The mass of catchphrases are innately ephemeral. Tied to a show or a specific individual they live a relatively brief albeit definitely merry life, massively popular, on, it seems, every lip, only to vanish before the next crop of amusements. Like fashionable slang, they age too quickly for long-term retention. Take Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’, once omnivocalised, now a historical curiosity, the leitmotif of the Thatcher years.
You didn’t need modern media. The mid-nineteenth century was catchphrase heaven. Among them ‘all serene’, ‘go it you cripples (crutches are cheap)!’, ‘Jim along Josey’, ‘do you see any green in my eye?’, ‘who shot the dog?’ and ‘not in these boots’. The origins were various but they sprang mainly from the music hall and from popular plays. Some, however, had no obvious origin. Such was bender! which appears in 1812 and in effect meant bullshit! As defined in James Hardy Vaux’s Vocabulary of the Flash Language it was ‘an ironical word used in conversation by flash people; as where one party affirms or professes any thing which the other believes to be false or insincere, the latter expresses his incredulity by exclaiming bender! or, if one asks another to do any act which the latter considers unreasonable or impracticable, he replies, O yes, I’ll do it – bender; meaning, by the addition of the last word, that, in fact, he will do no such thing.’ An ancestor for modernity’s not. By 1835 bender has become over the bender, which apparently reflected a tradition that a declaration made over the (left) elbow as distinct from not over it need not be held sacred. The Victorians also used over the left, i.e. pointing with one’s right thumb over one’s left shoulder, implying disbelief.
Charles Mackay’s classic sociological study, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1841) was especially interested in the phenomenon of catchphrases. Aside from Partridge’s Dictionary, his study represents the great single concentration of the type. Mackay (1814–89) was a poet and journalist, who mixed such posts as that of the Times’ special correspondent during the American Civil War with the writing of song lyrics and of a wide variety of books, many on London or the English countryside. Memoirs deals with a variety of such delusions – among them religious relics, witch and tulip manias, the crusades and economic ‘bubbles’ – and in volume II turns to ‘Popular Follies in Great Cities’. These, it transpires, are catchphrases, which are ‘repeated with delight, and received with laughter, by men with hard hands and dirty faces—by saucy butcher lads and errand-boys—by loose women—by hackney coachmen, cabriolet drivers, and idle fellows who loiter at the corners of streets.’ He also notes that each one ‘seems applicable to every circumstance, and is the universal answer to every question; in short, it is the favourite slang phrase of the day, a phrase that, while its brief season of popularity lasts, throws a dash of fun and frolic-someness over the existence of squalid poverty and ill-requited labour, and gives them reason to laugh as well as their more fortunate fellows in a higher stage of society. London is peculiarly fertile in this sort of phrases, which spring up suddenly, no one knows exactly in what spot, and pervade the whole population in a few hours, no one knows how.’
His earliest example ‘though but a monosyllable, it was a phrase in itself’ was quoz, which dated back to the 1790s. It seemed to have come from quiz, an eccentric person or an odd-looking thing, and itself from Latin quis, who. As the New Vocal Enchantress put it in 1791: ‘Hey for buckish words, for phrases we’ve a passion / [. . .] / All have had their day, but now must yield to quoz.’ Like many such phrases he noted, quoz multi-tasked. It was all down to the user. ‘When vulgar wit wished to mark its incredulity, and raise a laugh at the same time, there was no resource so sure as this popular piece of slang. When a man was asked a favour which he did not choose to grant, he marked his sense of the suitor’s unparalleled presumption by exclaiming Quoz! When a mischievous urchin wished to annoy a passenger, and create mirth for his comrades, he looked him in the face, and cried out Quoz! and the exclamation never failed in its object. When a disputant was desirous of throwing a doubt upon the veracity of his opponent, and getting summarily rid of an argument which he could not overturn, he uttered the word Quoz, with a contemptuous curl of his lip and an impatient shrug of his shoulders.’
After quoz another monosyllable: walker! which worked as did bender! as an all-purpose teasing, dismissive exclamation which ‘was uttered with a peculiar drawl upon the first syllable, a sharp turn upon the last’. It was short-lived, maybe three months, but served ‘to answer all questions. In the course of time the latter word alone became the favourite’, and ‘if a lively servant girl was importuned for a kiss by a fellow she did not care about, she cocked her little nose, and cried “Walker!” If a dustman asked his friend for the loan of a shilling, and his friend was either unable or unwilling to accommodate him, the probable answer he would receive was, “Walker!” If a drunken man was reeling about the streets, and a boy pulled his coat-tails, or a man knocked his hat over his eyes to make fun of him, the joke was always accompanied by the same exclamation.’
Walker! shortened the slightly earlier Hookey walker! which otherwise functioned similarly. It came, said Jon Bee in 1823, from one John Walker, ‘an outdoor clerk’ at a firm in Cheapside; Walker had a hooked or crooked nose and was used by the ‘nobs of the firm’ to spy on his fellow employees. Those upon whom he spied naturally declared that his reports were nonsense and since they outnumbered him, they tended to prevail. Bee added that the word was accompanied by a gesture: ‘a significant upliftment of the hand and a crooking of the forefinger that [meant that] what is said is a lie, or is to be taken contrariwise’.
Bee’s slang-collecting successor, Hotten, suggested ‘a person named Walker, an aquiline-nosed Jew’ (this was an assumption based on a stereotype: nose aside, he came from Westmorland and seems wholly English) who exhibited an orrery ‘the Eidoranion’ along which he would take a sight, which action, when used in slang, was the equivalent of a dismissive gesture. It was explained as a gesture of derision, made by placing the thumb on the tip of one’s nose and spreading out the fingers like a fan; thus the double sight, the same gesture, intensified by joining the tip of the little finger to the thumb of the other hand, which in turn has its fingers extended fanwise. Failing all that dexterity, Walker! was attributed to a magistrate named Walker, complete with the requisite nose.
Mackay also offered bad hat, which he links to a London election in the borough of Southwark, c.1838, in which one of the candidates was well known as a hat-maker. As he campaigned he would single out any voter whose hat fell beneath the highest standards and declare: ‘What a shocking bad hat you have got, call at my warehouse and you shall have a new one.’ On the day of the election, as he gave his final speech, his opponents urged a hostile crowd to drown him out by chanting: ‘What a shocking bad hat!’ The phrase, first in its entirety, then reduced to ‘bad hat’, survived through the nineteenth century though it gradually declined through the first half of the twentieth. An alternative etymology attributes the phrase to the Duke of Wellington, who on his first visit to the Peers’ Gallery of the House of Commons remarked, on looking down on the members of the Reform Parliament: ‘I never saw so many shocking bad hats in my life.’
Used as a cry of delight, triumph or defiance Flare up (and join the union)! had a solid background. It referred to the fires that accompanied the Reform Riots of 1832, notably, as Mackay noted, in Bristol which ‘was nearly half burned by the infuriated populace’. The flames were said to have flared up in the devoted city. Whether there was anything peculiarly captivating in the sound, or in the idea of these words, is hard to say; but whatever was the reason, it tickled the mob fancy mightily, and drove all other slang out of the field before it. The phrase was hugely popular: ‘It answered all questions, settled all disputes, was applied to all persons, all things, and all circumstances, and became suddenly the most comprehensive phrase in the English language.’
Mackay also included Jim Crow, which is better known in its twentieth-century incarnation
as an adjective used to indicate racist laws. The name is found in an old Kentucky plantation song with the chorus ‘Jump Jim Crow’ and was hugely popularised when the ‘black face’ entertainer Thomas Dartmouth Rice performed it in Louisville in 1828. It crossed the Atlantic, along with Rice, who sang it at London’s Adelphi theatre in 1836, in a ‘farcical Burletta’ [i.e. short comic opera] entitled ‘A Flight to America, or, Twelve Hours in New York’. The lexicographer Schele De Vere, writing in 1871, saw it as pure Americana: ‘We have no ballad and no song that can be called American. The nearest approach [. . .] was the dramatic song Jim Crow, brought out about the year 1835 by an enthusiastic Yankee on the boards of a theatre in New York; it created a sensation, for it was new in form and conception, and no doubt rendered still more attractive by the strange guise in which it was presented. [. . .] For a time this African inroad drove nearly every other song from the publisher’s store and the drawing-room.’
Mackay was not amused, and termed it ‘a vile song’. Rice ‘sang his verses in appropriate costume, with grotesque gesticulations, and a sudden whirl of his body at the close of each verse. It took the taste of the town immediately, and for months the ears of orderly people were stunned by the senseless chorus – “Turn about and wheel about, / And do just so— / Turn about and wheel about, / And jump, Jim Crow”.’
There he goes with his eye out! (which could also take the female ‘she’ and ‘her’) was one of a number of exclamations aimed at such passers-by as the speaker found amusing. Mackay was unimpressed, and termed the phrase ‘most preposterous. Who invented it, how it arose, or where it was first heard, are alike unknown. Nothing about it is certain, but that for months it was the slang par excellence of the Londoners, and afforded them a vast gratification. “There he goes with his eye out!” or “There she goes with her eye out!” [. . .] was in the mouth of everybody who knew the town. The sober part of the community were as much puzzled by this unaccountable saying as the vulgar were delighted with it. The wise thought it very foolish, but the many thought it very funny, and the idle amused themselves by chalking it upon walls, or scribbling it upon monuments.’
Similar shouts were framed as questions. Does your mother know you’re out? ‘was the provoking query addressed to young men of more than reasonable swagger, who smoked cigars in the streets, and wore false whiskers to look irresistible’. In other words, young men who claimed the affectations of manhood without having earned them by age. It was much used by women who wished to counter an impertinent male gaze, and many a leering youngster was ‘reduced at once into his natural insignificance by the mere utterance of this phrase’.
Still with mum, we find Has your mother sold her mangle? (a foretaste of the later, and inescapably if unquantifiably suggestive if not exactly obscene How’s your mother off for dripping? a phrase that some claim is the correct response to the traditional Cockney greeting Wotcher cock). The mangle can be extended by ‘and bought a piano’ or the query: ‘does your mother keep a mangle?’ This ‘impertinent and not universally apposite query’ gained, in Mackay’s words, only a ‘brief career’, being ‘not of that boisterous and cordial kind which ensures a long continuance of favour’. Its problem, he felt, was that you couldn’t use it to old people, whose mothers had long passed on.
Seemingly simple was who are you? which was delivered aggressively and met with an equally aggressive response, ‘who are you?’ Whether this led to fights is not recorded. Mackay told how ‘this new favourite, like a mushroom, seems to have sprung up in a night, or, like a frog in Cheapside, to have come down in a sudden shower. One day it was unheard, unknown, uninvented; the next it pervaded London. Every alley resounded with it; every highway was musical with it.’ A multipurpose line, it applied to anything the speaker wished.
MLE: A Speech of Many Colours
TO CONCLUDE, AND to bring us to what passes for slang’s current cutting edge, a story about immigration and its triumph. It is about young black Britons, their language, and the changes that language has wrought on the larger world. Not the whole world, but that of their contemporaries, irrespective of colour. It is not about the black slang that comes from America and has been increasingly important throughout the twentieth century, although that variety will play a part. And just as Black-America’s powerful role in world-wide popular culture, notably through music, helped spread that slang, then popular culture, again spearheaded by music, plays its part in this British phenomenon.
To go forward, we must first look back.
In 2006, barely ten years ago, those who follow such interests in the nation’s media might have seen, emerging as if from nowhere, that the speech of London, that eternal linguistic melting-pot, had been augmented by a new ingredient. An extra verbal spice, born as such things tend to be in the tropics – or at least their proxy reincarnations in such immigrant-dense areas as Bow and Brixton. It came with a name: Jafaikan, which seemed to be a journalistic invention, which neat and punning blend combined the proper name Jamaican and the dismissive adjective fake. The Guardian, hot on the multi-culti bandwagon, referenced television’s Ali G. and offered readers the chance to ‘learn jafaikan in two minutes’, and in the way of half a millennium’s slang expositors, offered both a short glossary and a few sample sentences: ‘You lookin buff in dem low batties. Dey’s sick man. Me. I’m just jammin wid me bruds. Dis me yard, innit? Is nang, you get me? No? What ends you from then?’
It was left to the estimable Michael Quinion, the Oxford etymologist behind the website World Wide Words to make a little sense. Jafaikan did not refer to a language or a youth dialect but was a London slang term used by working-class black teens to deride their middle-class, though equally black peers, posing, just like the equivalent white wiggas, wannabes and waspafarians, as hardcore proles, all the way from Trenchtown with a Rasta tam, waist-length dreads and a spliff-ful of sensimilia. The earliest recorded example of the word was just two years earlier.
There was, certainly, a form of language, but it had quite another name. Quinion explained that ‘a team of linguists are investigating this emerging speech form. They prefer the neutral term Multicultural London English (MLE).’ He quoted Professor Paul Kerswill, who had noted that ‘A clear new vernacular is emerging in inner London, linking ethnicities, and forging shared identities – often around music like rap, hip-hop, grime or bangra.’ There were certain changes in pronunciation, notably the shortening of traditional London vowel sounds, and the diminished stress of the Cockney’s trademark, the glottal stop. It also appeared that MLE was overtaking the last ‘new’ London language: Estuary English, itself a mix of standard English and traditional Cockney pronunciation and vocabulary, and spoken by an older generation as their rejection of ‘pure’ cockney.
The Jafaikan bubble, being pretty much a journalistic invention, duly burst. MLE did not. It took root, strengthened and spread. At the moment it is the default speech of young Londoners and it may be that since the young grow older and take their speech patterns with them, it may move beyond the current identification with a single generation.
MLE, in language terms, is just one more way-station in the progress of London speech. It may still be relatively new, and created by a young, black population, but it is a logical extension rather than an anomaly. Londoners have always spoken multi-culturally. Standard English is a mongrel tongue, as is the counter-language, slang. The three hundred languages now spoken in London’s schools represent a relatively modern development, but immigrants – one may start with the last invaders, the Normans of 1066, or go back to Angles, Saxons and after them Danes – have always played a role in forming first England, then Britain and its language.
The city had known a tiny black population for centuries, but it had been primarily imported either as servants or, occasionally, as flesh-and-blood souvenirs of distant lands, brought home by explorers and paraded before gawping Londoners. They can be seen in Hogarth’s illustrations and in grander paintings. Dr Johnson’s black servant F
rancis Barber was well known to the great man’s friends, and Johnson’s main inheritor. Francis Grose, in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) noted a few ‘negroe’ terms, although these were from the plantations. In a Cruikshank illustration for Pearce Egan’s Life in London (1821) where Tom and Jerry, slumming in an East End gin shop, meet Black Sal, resplendent in her spotted yellow skirt, five of the gin shop’s dozen customers (plus one babe-in-arms) are black. Compared to the major immigrant arrivals – Irish, Jews – the numbers remained limited, but by 1919 black Britons existed in large enough numbers to inspire the country’s first race riots, focused on ports where a black population, abandoning the ships they had crewed, had accumulated and expanded. The real turning point, and the arrival of a substantial number of what would become Black Britons, came after World War II.
After that war successive governments began looking outside England for new workers to help the steadily improving economy of the 1950s which could no longer be serviced by the indigenous population. They began recruiting in the Commonwealth, notably in the islands of the West Indies, and found that the black populations were more than willing to make the journey. They barely needed the alluring government invitations. England was ‘the mother country’, many of them spoke its language, worshipped in the same church, experienced the same education. Home life was often hard and even the skilled and the middle class saw England as a land of opportunity.
They did not, as yet, impinge on English speech. If they spoke slang, which for most listeners would in any case have been hard to distinguish from island patois, they kept it to themselves. For the first decade it was a mainly male society, and without women there were no children and without children far less cross-cultural mixing. Such immigrant narratives as the Trinidadian Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), which did offer their language, remained rare and looked inward. If Selvon uses slang terms, such as boldface, to pose as braver than one is, old-talk, to gossip or kiff-kiff, first-rate, over half are island-based, and there is no sense that the whites with whom his characters worked and sometimes socialised picked them up. The better-known Colin MacInnes, another immigrant but white and Australian, while embracing the culture, especially in City of Spades (1957), gives no particular linguistic insights (although he seems to be the first to print the insult raasclat, literally ‘arse-cloth’ and thus a sanitary towel). Nor is MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners (1959), while focused squarely on a much poorer, multicultural Notting Hill than today’s wealthy ghetto, and reaching its climax in the race riots of 1959, especially revelatory. MacInnes offers around two hundred terms, but there is no real sense of an especially youthful, let alone black lexis.
The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human Page 27