Vulgar Tongues

by Max Décharné

  That’s a word I’d never use, respect. I don’t even know what that means. Well, I do – but I’ve never respected anybody or anything in all my born days. It’s not something you do or feel in my walk of life. And I’ll expect to go to the grave not having been respected in turn. You can live without it. It’s dying out everywhere.

  Fine sentiments, but as predictions go, unfortunately it fell at the first hurdle.

  Speaking of respect, the word bitch has been slung around as an insult in the English-speaking world since before Shakespeare’s time. In his 1969 book Soul on Ice, Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver reflected on his own habitual use of the word in a letter from prison to his girlfriend:

  I have a bad habit, when speaking of women while only men are present, of referring to women as bitches. This bitch this and this bitch that, you know.

  Cleaver’s book had a political intent, whereas the following year a series of crime novels of a more light-hearted nature began appearing, featuring a black private eye named Superspade who exudes a natural scent that somehow makes him irresistible to women. The language which runs through each of the books is a hip mixture of mostly current black slang. In the first, Death of a Blue-eyed Soul Brother (1970), the ultra-groovy hero turns a woman down with the words, ‘Later, baby. Put those fire buns on ice. One of these days it’ll be party time like you won’t believe.’ She angrily responds by saying, ‘It will be cold in the hell of your mama’s grave when I ask you again!’ to which Superspade says, ‘Don’t play the dozens with me, bitch.’

  The dozens, sometimes known as the dirty dozens, was an escalating round of insults traded back and forth between people in an argument – a term which dated back decades. Jelly Roll Morton recorded an unexpurgated version of the song ‘The Dirty Dozen’ when being interviewed by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1938, preserving lines he had learned around thirty years earlier in the Storyville district of New Orleans. Anyone who has noted the fact that hip-hop music is occasionally prone to using swear words – or indeed Fur Q, if he was in search of further lyrical inspiration – might also like to investigate Morton’s rendition, which begins, you dirty motherfucker, you old cocksucker and continues on from there.

  The Superspade novels appeared under the name B. B. Johnson, and on the rear of the first in the series, there was a cool author photo of a man of about twenty-five with a neatly trimmed Afro, wraparound shades and the overall look of a studious member of the Panthers. The only information given alongside it said, ‘“B. B. Johnson” is the pseudonym for one of Hollywood’s most talented and creative black personalities.’ Indeed it was – but he was not the man in the photograph. The real author was in fact fifty-five-year-old jazz songwriter Joe Greene, whose illustrious career included writing slang-inflected material for bandleader Stan Kenton – such as the tragic tale of one woman’s search for accommodation, ‘I’m Going Mad For A Pad’ (1944) – as well as hits for artists like the Mills Brothers, Louis Jordan and Ray Charles. No wonder he had a wide range of slang at his fingertips when writing his crime novels. Death of a Blue-eyed Soul Brother was published the same year that another black private dick, John Shaft, hit the bookstands as the titular star of the novel by Ernest Tidyman – one difference, of course, being that Shaft’s story was filmed the following year, accompanied by a magnificent Isaac Hayes soundtrack. Another incidental difference was that the author of the latter book was white.

  Indie band, indie dustbin

  GROWING UP IN BRITAIN in the late 1960s and then the 1970s, if you wanted to hear the new music, Radio One was still the dominant force, and on television Top of the Pops provided the weekly fix of chart music, its name sounding like a relic of a bygone era, within just a few years of its 1964 debut. Music genres arrived and then fragmented or mutated, and terminology became a badge of inclusion by which various scenes defined themselves. Some people moved easily from one genre onto the next in a seemingly logical progression – there were glam rock teenyboppers in 1971 who would then have called themselves punks in 1977, and a proportion of those further realigned themselves by the start of the 1980s under the name goth. This last term was a response to both the subject matter of the songs and the black clothes worn on the scene, which on occasion drew inspiration from classic post-war Hammer films, and also the Gothic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries. As slang, however, goth already had a venerable history; consider the following, from Farmer & Henley’s Slang and Its Analogues (1890), in which the association derives not from vampires and Gothic churchyards, but rather the Visigoth army who sacked Rome in the year 410:

  GOTH – A frumpish or uncultured person; one behind the times or ignorant of the ways of society.

  Goth was, and remains, a distinct scene unto itself, but much of the guitar music of the last thirty-five years has been filed under the catch-all term indie music – a phrase which by the end of the 1990s had become so debased that a further category, indie landfill, was developed in order to cover a multitude of generic, often record-company-promoted faceless guitar bands who had clearly spent more time combing their hair for the obligatory promotional video than in writing any kind of memorable material. The word indie surfaced in the late 1970s UK punk explosion, initially denoting independent record labels such as Chiswick, Stiff and Rough Trade on modest budgets, as opposed to major labels such as CBS or EMI. Punk fanzines like Ripped & Torn published their own charts as a way of nailing their colours to the mast, giving space to singles and LPs which were sometimes selling in their hundreds rather than tens of thousands. Then the music industry caught on, and the first official indie chart was published in 1980. As that decade progressed, it became common to refer to the kind of bands signed to these labels as indie bands, but by the early 1990s it was becoming hard to define what the word even meant. For example, a new band called Oasis could be seen topping the indie charts with the song ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ in October 1993, despite having signed to the Creation label just after half of the company had been bought by that well-known struggling indie concern Sony Music, the second-largest music company in the world.

  In 1997, Noel Gallagher of Oasis was famously pictured at Downing Street shaking hands with new prime minister Tony Blair, a man who had apparently once harboured rock ambitions back in the 1970s. This was just one example of the Blair government’s various attempts to court the youth vote, and in 2003 another involved the issuing of a radio advert aimed at teenagers, which tried to speak to them in their own slang. For this, the government was roundly mocked, not only in the media, but also in Parliament, when Michael Howard put the following question to Tony Blair, as Hansard reports:

  I have the text [of the advert] here, and it says: ‘You cough up zip ’til you’re blingin”, which, as the Prime Minister will know, means, ‘You pay nothing until you’re in the money.’ The advertisement is promoting the Government’s policy on student funding, which has yet to pass the House of Commons. Does the Prime Minister approve of that?

  To be fair, other politicians had been down this route before, such as David Steele, MP, who featured as vocalist on a 1982 proto-rap single, ‘I Feel Liberal, Alright’ (1982), and the compliment has now been returned, with the rise of a style known as chap-hop, in which people in tweeds such as Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer freestyle over a banjulele accompaniment barbed songs of political comment such as ‘They Don’t Allow Rappers in the Bullingdon’ (2012).

  Eighteen-year-olds today have the chance to be into techno, post-rock, hardcore, acid house, happy house, ragamuffin, death metal, thrash metal, dancehall, go-go, straight-edge, punk-funk, dubstep, trance, jungle, emo, grime, psych-rock, drum & bass, grunge, prog, UK garage, Balearic beat, Krautrock and many, many more genres and sub-genres. Some have their own phrases and slang, but others are more rhythm-based, with language playing a secondary role.

  Whereas in the past a particular genre often had a very strong, tribal sense of identity, these days some bands manage to encompass five or six apparently conflic
ting genres in the course of one album, which of course makes the music journalist’s job linguistically tricky, and also that of the fans, when trying to describe their taste in music. Here, to take a recent example, is a line from John Mulvey of Uncut’s review of the album Total Freedom by Spacin’ (2016), which employs a variety of slang terms from various decades: ‘A fetishistically scuzzy psych-boogie band, whose choogles often accumulate a near-mantric, motorik intensify’.

  Boogie, of course, has a venerable history, and psychedelia has been around since the sixties. There is no entry in the OED for choogle (or chooglin’, as it was often written in the 1970s), but it was a mainstay of music reviews back in those days as a way of describing a kind of easy-rolling playing. The word was popularised by Credence Clearwater Revival with a track on their Bayou Country LP (1969), entitled ‘Keep On Chooglin’ (although in their case chooglin’ was a slang term for sex). What particularly helps identify the description of Spacin’ as modern is the unexpected combination of the word chooglin’ with that of motorik (literally motor activity in German, but coined in this sense by journalists attempting to describe the machine-like 4/4 beat used by bands such as Neu! and Kraftwerk). That all these words can now be combined to label just one band shows how fluid the situation has become, musically and linguistically.

  Of course, everything is cyclical. The trend among hip-hop artists and fans for wearing baseball caps backwards on the head might look like a development of recent decades, but reversing flat caps was common in pre-First-World-War England among young motorists with an urge for speed, who were known as scorchers, the object being to look as if you had been travelling at great velocity. ‘It is quite reasonable that an outcry should be made against the scorching motor fiend,’ wrote Ferdinand Long in the Daily Express in 1903. ‘It is the goggle-eyed scorcher who presents a real menace to the earth’s population, lamp-posts, trees, houses, etc.’ Whether it be reversed headgear as a way of winding up straight society or defining your style, not to mention newspapers decrying the excesses of youthful drivers, most things have been done before.

  It used to be that music slang, like music styles, came into fashion and then eventually gave way to the new, so that hip supplanted hep, fab was suddenly no longer gear, and saying groovy eventually became seriously ungroovy. No longer. Everything is in fashion simultaneously, and what passes for good taste in music these days can either look like open-mindedness, or no taste at all.

  As things stand, to paraphrase Sun Tzu, if you wait long enough by the river, the bodies of every supposedly outdated trendy word and musical movement will eventually come floating by.

  ELEVEN

  UNIFORM PATTERNS OF SPEECH

  The disappearin’ view of a racehorse

  IN BRITAIN, UNTIL THE LATER 1980s, if a tabloid had run a headline saying ‘PC GONE MAD’, it would have meant that a police constable had lost the plot, embarked on a rampage or otherwise blown a fuse. No longer.

  Of course, the term PC in its original context is not slang, but simply a proper name for the ordinary rank-and-file police constable in the UK. However, over the years, officers of all countries have been called many other names, not all of them complimentary. It comes with the job, as local Florida official Sheriff Haskins calmly explains to Simon Templar in the crime novel The Saint in Miami (1940):

  ‘Son,’ he said, ‘I’ve been compared to everything from the disappearin’ view of a racehorse at Tropical Park to havin’ my maw never find out what my paw’s last name was. It ain’t never got a rise out of me.’

  There have been slang names for the police in Britain since before there was even a properly constituted force, and it was not until 1829 that the Metropolitan Police was founded. People known as constables had existed in one form or another in England since the 14th century, whose duty was to help keep order in the parish, but they were not part of some larger, organised body. Over here, police forces in general were believed to be the kind of thing used by despotic foreign rulers to subjugate their peoples, and the idea of setting up anything of that kind was bitterly resisted until the early 19th century. Nevertheless, in Stuart and Georgian times, the criminal community were well aware that assorted watchmen and parish constables were sometimes patrolling the night. If apprehended in London, the culprit would likely be sent for a course of study in ‘Whittinton’s Colledge’ – a stay in Newgate prison, so called because London mayor Richard Whittington (c. 1354–1423) not only endowed a college but also rebuilt Newgate – to then be ‘strictly examin’d at the Old-Baily, before taking their highest Degrees near Hyde-Park Corner’ (being hanged at Tyburn). These ironic descriptions are taken from a publication called Memoirs of the Right Villainous John Hall, the Late Famous and Notorious ROBBER, Penn’d from his own MOUTH sometime before his DEATH (1714), which also includes the line ‘out jump Four Truncheon Officers’, which in this case is a slang term for some of the guards at Newgate, but still suggestive of things to come. There were a few law-and-order words listed in the short cant dictionary which formed part of this book – cuffin, a justice, harminbeck, a constable, and scout, a watchman – but in essence this was still a pre-police world, in which many of the criminals who were caught seemed to be the ones who loitered afterwards at the scene of the crime, or remained in their usual neighbourhoods, when some discreet fleeing might have been the better option.

  Nabbed by the grunters

  CONSTABLE AND OFFICER HAVE LONG been respectable names for the police, but the other variants employed by the general public, and sometimes the officers themselves, have generally been slang nicknames, ranging from the cosily descriptive to outright abuse. As noted in an earlier chapter, the 1811 edition of Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defined the slang word pig as police officer – a usage confirmed in an 1823 article in The Times about the proceedings at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, in the case of a man named Murphy, who had been arrested in the act of picking someone’s pocket. The report itself was entitled ‘Police’, although this was six years before Sir Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police (his name of course giving rise to the slang terms bobby and peeler). Nicholls, the official who made the arrest, is described in official terms as a conductor of patrol, but in his evidence to the court, a much more direct name was given:

  Nicholls added, that he saw the prisoner in company with young thieves at some rowing matches last week, when he pointed witness out to his companions as a pig, (a slang phrase for a police officer) and set them to hoot at him.

  Unsurprisingly, the year that this article appeared was also the one in which Pierce Egan’s revised edition of Grose’s Vulgar Tongue defined officers of justice as grunters.

  Since the British police were thus being roundly abused in slang terms before they were even constituted as an official body, it probably would not have come as too much of a shock to any former or serving members of the constabulary who happened to be watching the popular television word-based quiz Blankety Blank one evening in May 1979, when the answer to the riddle was supposed to be the word police. Most of the regular team of celebrities on the panel had duly inscribed this on their boards, and held them aloft at the appropriate moment. However, when it was the turn of Lorraine Chase, the cockney model turned actress, she had opted for something decidedly more colloquial:

  FILTH

  Here was a classic example of criminal slang, which first appeared in the 1960s, generally spoken as the filth. It was used in this form in G. F. Newman’s hard-boiled novel of Metropolitan Police corruption, Sir, You Bastard (1970), which also contained a useful glossary of the kind of slang in use by police and criminals at that time. When investigating a recent robbery, the novel’s main character, Detective Inspector Terry Sneed, says to a man who is on the file of local talent (a habitual criminal known to the police): ‘It’s understandable, John, you need a little extra. A blag [raid] was done up the road. . . Comes to about a monkey’s [£500] worth of tom [tomfoolery, jewellery].’

  In ge
neral, criminals and police have a vested interest in understanding each other’s motives and language, and after all, they spend a fair amount of time in each other’s company, and their jobs are inextricably linked.

  When Alan Hunter’s fine series character, Inspector George Gently of the CID, investigates a case involving an East Anglian motorbike gang of jazz-loving ton-pushers (aiming at speeds of 100 mph), reefer-smokers and beats in the novel Gently Go Man (1961), this stolidly respectable, middle-aged, pipe-smoking member of the force has to engage with their particular slang in order to have any chance of understanding what has happened. Described on the back cover as a big-shot screw (important detective), the inspector is given a tip by a local officer called Setters that the gang are usually to be found at a particular roadside hangout, in a dialogue between the two policemen conducted sarcastically in the jive talk of their quarry:

  ‘Try the First and Last café’ [Setters] said. ‘You’ll find it just out of town on the Norwich Road.’

  ‘Is it cool, man?’ Gently asked.