One last woman is Kathleen Mavourneen. The name, which comes from the song ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, written in 1837 and meaning, in Gaelic ‘Kathleen my beloved’, was initially popular in the US but its slang uses have been Australian and focus on the chorus which runs ‘It may be for years, it may be forever,’ and is defined variously as an indeterminate period of time, an indeterminate prison sentence, an habitual criminal (who may be serving the former), a promise (usually in the context of a loan, which most likely will remain outstanding; business jargon uses the name for any defaulting debtor) and an Australian swagman’s pack (better known as a bluey) which he may carry for a lifetime. Finally there is the Kathleen Mavourneen system, Australia’s name for hire purchase.
The better-known term is tell it to the Marines (the sailors won’t believe it)! which plays on the true salt’s contempt for the half-sailors, half-soldiers who once sailed alongside him, but slang has also come up with an equivalent: tell it to (or save it for, or that’ll do for) Sweeney! Both work as a dismissive exclamation of disbelief in a previous far-fetched statement. The Sweeney version seems to have emerged in the 1920s. It was likely popularised by a silent movie of that name, released in 1927 and starring funnyman Chester Conklin, but US researcher Barry Popik has it a few years earlier, first used in an advertisement for the New York Daily News, first appearing in August 1922: ‘Tell it to Sweeney! (The Stuyvesants will understand.)’ The Daily News being a devotedly blue-collar paper, it picked Sweeney – a classic Irish name, alongside Riley, Kelsey or Kilroy, all of whom play their own slang roles – and set it against the Stuyvesants, a name and family long established among the city’s aristocracy. However, the phrase can be pushed back a little further: to the 1910 musical The Yankee Girl, which featured the song ‘Tell it to Sweeney’. There was even an ad, used a year earlier, which suggested to New Yorkers that ‘If you have any harness trouble tell it to SWEENEY, the leading harness maker’ but this may be coincidental. Quite unconnected, Sweeney can also mean a barber, from the fictional Sweeney Todd, the ‘demon barber’ of Fleet Street, who sold ‘golopshious’ pies made from the flesh of those he had murdered.
Further violence links to Morgan Rattler, which comes from dialect and was used around 1890 to describe a hard or reckless fighter and thence a good boxer; outside pugilism it simply meant an outstanding example. But its original use came a century earlier: some form of stick with a knob of lead at one or both ends; unlike the rigid police truncheon, the stick itself was flexible, made of bamboo or metal and especially favoured as the garrotters’ weapon of choice. It could and sometimes did kill. All of which leads to its use in slang: the penis. Whether this underpinned its adoption as the name of a popular fiddle tune is unknown, but there was a song ‘Morgan Rattler’ included in Chap Book Songs around 1790 which ran: ‘At night with the girls he still is a flatterer, / They never seem coy, but tremble for joy, / When they get a taste of his Morgan Rattler.’ Terry Pratchett fans will recall the popular Discworld ditty ‘A wizard’s staff has a knob on the end’.
Animals have already cropped up as similes for drunk humans; they also boast some names on their own account. There is Mrs Astor’s pet (or plush) horse, a US term for an over-made-up or overdressed person, Mrs William Backhouse Astor Jr. (neé Caroline Schermerhorn) being the immensely rich doyenne of New York society (a.k.a. the ‘400’, that being the maximum number that could fit comfortably into her ballroom). Another horse, this time all-equine is Phar Lap, which meant ‘flash of lightning’, and remains Australia’s most famous racehorse, since its glory days in the 1930s. In slang it means (heavy-handedly) a very slow person and (gruesomely) a wild dog, with its hair burnt off, trussed up and cooked in the ashes. The phar lap gallop is (perhaps anomalously) a foxtrot.
Ireland provides a number of creatures that stand for humans who are happy to befriend whoever turns up, and will go ‘a little way with everyone’. Presumably the journey was once literal; the figurative has wholly replaced it. What we don’t know, frustratingly, is the background of any of these affectionate if less than wholly loyal creatures: Lanna or Alanna Macree’s dog, Lanty MacHale’s goat (he had a dog as well), Larry McHale’s dog, Billy Harran’s dog, Dolan’s ass, and O’Brien’s dog. All must have sprung from some local character, none bothered to explain to the wider world. Nor did Paddy Ward’s pig, a lazy person, constantly relaxing in the face of work; Goodyer’s pig, which was constantly in or causing trouble, Joe Heath’s mare, a hard worker, expanded into the phrase like Joe Heath’s mare, exerting oneself or behaving in an excited manner.
We have better luck with all on one side like Lord Thomond’s cocks, a phrase that denotes a group of people who appear to be united but are, in fact, more likely to quarrel. There was a late-eighteenth-century Lord Thomond, an Irish peer, there were a group of cocks – bred for fighting and the gambling that went with the cockpit – and there was a cock-feeder, one James O’Brien, who foolishly confined a number of his lordship’s cocks, due to fight the next day for a considerable sum, all in the same room. Stereotyped for the story as a stupid Irishman, he supposedly believed that since they were all ‘on the same side’, they would not squabble. He was wrong, and the valuable cocks destroyed each other.
Too many of slang’s proper names offer no clues as to their origin, although most suggest some kind of lost anecdote. Some, e.g. Charlie Prescott (or Billy Prescot, Colonel Prescott, Jim(my) or John Prescott) for waistcoat or Dan Tucker for butter are rhyming slang and there are dozens of similar examples which can be drawn from most of the format’s two-hundred-year history: Germaine Greer or Britney Spears, beer, Posh and Becks, sex, Harry Randle, candle, Nervo and Knox, the pox and on it goes. But the names are mere conveniences, they rarely if ever link to their meaning, they are there for assonance not anecdote.
Some names, on the other hand, beg for a story. The US south-west’s Charlie Taylor, syrup or molasses into which bacon or ham fat has been poured; the mid-nineteenth-century UK’s Jerry Lynch, a poor-quality pickled pig’s head reserved for sale in slum butchers; make a Judy (Fitzsimmons) of oneself, to be a fool, to make an idiot of oneself; Ned Stokes, the four of spades; Tom Brown, a name for cribbage and Tom Bray’s bilk, laying out the ace and deuce when playing that game; not for Joe (nor for Joseph), by no means, not on any account; a Salamanca wedding, the marriage of an old man to a (rich) young woman; Joe McGee, a stupid, unreliable person; Lady Dacre’s wine, gin, but which Lady Dacre? Mickey T, a woman who pursues powerful and/or wealthy men and spurns the rest; Kennedy, a poker; Johnny O’Brien, a freight train or one of its boxcars; being a passenger on the Cape Ann stage or talking to Jamie Moore, drunk, and the exclamation in (or off) you go says Bob Munro. Even Roscoe or John Roscoe, so widely used for a handgun, has no known origin. There are others. Slang, frustratingly, remains careless of such tales and they may beg, but we do not receive.
It is not just these. Slang has a number of what might be termed known unknowns: how well we know the words, how little chance we have of eliciting a concrete etymology. The words and phrases that defy all explanation: the whole nine yards is an exemplar. OK was another but that has long since been explained. To conclude let us take one more, focused on a name, and still defying explanation.
Although the OED states that ‘None of the several colourful explanations of the origin of the expression is authenticated by contemporary printed evidence,’ gone for a Burton remains one of the most tantalising slang expressions, Britain’s version of America’s OK, as it were, and for all the OED’s self-denial, a trawl through the possibilities is simply too tempting to resist.
There is no argument as regards what the phrase, used invariably in the past tense (gone for a Burton), meant: initially, as recorded during World War II and specifically amongst RAF pilots, it was dead, killed either during some sortie or in a dogfight; latterly, post-1941, it came to mean missing, whether in the air or not. Although there are some claims for its existence during World War I, when Burton was suppo
sedly derived from an elision of the words ‘burnt ’un’ (the fate of many young aviators), most lexicographers, including Partridge, an expert on every aspect of 1914–18 slang, opt for the following conflict and the magisterial OED offers no citation before that from the New Statesman, dated August 1941. From thereon in, all is confusion.
Partridge in the 7th edition of the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, and Paul Beale in the 8th, suggest, but sadly fail to prove any of four alternatives. There is a euphemism: going for a glass of Burton ale; there is Burton-on-Trent as rhyming slang for went, as in ‘went west’ (though this has other possible origins); there is the fact, at least among beer cognoscenti, that Burton ale is heavy, as is a burning aircraft as it crashes to the ground; finally a reference to the suits made by the ready-to-wear tailor Montague Burton. This ties in neatly with descriptions of coffins as wooden overcoats, kimonos and the like, but would conclusively disqualify any World War I origins, since Burtons had yet to appear on the High Street. To confound the whole issue even further, during World War II the RAF used a number of billiard halls, invariably sited above Burton shops, as medical centres. Those who attended such centres had ‘gone for a Burton’; the black joke was that such treatment was more likely to kill than cure.
Other suggestions, vouchsafed by correspondents to BBC Radio 4’s Enquire Within brought up the large-scale inter-war advertising campaign for Burton’s Ales (which, pace Partridge, were apparently not that heavy). The campaign featured on posters ‘several scenes depicting a Burton Ale house in the background and a tableau in the foreground where a principal character was obviously missing. An example is a broken-down car, bonnet up, distraught lady standing beside it, male character disappearing up the road towards the pub.’ The copy line for this and similar pictures was ‘He’s gone for a Burton’. Only after the advertising campaign was it picked up by participants in the military one.
A second correspondent noted that Montague Burton’s halls were used for morse aptitude tests, not medical checkups, and going for a Burton meant failing such a test, ‘made,’ he noted ‘more difficult by open windows and passing trams.’ It was also claimed that the burton came from seafarers’ jargon, referring to the stowing of a barrel athwart rather than fore-and-aft. Such stowage was notoriously unsafe in a rough sea, and a rolling barrel could be a genuine threat to a sailor deputed to tackle it. Thus this going for a Burton meant risking death.
All have a certain feasibility, none suggest an absolute. Like so much slang etymology, anecdotal or otherwise, we must reject Eric Partridge’s premise ‘something is always better than nothing’ and go instead, and however reluctantly, with Anatoly Liberman of the OED: ‘better no etymology at all than a wrong one’. The case rests.
Nudge-Nudge, Wink-Wink: The Pun
THE PUN. A play on words that works because the words sound similar. The word itself defies origins, though some plump for the Italian punctilio, which meant variously a trifling point, a quibble, and any minute detail of action or behaviour. Linguists, possibly nearer the mark, call it paronomasia, which goes back to the Greek παρονομάζειν, which means ‘to alter slightly in naming’.
It seems to have exercised the greats. Some love it: the pun is ‘among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation’ (James Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s biographer), or ‘an art of harmonious jingling upon words, which, passing in at the ears, excites a titillary motion in those parts; and this, being conveyed by the animal spirits into the muscles of the face, raises the cockles of the heart’ (Jonathan Swift, he of Gulliver’s Travels and much besides). Some do not: to pun is, ‘to torture one poor word ten thousand ways’ (John Dryden, the poet), or simply ‘the lowest form of wit’ (the celebrity pianist Oscar Levant, along with dozens of others who set puns even lower than the usual sarcasm). True, the reduction of the rape of some unfortunate laundresses by a mentally challenged escapist to ‘Nut screws washers and bolts’ may lack much charm in a less linguistically tolerant world. Yet Shakespeare loves them (see Carry on Barding, or, Much Ado About Pistol’s Cock), and more recently we have the Marx Brothers (‘Love flies out the door when money comes innuendo’) while fans of Patrick O’Brian’s navy novels will recall an elaborate, and recurring scenario which permits his seaborne heroes, with rotting stores in mind, to opt for ‘the lesser of two weevils’.
No matter. Slang loves a pun. There are times when, just as one despairs of finding a term that might not be labelled ‘derogatory’, every example seems to demand the note: ‘No pun intended’. Except for the many that do. My database lists nearly 750 terms that use the form. Their frequency underlines the role of wit in slang. No, Virginia, it isn’t just those words Mummy would rather you didn’t know and which you and your friends doubtless trill across the playground. Puns also represent a side of slang that makes one wonder: just who coined this stuff? On the whole slang’s punning takes it beyond the usual themes. There’s an element of creativity here that one doesn’t need to search out in the usual equation of fucking with ‘man hits woman’ or insanity with ‘not all there’.
Let us start at the beginning. Or at least with the oldest recording of slang’s punning. The green gown: which looks to standard English green, with its figurative sense of innocence and the literal images of the countryside and the green stains that come from rolling on the grass. Usually linked to getting or giving the definition is sexual play, usually assuming intercourse, performed out of doors; as B.E.’s dictionary of 1698 puts it: ‘a throwing of young Lasses on the Grass and Kissing them’. Kiss, of course, like the double-defined French baiser, could also mean full-on sex, and led in turn to puns. Thus in The Parliament of Women (1646) one ‘Dorcas Do-little’ declares, ‘My husband is a Gamester and as he games abroad, so I play at home; if he bee at bowles and kisse the Mistris, I can for recreation play at rubbers with his man.’ Gamester (a gambler but equally a womaniser) and game (sport in every sense), bowls (or balls), kiss the mistress, play at rubbers (which doesn’t just mean a game, nor indeed to rub, but also promoting one’s own interests) . . . like certain scenes in Shakespeare, it’s a prototype Carry On script.
But when slang meets sex, the sniggering of Carry On movies is often the default setting. The whole play at thing: play at brangle, bouncy-bouncy, buttock, hot cockles, leapfrog, mumble-peg, prick the garter, pully-hauly, put in all, stable my naggie, tops and bottoms, top sawyer, where the Jack takes Ace (that’s the black ace, the pubic hair-girt vagina). Or dance: bobb-in-jo (Bob being the penis or as verb, to fuck, and thus perhaps in Joan), the blanket hornpipe, the buttock jig, the married man’s cotillion, the matrimonial polka (could that also be poke her?), and plays on such real-life country whirligigs as Sallinger’s round, the shaking of the sheets and Barnaby. Where do we stop? Take one tiny example, there’s needle (and its coeval, sew). OK: the needle is the penis, except that you can thread it, and that lets it gender-bend as the vagina. A needlewoman is a whore, needlework, sexual intercourse and to pick a needle without an eye (which needle is useless) is used of a young woman who marries a man, knowing that he’ll offer little joy in the sack.
On it goes; the navel engagement, and still seaborne, the light frigate, a prostitute who is both ‘light’ on her heels, and offering to ‘frig it’; hare (hair) pie, which can of course be eaten, hairyfordshire, whence one can visit, although slang seems to have missed a trick with the possibilities of ‘going down into the country’. A bit on the fork which blends all those feminised bits (of muslin, of melon . . . ) with fork, the crotch; the netherlands and furbelow, both ‘down there’, Bushey Park, the bush or pubic hair, the agreeable ruts of life, the breakfast of champions, which one eats and signifies cunnilingus and leads to that abecedarists’ friend, the cunning-linguist. And to stretch a point, there’s the cunt-hat, nothing sexual, merely a derby (America’s name for the bowler), but it’s ‘often felt’.
It’s not all sex. Slang’s themes range further. There is, for instance, mad. Or ‘intellect
impaired’ as might prefer the politically pure in heart. Pun-based terms include crackerbox (playing on biscuits and crackers/cracked), gonzo, which looks like a blend of the old hipster-era gone and crazo but apparently started life as a play on the military attribute gung-ho, the eccentric ‘sweetmeats’ nutbar, nutcake and nut roll (all based like many other ‘mad’ words on nut: the head [see The Body: Only Man is Vile]);brain salad surgery, however, requires no operating theatre, it simply puns on head, oral sex.
However, slang’s all-purpose synonym for eccentricity, to whatever degree, is ‘not all there’, or as a popular term has it Dagenham, which as London tube users will know is ‘two stops on from Barking’ (barking mad that is, howling at the moon). Still underground, one stop short of East Ham is Barking itself. The member for Barkshire, however, is merely suffering from a nasty cough. ‘Not all there’ melds into ‘not getting there’ and ‘not amounting to’ and phrases using short of . . . are multitudinous. There’s a couple of chips short of . . . , whether the punning chips are of the silicone, chocolate, potato or even gambling variety, and those things missing include: . . . a computer, . . . a cookie, . . . an order, . . . a complete circuit, . . . a casino bet, . . . a butty, or . . . a happy meal (which may also lack its French fries). Other variations give us wafers short of a communion, tacos short of a combination plate, a few spring rolls short of a banquet, tinnies short of a slab, and a sliding scale of snags (or chops) that have failed to make it to the barbie.
Keeping it thematic, homosexuality, and in particular what the standard dictionaries term sodomy, is always good for a (coarse, stereotyped, homophobic) laugh. One barely needs proceed beyond the back door (or passage or avenue): there is the gentleman (or the usher) of the back door, the backdoor bandit, kicker, man, gentleman and merchant; there is backdoor action and backdoor work whereby one cops it up the back door or goes in or up the back door. All such pleasures unified as bestial backsliding, a synonym for homosexuality that combines physical distaste with pulpit moralising. Enough? Not yet. Still punning away we meet the backgammoner, the breechloader, the navigator of the windward passage, one who is behind with the rent (which also rhymes with bent), the rear-end loader and noted by Francis Grose who eventually chose not to include it, the invader of the rear settlements (which, more bluntly, he termed simply an a—e man). None of which even touches on what was once termed the browning family or brown pipe engineers and all the colour-coded crudity that introduced (not to mention a few byways via Marmite and other colour-indicative trade names).
The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human Page 25