their conclusion is that Buckley and Nunn, providers of the pun, are the most likely originators.

  Ireland offers Johnny Wet-bread, a teasing rather than aggressive term of mockery. Johnny existed – he was a well-known Dublin beggar who, bereft of alternatives, moistened his bread in the city’s fountains. Unlike most street people he has a memorial, albeit shared. It is to be found on a plaque at the city’s Coombe Maternity Hospital on Cork Street, where his name joins those of other city characters: Stab the Basher, Damn the Weather, and Nan
cy Needle Balls.

  The last of these has sadly not, despite the undoubted potential, entered the slang lists. As we know, slang is too often a man-made vocabulary. However we do have the historically proven Mrs Phillips, she of Mrs Phillips’s ware, condoms. Captain Grose explains: ‘These machines were long prepared and sold by a matron of the name of Phillips, at the Green Canister, in Half-moon Street, in the Strand. That good lady, having acquired a fortune, retired from business, but learning that the town was not well served by her successors, she, out of a patriotic zeal for the public welfare, returned to her occupation . . . in the year 1776.’ Whether – grandmother, great-aunt? – she was related to Mrs Phillips, that brothel-keeper who, in the mid-nineteenth century, ran a house specialising in flagellation at 11 Upper Belgrave Place in Pimlico, is alas unknown.

  Nor are such women who exist strictly ‘real’. Sometimes they have been appropriated by men: typically Mrs Hand and Mrs Palm (first name Patsy) both of whom are blessed with five daughters (or sometimes sisters) who represent the hand, as used for masturbation (for further details see The Body: Only Man is Vile).

  Other generic ‘women’ include a variety of Misses and Missuses. Examples include the overdressed socialite Miss Lizzie Tish, the well-built and noisy Miss Big Stockings, the unpopular Miss Fitch, who rhymes with bitch, flouncing Miss Nancy who is not in fact a girl but a gay young man, opulent Miss van Neck, known for a magnificent cleavage and minatory Miss Placed Confidence, a mid-nineteenth-century term for venereal disease. Mrs Evans and Mrs Fubbs are both (literal) cats, and Mrs Fubbs’parlour, pushing the whole pussy thing that distance further, is the vagina. Mrs Jones’ counting house is a lavatory and Mrs Greenfields sleeping in the open air. The one area where men do not trespass is, predictably, menstruation. Among its many euphemisms are the punning Aunt Flo, Auntie Jane and sanguine Aunt Rose, Grandma George and Granny Grunts, Monica; quite how Charlie and Tommy join the party is unknown, but so they do.