The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  One last theme for the road: drinking. What do we find? The bottle baby, not an infant, merely an alcoholic tramp whose excesses, possibly including drinking dehorn, adulterated alcohol that does nothing for the libido (the horn, geddit?), have reduced him to that state; the hoisting engineer (from hoist, to lower) who is canned, chateaued (everyday shattered, but on at least a cru bourgeois), elevated, petrified . . .

  Some pun occasionally, while others seemed hard-wired to the task. Francis Grose, antiquary, militia captain and the Samuel Johnson of slang from 1785 (the first edition of his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue), boasted well over 150 examples. There was the gentleman of (the) three ins (or indeed inns): ‘In Debt, in Gaol, and in danger of remaining there for Life: or, in Gaol, Indicted, & in danger of being hanged in Chains.’ There was his antithesis, the gentleman of three (or four) outs: without money, without wit, and without manners: some add another out, i.e. without credit. Variations on this latter, essayed by the Newgate novelists Lord Lytton in Paul Clifford (with its grand guignol opener: ‘It was a dark and stormy night . . .’) and Harrison Ainsworth in Rookwood, his pot-boiling tale of highwayman Dick Turpin, suggest respectively that the properties lacking are ‘out of pocket, out of elbows, and out of credit’ or ‘shoes, stockings and shirt’.

  But this barely scrapes the surface. The Captain, a splendid figure from whom butchers, overawed by his corpulence, would beg for his sponsorship, desperate to tell clients that it was their beef that had transformed into his, had much more to offer. There was the burning shame, ‘a lighted candle stuck into the parts of a woman, certainly not intended by nature for a candlestick’ (primly reinterpreted by Grose’s successor Pierce Egan as ‘a nightwatchman placed at the door of a brothel, holding a lantern, even in daylight, to deter people from wandering in and out’) and a Catamaran, defined as ‘an Old Scraggy Woman; from a kind of float made of spars and yards lashed together, for saving persons ship-wrecked’ and seemingly knitting together cat, the old woman, and catamaran, a fireship (a slang term for a clapped whore) or catamaran, an ill-tempered person.

  Grose, who like his contemporaries would not have understood the concept, did not do political correctness. The prostitute was a bobtail (playing variously with rabbit/coney/cunny, bob, ‘go up and down’ and tail, both buttocks and vagina, and the idea of a horse which gave a good ‘ride’), Miss Laycock (also Gammar Laycock, Lady Laycock, Mrs Laycock and Nancy Laycock who may, though it is not indicated in examples, have been gay), a public ledger (‘like that paper, she is open to all parties’), or an Athanasian wench, which punned on the Athanasian Creed, which begins with the words ‘quicumque vult’ (Latin for ‘whoever wants’ and was itself a synonym for whore) and defined by the Captain as ‘a forward girl, ready to oblige every man that shall ask her’. Her vagina, ‘the stock in trade of a prostitute, because fairly entered’, was custom house goods. It might also be Mr Thingstable, ‘a ludicrous affectation of delicacy in avoiding the pronunciation of the first syllable in the title of that officer, which in sound has some similarity to an indecent monosyllable’. Or there were the blasphemous and anti-papist, if quasi-accurate jokes on mother of all saints, all souls, St Patrick or St Paul. Then there was the butcher’s dog, defined as a married man, and attributed to the fact that both can ‘lie by the beef without touching it’. But maybe that’s simply ageist: as Middleton and Rowley put it in their play Old Law (1656): ‘a piece of old beefe will serve to breakfast, yet a man would be glad of a Chicken to supper’. Chicken as a young woman is thus old, and the sense of cowardice emerges at the same time, but the modern usage, an underage boy or girl, is a nineteenth-century coinage.

  A Cambridge fortune, punning on two supposed staples of the Cambridgeshire countryside, referred to a woman who possesses nothing material of her own but ‘a wind mill and a water mill’, i.e. she can talk and urinate but nothing else, and without money must rely for attraction on her personal charms alone. Finally the gross, to pun on the name of its first collector, make a coffeehouse out of a woman’s cunt. This reference to the popularity of coffee-houses as social centres, rather than places for eating and drinking, was defined as performing coitus interruptus, i.e. ‘to go in and out and spend nothing’. The alternative term rendered the vagina ‘a lobster-kettle’: it is hard to suggest why, unless it played on lobster, a soldier, and the idea of the kettle as both wet and hot.

  From sex, as ever, to violence, in this case as urged by the law. A man unashamedly of his era, Grose was not squeamish when it came to judicial executions. The gallows was the deadly never-green or the anodyne necklace, which played on health-care’s equivalent, a form of medicinal amulet, peddled by charlatans and especially popular earlier in the century; based on the original definition of anodyne as soothing pain, in this context that of a misspent life, the phrase is thus a pun on ‘painkiller’. Similarly medicinal was the morning drop, the execution itself, which paired drop, a popular form of medicine, and the fall through the gallows’ trapdoor.

  The moment of hanging was a hearty choke (with caper sauce), playing with the vegetable, the gurgling victim (before the drop snapped necks one literally choked to death) and the ‘capering’ legs of the expiring hanged. To die was to go to Ratisbon (or more aggressively, ‘Rot-His-Bone’) which played on the religious colloquy or Diet of Ratisbon. One who is imprisoned in the stocks or pillory was a babe in the wood; to be hanged in chains was to keep an ironmonger’s shop (either by the side of the common or where the sheriff sets up). Hanging, like sex, was keen on dancing: there was dance on air, or on nothing (in a hempen cravat), dance the Newgate or Tyburn horpipe, dance at Tuck ’em Fair (to tuck up was to kill), dance at the sheriff’s ball and loll out one’s tongue at the company, and dance at Beilby’s ball, an elaborate concept which, failing an actual sheriff named Beilby, played either with that legal mecca the Old Bailey, or the bilbo, a long iron bar, furnished with sliding shackles to confine the ankles of prisoners and a lock by which to fix one end of the bar to the floor or ground. Bilbo comes from the Spanish town of Bilbao, where these fetters were invented. Such dancing accompanied the pre-drop gallows, when the victim choked to death rather than suffering an instantly broken neck; sometimes one’s friends rushed to pull on those dancing legs, intent on speeding the inevitable.

  The drop, whereby two hinged panels fell away beneath the villain’s feet, brought in go off with the fall of the leaf which punned on the drop’s hinged ‘leaves’ and the dead leaves that fall from a natural, rather than judicial ‘tree’. Grose aside, judicial execution was awash with black humour, for instance the gallows was the tree that bears fruit all the year round or the government signpost, presumably directing the hanged individual to hell; to mount it was to climb three trees without a ladder. The noose, name-checking the execution ground of Tyburn, near modern Paddington, gave a Tyburn tippet or pickadill, that same form of stiff collar, originally Spanish, that would, in the following century, give a name to the London thoroughfare Piccadilly. The Tyburn tiffany took its name from a transparent gauze muslin, often used as a woman’s headcover.

  Executions aside, Grose’s puns were all pretty wince-worthy: master of the rolls, a baker; marinated, transported to Botany Bay, book-keeper, one who fails to return borrowed books, figure-dancer, a forger who specialises in altering the figures on banknotes (a real figure-dancer performed in a dance that offered representations of famous historical events), the king of Spain’s trumpeter, a donkey (i.e. ‘Don Key’), a parson, a signpost (the clergyman supposedly ‘sets people in the right way’), manoeuvre the apostles, to manipulate one’s accounts to pay off one debt while incurring another and thus a pun on the popular phrase ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’. Finally, two stone underweight or wanting: a eunuch, bereft of his testicles or stones.

  Slang’s sex-related puns were hardly limited to a single lexicographer. Elsewhere a finishing academy or finishing school meant a brothel, with ‘finishing’ meaning coming to orgasm; other educational brot
hels included the boarding school, the pushing school (push meaning to fuck), cavaulting school (another play on ‘ride’), the college, the dancing school, the topping school and the seminary (with its extra wink at ‘semen’). There was the solicitor general, the penis and the receiver general, a prostitute who ‘receives’ such lovers as pay their money. She was also the deadly nightshade, the guinea hen (her price) and, if rich, drove around in a carriage nicknamed a loose box (in standard use, a stall in which a horse can move around freely). More recently she has been a garden tool, i.e a ho(e).

  To round off the puns, a few taken at random. Grand Central Station was the scarred arm of a long-term heroin user; such an arm was covered in tracks. A growler was a form of four-wheeled cab and punned on another vehicle, the two-wheeled sulky, though it may have referred to the stereotypically poor temper of the driver. Understandings were either boots, shoes or legs. The republic of letters (usually hymning the world of literature and coined for standard use, albeit originally French, by Pierre Bayle in 1664) was the post office. Australia’s ornythorhynchus, in slang a creditor, was properly the duck-billed platypus, and the pun was on ‘a beast with a bill’. Australia also has the elaborate Wallaby Bob’s cousin, which means exhausted or worn out. Why? Well, Wallaby Bob’s cousin is (Kanga) Roo Ted, and rooted, an all-purpose substitute for fucked, means exhausted. America offered Kelsey’s nuts, which mixed nuts, the very best, with the nuts and bolts that were the product of the Kelsey Wheel Company, founded in 1910 to produce automobile wheels. There was kidney pie, flattery, humbug, deceit and based on the verb to kid, to fool or tease. All holiday at Peckham, playing on peck, food, meant that things were all over and beyond redemption, while another game with food gave a general phrase of encouragement don’t let your meat loaf, which used slang’s meat, the penis and loaf, to loiter.

  Now ’ere’s a funny thing . . . : Catchphrases

  TODAY, DIGITISED, WE call them memes, and distribute them through social media. Based on a single image, that for whatever reason latches on to the brain, they have names that, at least as listed by Wikipedia but perhaps beyond those of us over twenty, everyone recalls – The Most Interesting Man in the World, Condescending Willy Wonka, Success Kid, Be Like Bill, Grumpy Cat – and their success is noted in the millions of home-brewed variations they inspire.

  Pre-meme, but very much the same even if technology restricted it to words, and some individual, usually celebrated, was necessary to set it in motion, was the catchphrase, a form of lexical rather than visual earworm, which is one of a number of terms – catch-cry, catch-idea, catch-sound – all of which intend to ‘catch the eye, ear or fancy’.

  The OED suggests a first recorded use for catchphrase of ‘ante 1850’, and its second, in 1856, is already taking the judgemental high ground, suggesting that ‘Catch phrases of this kind are sufficient to satisfy the simple.’ The phrase in question is sadly left uncited, but the ‘satisfaction of the simple’, one might propose, has lain at the heart of the term, and its thousands of popular variations, ever since.

  According to Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Catch Phrases (1977, 1985) the use of these snappy references – sometimes a whole line, often literally no more than a phrase or even single word – has existed since the sixteenth century. Who knows: perhaps the great jesters capered before their lords and masters armed not merely with the obligatory stick-borne bladder, cap and bells, but with a much-loved one-liner, guaranteed to set the aristocratic audience giggling on cue. Perhaps, but the ‘modern’ catchphrase is very much tied into mass popular entertainment, and that means the music halls of the nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth century and the radio and TV shows (and even soaps: the Internet offers a ‘Dictionary of Catchphrases used on Coronation Street’) that have taken their place.

  They don’t even have to be spoken, or not out loud. Sherlock Holmes’ ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ definitely qualifies (for all that he never actually voiced the line in print); and Conan Doyle’s best-selling detective, of course, was a ‘popular entertainer’, in his way. Or Hercule Poirot, with his ‘little grey cells’. These phrasal trademarks qualify too. But the halls, the radio comedies, and latterly the sit-coms and quiz-shows, are the catchphrase’s true home and it is from them that the examples that follow almost invariably spring.

  Not just earworm, the catchphrase is essentially a verbal autograph. It ‘catches the ear’ but simultaneously comes over as a tiny but highly focused biography. What you hear is what you get. Usually this serves to announce, in shorthand as it were, the nature of the comic character, if not the actual comedian, on display. Hear Arthur Askey’s ‘Hello playmates’, Max Bygraves’ ‘I wanna tell you a story . . .’, Flanagan and Allen’s ‘Oi-Oi!’, Hylda Baker’s ‘She knows y’know’, or Billy Cotton’s ‘Wakey-wakey!’ and you knew exactly what was in store. On it goes, Ali G. offers ‘Is it ’cos I is black’, Arabella Weir ‘Does my bum look big in this?’, Catherine Tate ‘Does my face looked bovvered?’. Like a verbal/aural comfort blanket (or, the cynical might prefer, some Pavlovian bell) the catchphrase settles the audience down, ready for comfort and delight.

  Sometimes they’re all too real. George Formby Senior’s regular on-stage declaration, ‘Coughing well tonight’ was grimly true. The ‘Wigan Nightingale’ died, first collapsing onstage like a good trouper, of TB. Of course, they’re not obligatory: the Marx Brothers had no such easy identifiers; but at the same time their three distinct personas, evolving from three racial stereotypes (Jewish, Irish and Italian; the generally unfunny Zeppo presumably played the WASP) are ‘catchphrases’ in themselves. On other occasions it can extend to an entire vocabulary. The ageing chorus boys ‘Julian’ and ‘Sandy’ (Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams) of radio’s Round the Horne turned a century-old theatrical jargon (the Italian-cum-Romani Polari), with its bona and naff, thews and lallies, omipalones and lucoddies into what might be seen as the biggest catchphrase of the lot.

  Like the song (comic and/or sentimental) that as if by law once concluded every comic’s act, a catchphrase came with the job. The songs are largely gone (though Victoria Wood refused to let go, and Morecambe and Wise’s sign-off‘Give me sunshine’ was as much a catchphrase in itself as the oft-repeated ‘You can’t see the join’) but the need for the instant identification provided so conveniently by the catchphrase soldiers on. That they are as likely to spring from a quiz show (‘Come on down!’, ‘Nice to see you, to see you nice’; ‘Bernie, the bolt’, ‘Shut that door’ and ‘You’ll like this, not a lot’) as from a performance says as much about the contemporary role of the old-style ‘variety’ comic as the development of the phrases he or she uses. Sitcoms are equally productive. Dad’s Army was especially so: ‘You stupid boy’, ‘They don’t like it up ’em’, ‘We’re doomed, all doomed’, among others, but most of the great ones have something to offer. Till Death Us Do Part (‘Silly moo’), Are You Being Served (‘I’m free’), Blackadder (‘I have a cunning plan . . .’), Only Fools and Horses (‘Luvvly jubbly’), Steptoe and Son (‘You dirty old man’), One Foot in the Grave (‘I don’t believe it’). Then there are shows like Monty Python (‘And now for something completely different’) or even cartoons such as The Simpsons (‘Eat my shorts’) or South Park (‘They killed Kenny’). The list is long, the pantheon ever expanding. But expand it does. Every one – and there are hundreds necessarily unreprised here – a winner, yet paradoxically deracinated in chilly print. What’s so funny? the uninitiated might justifiably enquire, but for those who do know, what a panorama of delights they each and all unleash.

  The quiz shows and sitcoms, music-hall stars, radio and TV comics all use catchphrases, but on the whole they remain an adjunct to the greater performance. Two shows, fifty years apart, seem obsessed by the things: Tommy Handley’s 1940s’ ITMA (‘It’s That Man Again’) in which the very title was a catchphrase, and Paul Whitehouse’s late 1990s Fast Show. ITMA was awash with ‘characters’ and every one proclaimed their identificatory line: �
�After you Claude.’ ‘No, after you, Cecil.’ (the pair of ultra-chirpy broker’s men); ‘It’s being so cheerful keeps me going’ (Mona Lott); ‘Don’t forget the diver’ (culled from a real-life unfortunate, plying his trade at New Brighton pier-head); ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ (Mrs. Mopp). ITMA, following its own title, also produced the acronymic catchphrase, most obviously TTFN (subsequently appropriated by radio’s Jimmy Young): ‘ta-ta for now’. But if ITMA’s catchphrases were, so to speak, ‘serious’, then the Fast Show’s vast selection were far more ironic, a post-modern take on the whole thing that’s best summed up by Whitehouse’s cod-variety star Arthur Atkinson. His catchphrases, ‘How queer’ and ‘Have you seen my washboard missus?’ their absolute humourlessness followed invariably by the shot of an hysterical audience (apparently a genuine piece of music hall footage) dealt neatly and cruelly with the whole tradition. But even so, the Fast Show’s phrases rushed into the language: ‘Suits you, sir’; ‘Scorchio’; ‘Which is nice’; ‘This week I be mostly eating . . . ,’ ‘I’ll get me coat’ and the rest. People, stubbornly, simply didn’t get the joke. Or not the right one.