A decade later there was little sense of change. Black slang had arrived in the UK, but it was very much African-American. The lexis of the urban ghetto had undoubtedly infiltrated, even dominated the language of first beats and then hippies. But hippie slang – heavy, outasight, uptight, cool – whether it realised or not, was a direct decsendant of an established African-American lexis and filtered through America’s mainly white ‘counter-culture’. There was no discernible Caribbean input.
Only with the early-Seventies’ appearance of reggae, spearheaded by Bob Marley, did a new variety of black slang start to gain a foothold. Anyone who knew Marley’s lyrics soon knew Babylon, the Rastaman term for the police in particular and the ‘downpressing’ Western society in general. Other terms would follow, even if they still sounded absurd on white lips, typically Marley’s use of Rastafarianisms such as I and I (me) and the adjectives dread or irie (both meaning excellent). The work of the Brixton-based poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, appearing in the late Seventies, revealed more terms – among them juke, to stab, mauger, thin (from French maigre), yout, both a young man and a generic for the increasingly disaffected community of young working-class Black Britons – but it was Johnson’s heavily accented delivery that was as potent an indicator of the arena in which he worked as was his vocabulary. The races, even those who were educated in the same schools, remained in parallel. Punks enjoyed black music; ironically so did the overtly racist skinheads who had picked up on Jamaica-made ska and bluebeat in the Sixties. The dreadlocked Don Letts – whose father had been a celebrated sound-system operator – was a favourite punk DJ, but there was no sense of linguistic blending.
Such moments are always hard to pin down, and nothing in language, even slang, happens ‘overnight’. The concept was yet to emerge, let alone the name, but if there is a moment when MLE, even in embryo, seems to be emerging, then it comes in 1985, with the release of the record ‘Cockney Translation’ by black British dancehall DJ Smiley Culture. His birth name was David Emmanuel, he was the son of a Jamaican father and Guyanese mother, and born in Stockwell, next door to the black centre of Brixton in South London. On one level it was what the music business sidelined as a novelty song, the lyrics laying out a bilingual glossary of words used by young Cockney tearaways and their black peers.
For instance:
Say cockney fire shooter, We bus’gun
Cockney say tea leaf, We say sticks man
You know dem have wedge while we have corn
Say cockney say be first, my son! We just say Gwan!
Smiley Culture was perhaps the first songwriter to put black and white slang in the same place. Yet there is still no suggestion of crossover. His whole point is difference, and as the singer pointed out, ‘Cockney Translation’ was meant as a social tourist guide, even a survival mechanism.
In an essay in 1955 Colin MacInnes had coined the phrase ‘Young England, Half-English’. The young England in question had been the pop singer Tommy Steele and his fans; the other ‘half’ was America. A music-hall fan with a romantic view of what constituted popular entertainment, MacInnes was lamenting American influence, but unconsciously and with quite a different focus, the phrase was prescient. American influence would only increase, but what would form MLE was a blurring between the two varieties of English young: native white and immigrant black. In Cut ‘n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music, the social commentator Dick Hebdige suggested that ‘In some parts of Britain, West Indian patois has become the public language of inner-city youths, irrespective of their racial origin,’ and wondered whether ‘Perhaps there is another nation being formed for the future beyond the boundaries of race. If that nation can’t yet be visualised, then it can perhaps be heard in the rhythms of the airwaves, in the beat that binds together histories, cultures, new identities.’
Black was cool (even if that word seemed to have started off at Eton, the most elite of all British schools). A knowledge was desirable and if one couldn’t change race, then one could learn the necessary language. If the Eighties and even more the Nineties offered London’s white speakers a way into blackness, it was via what the linguists called code-switching. Not between class but between colour. A switch that was encouraged not so much by homegrown music, but by the new and increasingly powerful agency of what began as hip-hop and moved on, as what had begun as disco-originated party music transformed into something far angrier – not to mention slangier – with the advent of gangsta rap. The source, in common with that of most slang since World War II, was America.
Kanye West, as yet to move beyond his role as a highly successful rap star and talking in 2006, described the white man’s fascination with black speech as ‘diction addiction’ and joked that there should be an obligatory moratorium of twelve months before white teens were allowed to start using the ghetto’s latest coinages. It was far too late. Nothing epitomised the white incorporation of this black culture more than the character Ali G. created by the white, Jewish, Cambridge-educated UK comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. Ali G., the ‘voice of da yoof’, came not from the mean ghetto streets but from the dormitory town of Staines, outside London. The character, self-styled leader of the ‘West Staines Massive’, debuted on TV in 1998; eventually there would be a movie. The joke was that he saw himself as black, dressing like a rapper, brandishing gang signs and speaking accordingly. His scripts were seeded with the ogligatory clichés: big up yaself, booyaka, for real, punanny, chill, batty boy, respect, wa’g’waan and most ironically, keep it real. The references, despite batty-boy (a homosexual) and punanny (the vagina), both staples of Jamican sexual ‘slackness’, and the greeting wa’g’waan, looked to the States.
MLE, however, is innately British, and fundamentally London, although it has been suggested that in other cities, where the immigrant community arrived from areas other than the Caribbean, there is a sprinkling of terms that reflect those origins, typically the appearance of Somali terms in Cardiff. The language of the Caribbean, and particularly of Jamaica, remains central. Smiley Culture notwithstanding, its more immediate roots lie in the language of a wholly British creation: grime, a musical style that appeared, at least for the wider public, in 2002. Like other youth slangs, music, or more properly the lyrics that accompany it has provided the primary impulsion for its adoption. If MLE has had a single driving engine, then this is it. Grime, most easily, if inaccurately, described as British hip-hop or British rap draws on a variety of roots. There is rap itself, of course, but more locally there is UK garage (pronounced ‘garridge’) and West Indian dancehall. It came out of East London, particularly Bow, E8 – an area that was regularly name-checked in its early lyrics – and was initially promoted via the flourishing world of pirate radio stations, often broadcasting a mere few hours per week on kit thrown together in tower-block apartments and just as quickly dismantled before the police arrived. It enjoyed various names: 8-bar (which referred to the verse patterns) and Nu Shape (with more complex 16- and 32-bar patterns). It could also be Dark Garage, Sub-Lo, One-Step or Esky or Eskibeat (with a nod to slang’s veteran term ‘cool’) which blended in dance and electro styles and was created by Wiley (Richard Cowie), who alongside Dizzee Rascal (Dylan Mills) – perhaps the most successful of all its stars, and now a far more mainstream performer – was the first to move the form from the underground to a wider audience.
Grime remained underground for fifteen years. Where American rap conquered the world, following in a succession of black-driven musics, grime seemed too insular, too London. Too grimy. As of 2016 that may have changed. That year’s Mercury Prize (for best album in the UK and Ireland) was won by one of the style’s best-known stars, Skepta (Joseph Junior Adenuga) who to the alleged horror of millions locked into their protracted mourning, pipped the late David Bowie to this particular post. Grime, so long a friendless, grubby Cinderella, appeared to have met its Prince Charming. Its fifteen minutes of fame seemed finally to have arrived.
Like all slangs MLE is not a language as s
uch, other than in the very broadbrush definition of its being a form of communication. It has no grammatical rules, and again like slang, is essentially a vocabulary. It need not be the sole slang in a given context. A lyric from Skinnyman (Alexander Holland; Leeds-born, but north London raised), ‘Little Man’ (2004), set in prison, mixes MLE – parro, feds, blud – with terms such as lockdown, hang up and sweatbox, that are strictly prison-orginated (and all Americanisms).
It may be poised to move beyond its limits, but compared with the world-conquering juggernaut of mainstream rap, grime has remained a niche creation, still not so far removed from the hand-distributed tapes and on-on-one DJ ‘battles’ that typified its early incarnation. It is very much home-grown, not least in its rejection or at least side-stepping of the celebration of bling that typifies its American cousin. There is no concept of ‘ghetto fabulous’. The lyrics underline the problems of life – unemployment, police harassment, gang warfare, racial prejudice. The overriding emotion, as punk’s Sex Pistols put it thirty years before, is ‘no future’. It has been described as music put together by the young for themselves. It uses their language, which means MLE.
Breaking down the MLE lexis, the primary strands are Jamaican speech, rap and Cockney. In addition there is a strong showing from contemporary black and white youth coinages. My own database offers around 250 terms, which is representative rather than comprehensive, and as with all slang new material keeps appearing, even if it tends to focus on the usual thematic suspects. Even within slang, it represents a reasonably narrow spectrum. The preoccupations of young men: money (but less overt self-congratulation than touted in America), drugs, girls, friends and enemies, insults, violence and weapons, music and its performance, clothes, the police. There are certain phrases – allow it (as in let it pass, forget it), true dat, all good, get me? – but few abstracts other than terms that can be loosely qualifed as good and bad. On the whole emotions are absent. This is neither praiseworthy nor reprehensible: it is very much according to slang’s long-established paradigm, within a further subset delineated by rap/grime. It is the world of the street, the world of article-less road, a self-defensive, cover-your-arse, all-against-all existence. Grime lyrics reflect what the white performer Skinnyman neatly expressed as ‘a council estate of mind’.
Aggression, whether or not it leads to actual violence, seems to play the largest part, followed by sex, or at least the assessment of young women, and by money and drugs. The aggression may be a pose, and like rap, grime’s lyrics are filled with exaggeration and boasting, but it is inescapable and as retailed by the young writers is based on lived experience on the street. One’s default mode is the screwface, which dates to 1970s Jamaica. Bob Marley’s Talkin’ Blues (1974) tells how he has been ‘down on the rock so long / I seem to wear a permanent screw’ and in 1973 his band, the Wailers, released a track called ‘Screwface’. It was explained as ‘the custom of grimacing fiercely in order to unsettle nighttime bushwhackers who preyed on those caught in shantytown’.
Insults include wasteman (plus wastewoman, wastegash or plain waste) which suggests a waste of time or space, pussyhole (i.e. cunt), poomplex or the long-established clown, joker, snake (which as a verb means cheat) and dickhead. A shower or showerman is a show-off though there is a positive definition: a success. Fascio, from Jamaica, is specifically a male homosexual, but can be used more widely, in the same way as gay. The term is either an elision of ‘fuck ass’ or linked to Jamaican fas, fassy, dirty. There is chief, which seems to play on the stereotyping of Native Americans as stupid, and works as a verb, meaning to insult or humiliate. Other terms for insult include burn, bury, brush or rip which has meant infuriate in Australia since the 1940s and the long-established cuss. To dis, which is seen as a coinage of the 1980s but can be found as long ago as 1905, and then in Australia, is to disrespect. Beef, which goes back to the late nineteenth century and is probably rooted in an even earlier form, the cry of hot beef! or stop thief!, is an argument. One can be boyed (treated like a child) or had up, hotted, and if one loses one’s temper one switches. Negatives, whether for people, objects or experiences offer bait, dark, raw, deadout, wack (a rap staple), faastie, probably from fuss though its Jamaican origins may include Surinam Creole fiesti, nasty, swag, deep. To be begging is to be talking nonsense, which can be fuckery, air, jokes or far, with its implication that something is figuratively too far away or too much of a hassle to consider. The sycophant is up on your balls while an irritating person is up in your hair.
All of which remains verbal. Real violence, up to and including murder, has its own vocabulary. A gang rival is a pagan, which suggests a certain religious faith in one’s own side, or opp, as in opponent or opposition. Armed gang warfare is the punning armshouse, and a gun can be a biscuit (one of many terms that also means penis, though the link to gun is unstated; perhaps one ‘snaps’ them both), a bucky (thus buck, to shoot and bucked, shot), a gat (from the Gatling gun and coined in 1897) and a skeng, which covers knives too; a knife is a bora, i.e. ‘borer’. The origins of skeng are unknown, but Caribbean English skengay, a form of music in which the guitar sounds are seen as mimicking those of gunfire, has been suggested. Bullets are corn (whether from a resemblance to an ear of corn or because they are scattered), while a gun that has been used in a (fatal) shooting is haunted. To shoot is to light up (the flash, but the phrase has meant attack or beat since 1970), to lick off (from lick, to hit), to spray (i.e with shots), to burst and to bust a cap (found in 1866, but dormant for the next century). Perhaps the key word is merk or murk, which can mean to murder, but also to beat figuratively, i.e. surpass, to humiliate or to act aggressively. Merked can also mean very drunk, while merky is aggressive, which can also be act-up. The etymology is arguable: some opt for murky, dark, while others, claiming the spelling to be merc, link it to a gun-for-hire mercenary though this spelling is not recorded in MLE or rap. To fight or beat up is to scuff, beat, rush or work (a weaker use of the 1970s put in work, to go out killing). To rob is to jack, from hijack, and a jacker a robber and jack move a wild, foolish, eccentric move or type of behaviour; a rudeboy a young gansgter, a mashman a thug and ninja, tough. A core term is stoush, variously defined as arrogant or stuck-up and which seems to come from ostentatious, by way of slang’s stocious which also means stuck-up, but also well-dressed and stylish, and physically attractive. (It does not, despite appearances, have links to Australia’s stoush, a fight or to hit, which comes from the dialect stashie, a quarrel or, an uproar.)
This is a language of young men and there is no suggestion that their attitudes to women have moved on from slang’s inevitable sexism. Women exist as sex objects, or worse, fail to make that cut. There is the usual double-standard and what is defined as ‘promiscuous’ is only what the boys want to believe. To have sex is to wok or wuk (from the older work and which like fuck enjoys an echoic sense of flesh slapping flesh), to knock boots, beat, hit the sack (from the 1930s and less excitingly simply go to bed) or juice, and juice up means to excite while jiggy means ‘hot to trot’. If sensible one wears a hat, from America’s jimmy hat, a condom (the jimmy being the penis as is the bone). Intercourse is lash, yet another example of slang’s essential definition of the act: man hits woman. Attractive girls include the beanie (from ‘keen as a bean’?) and four-by-four, and sexy or attractive brings in gritty, tromp, choong, criss (i.e. crisp), trueing, with suggestions of faithfulness, buff and fly. Fine, equally attractive, has been used since the 1930s, but can be found as far back as the early eighteenth century.
There is the much-publicised on fleek, which as simple fleek emerged around 2000 to mean admirable, but came into its own as a phrase in 2014. Perhaps its greatest importance is that unlike so much slang, we can trace its origins to a specific moment: a Vine video produced by an American girl, Peaches Monroe, and uploaded to the Internet on 21 June 2014. What was on fleek was her carefully groomed eyebrows, but the term quickly expanded to mean, as long as it was positive, whatever the u
ser wished.
Booty (literally the buttocks) or brud mean a girl, usually seen sexually but not invariably; the root is breed and breeded up means pregnant. The same goes for tings, i.e. ‘things’ and less than congratulatory (and thing has been used to sidestep direct references to both vagina and penis for centuries). Definitely sexual are the link and the live blanket, both seeing the girl as a partner in intercourse, when one is on the link, and to wife is to have a sexual relationship. Gash has meant females (including prostitutes) since the 1910s, but can be found as a crudely physical description of the vagina from the 1780s. Unequivocally critical are junz, yat or yatty, sket or sketel (perhaps from skittle, which ‘falls over easily’ and was the nickname of Catherine ‘Skittles’ Walters, mistress of Edward VII, Louis Napoleon and several other grandees), all of whom are condemned as promiscuous, pancoot (perhaps from the Caribbean pan cart, a wheelbarrow, i.e. something large and inelegant) is simply ugly. Shyst is promiscuous and aggressive with it, perhaps the word we need is ‘independent’, though the origins may lie in feisty.
The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human Page 28