Vulgar Tongues

by Max Décharné

  On the beam with that chicken

  EMPLOYING AIR FORCE SLANG could sometimes cause unexpected problems. In 1943, an American newspaper called the Lewiston Daily Sun, from Maine, published a report under the headline ‘NAZIS THREATEN TO TRY FLIERS AS “WAR CRIMINALS”. . . Nazi Propaganda Says it Has Proof “Gangsters” Control U S Air Force’. This state of affairs had arisen on account of the nose decorations and slang-derived slogans painted by American aircrew on the fuselages of their bombers, prompting the proposed trial of captured US airmen shot down near Bremen, said to have flown under the nickname Murder Incorporated:

  It was pointed out here that if the planes and crews actually did bear such names it would indicate nothing more than the flippancy of young soldiers who in the same vein have given their planes such names in American slang as ‘Boomtown’ and ‘Susie Q’.

  On a less serious note, a year later another newspaper, the Pittsburgh Press, traced the spread of US Air Force slang to other services, and then into general parlance, as a result of military collaborations with Hollywood during the making of films such as the Darryl F. Zanuck wartime propaganda vehicle Winged Victory (1944). Among their examples, they considered the new phrase – also popular with jazz musicians – on the beam:

  The latter means headed in the right direction, everything going right. It is applied to either thought or action. Thus, if a GI is pressing an ardent suit with the lady of his choice and says exultantly, ‘I’m on the beam with that chicken, the layman can rest assured that everything is progressing favourably. Origin of ‘on the beam’ is easily traceable to flying by radio instrument – on a radio beam.

  In the post-war era, some of those who had survived air combat drew on their experiences as the basis for novels. One of the finest examples was John Watson’s story of a Bomber Command pilot and his crew, Johnny Kinsman (1955), a thinly disguised portrait of 158 Squadron, which flew Halifaxes out of RAF Lissett, just south of Bridlington.

  Interestingly, the regular nickname in the book for the group captain – equivalent to the rank of colonel in the British Army – is groupie, a word which would have different connotations once the sixties hove into view (not that women who followed jazz musicians around were a novelty during the war years – they were simply known by a different slang name, band rats).

  Watson had been a fighter pilot and then a bomber pilot, winning the DFC after having flown thirty-four operational tours. The death rate among aircrew in his book is steady and relentless, to the extent that almost everyone the reader meets eventually succumbs, but this is not handled in a sensationalist way, and all through it the slang used by these characters is realistically deadpan and offhand. ‘Widdowson, sir, has pranged,’ says an officer, reporting a crash. ‘But he can’t have,’ replies the squadron leader. ‘Not in that lovely new aircraft.’ Then, later on in the book, after Kinsman’s badly damaged plane has limped back to base:

  ‘Aircraft bent?’ the Wingco asked.

  ‘A little, sir.’

  In the end, ex-Pilot Officer Tim Vigors of 222 Squadron got to the heart of an impulse which lay behind much of the outwardly callous or offhand-sounding wartime slang evolved by all three services when he wrote in his autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Cry (2006, quoted in Max Arthur’s oral history of the Battle of Britain, The Last of the Few (2010)):

  Death and wounds among our companions became common-place and were taken with an exaggerated lightness which we found was the only possible way to bear the losses and remain sane.

  TWELVE

  THE LAST WORD

  Beware of geeks bearing gifts

  Among the leading ‘futurologists’ and ‘trend consultants’ last year was New York outfit K-Hole, whose 2013 white paper on youth trends coined the term ‘normcore’ (denoting ‘finding liberation in being nothing special’, ie dressing in nondescript fashion as a sort of fashion statement). Now K-Hole has released its latest bullshit bible. Ostensibly all about ‘doubt’ as a cultural trend, it touches on ‘chaos magic’ and the concept of ‘weaponising burnout’ and ends with the authors claiming that they are ‘swimming in a universe of squirrels.’

  Private Eye, 18 September–1 October 2015

  SLANG USED TO COME FROM THE STREET, from the working stiffs, the grafters, the frails, the jack-rollers, the winchester geese, the hep-cats, the old lags, the mollies, the lobsters and the jug-bitten. Much of the time, it still does, but it is fighting against a tidal wave of fake language deployed by committees of marketing executives or by focus groups in the pay of politicians, all desperately seeking to look cool. In today’s online information blizzard, countless billions of words are sent out into the fray in the hope of causing a Twitter storm, perhaps trending on Facebook, or else gaining a ludicrous number of plays on YouTube, alongside the tap-dancing kittens and the latest celebrity wardrobe malfunction.

  It is not uncommon to see people walking down the street wearing T-shirts or baseball caps proudly emblazoned with the single word GEEK or NERD. The latter term first appeared as the name of a creature in the 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo by Dr Seuss (Theodor S. Geisel), who, when asked by the computer publication PC Magazine in 1987 how he had come up with it, responded that ‘he had never heard the word before he drew that character’. Many of those now adopting the former term are probably unaware that for much of the 20th century a geek was basically the lowest job in a travelling carnival freak show, the person in the tattered wild-man costume and fright wig who bit the heads off live chickens and snakes for the amusement of an audience of local rubes. Billboard magazine’s side-show pages used to be full of fairground bosses advertising for geeks to work alongside other attractions, as in this typical line-up from an outfit touring Oklahoma in 1949, which included ‘L Williams; May Williams, sword ladder and electric chair; Fay Dill, four-legged girl; [and] Jimmy McLeod, who joined recently with his pin cushion and fire act’. A few months later, the magazine ran a satirical report about a protest march of:

  500 geeks [who] decided to hoof it from burg to burg in full regalia. When we say ‘full regalia’ we mean 500 stringy or matted long-hair wigs, 500 mother hubbards and leotards, 500 sets of wolf-like three-inch tusks, and each with his face smeared with brick color grease paint.

  Clearly, anyone these days making do with just a GEEK baseball cap is missing out, and it is high time that wolf-like three-inch tusks came back into fashion.

  Prior to its popularity in carnival circles, in 19th-century Yorkshire a geek was simply a term for an idiot, a moron, a credulous simpleton, and was listed as such in the 1876 edition of Francis Kildale Robinson’s A Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Whitby. It is thought to be a variant of a much older slang word for a fool, geck, which derives from an identical German word of the same meaning. Dr Johnson defined geck in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as a term for someone ‘easily impos’d on’, and also quoted Shakespeare’s use of the word. The similarity is further strengthened by the fact that in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works (1623), in The Tragedy of Cymbeline, the word was spelled geeke:

  Why did you fuffer Iachimo, flight thing of Italy,

  To taint his Nobler hart and braine, with needleffe ieloufy,

  And to become the geeke and fcorne o’ th’others vilany?

  Also to be found in Dr Johnson’s 1755 dictionary was the following entry:

  COMPUTER. n. f. {from compute} Reckoner; accountant; calculator. . .

  I have known some such ill computers, as to imagine the many millions in stocks so much real wealth. Swift

  Thus geekes were treading the boards in Jacobean England, and computers were alive and well in Georgian London, but it took until the last quarter of the 20th century for the two to join forces and bring about the computer geek.

  As it happens, the October 1969 issue of the magazine Computer World announced, in suitably geeke-friendly terms, the development of a new user language called Slang, ‘oriented toward the solution of implicit nonlinear pr
oblems, such as simultaneous nonlinear algebraic equations, implicit ordinary differential equations, multipoint boundary value problems, maxima and minima, and calculus of variations’. Heady stuff.

  In their song ‘Suzy Is a Headbanger’ (1977), The Ramones helpfully pointed out that the title character’s mother was ‘a geek’, and these were still the days when the word conjured up images of people biting the heads off unsuspecting poultry. Similarly, a few years later, when an interviewer from the NME asked The Cramps to name their favourite film and they nominated Nick Zedd’s Geek Maggot Bingo (1983, aka The Freak from Suckweasel Mountain), the subject matter under discussion was nothing to do with gadget-obsessed programmers in heavy-framed glasses. Times change, and the year 2011 saw the arrival of a Disney high-school film called Geek Charming. Suffice to say, one of these two celluloid contenders starred Richard Hell, and the other did not.

  One year before Geek Maggot Bingo reared its bashful little head, an article about the supposed aphrodisiac effects of personal computer technology and language for the geek-about-town appeared in the magazine Popular Mechanics – appropriately enough, in a discussion of the term RAM (random-access memory) – which was surely a sign of things to come:

  There are now many computers that were bought with 4K of memory and are now fleshed out with 256K of bulging brainpower. . . Having a lot of RAM memory in the personal computing subculture is like walking into a bar with Miss Universe on your arm. People who would never once have considered inviting you to join them suddenly think you’re a great guy.

  Eventually, the newer meaning of geek prevailed, and in 2013 an article in the computer magazine PC made it clear to all interested parties that they had finally inherited the earth:

  YOUTUBE’S GEEK WEEK KICKS OFF SUNDAY

  Who run the world? Geeks. And YouTube is taking advantage of our eminence by holding its first ever Geek Week from Aug. 4 to 10.

  Fittingly, the whole thing was co-sponsored by an outfit called Nerdist.

  In hock to your own image

  THE RISE OF THE PERSONAL COMPUTER, followed by the sea of hand-held devices available today, has not only made nerds out of much of the population, the technology itself has enabled the instant dissemination of slang across the planet. In the past, the specialised argot of various groups might be in use for many decades among their core members before being gathered together in a newspaper article or book, but today anyone hearing an unfamiliar term can go online and track down a definition of sorts in seconds – although whether the information will be accurate is quite another matter. In addition, if you try searching the net for the meaning of some of the magnificent phrases recorded nearly two and a half centuries ago in Covent Garden by Captain Francis Grose – such as Admiral of the Narrow Seas, ‘One who from drunkenness vomits into the lap of the person sitting opposite him’, or Riding St George, ‘The woman uppermost in the amorous congress, that is, the dragon upon St George’ – it will be in the knowledge that someone, somewhere, from a government agency, is now monitoring your activity.

  The crime writer John D. MacDonald saw it all coming as early as 1964, when his enduring individualist character Travis McGee considers the implications of credit cards and privacy, in the first novel of the series, The Deep Blue Good-By:

  They are the little fingers of reality, reaching for your throat. A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself. But these are the last remaining years of choice. In the stainless nurseries of the future, the feds will work their way through all the squalling pinkness tattooing a combination tax number and credit number on one wrist, followed closely by the L.T. and T. team putting a permanent phone number, visaphone doubtless, on the other wrist. Die and your number goes back in the bank. It will be the first provable immortality the world has ever known.

  This lack of privacy is now in many ways self-inflicted. People have been telling slang-heavy stories to their friends in bars around the world for centuries, but now if they come home drunk and do it on Twitter or Facebook, using words that are judged to be ‘inappropriate’, they might find themselves hung out to dry by a modern-day lynch mob who can mobilise 200,000 signatures at the drop of a hat. Spend your teenage years plastering your social media accounts with all the latest slang and your own half-formed opinions, and in ten years or sooner they will come back to haunt you as prospective employers trawl old sites looking into your background. This is the point at which a self-posted photo of yourself collapsed on a party floor with a toilet seat around your neck and surrounded by zombie-eyed classmates – lovingly annotated with fifteen choice contemporary euphemisms for excessive chemical over-indulgence – starts to look like a potential barrier to a career as a future Archbishop of Canterbury. Or perhaps not.

  Non-living person spinning in their grave

  THROUGH IT ALL, THE AVALANCHE of slang across all forms of media continues. ‘Scrabble Stays Dench With New Words’, announced the Aberdeen Evening Express in May 2015, explaining that:

  . . . a host of slang words used on social media, in texts and on the street are now available to fans of the traditional word game seeking to outplay their opponents. These include obvs (obviously), ridic (ridiculous), lolz (laughs), shizzle (form of US rap slang), cakekole (mouth), and dench (excellent).

  The makers of Scrabble may have only just included it, but cakehole had been doing the rounds in British school playgrounds for over sixty years by this point, having begun as RAF slang during the Second World War. The other words are far more recent, but how long some of them will remain trendy now that the then Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne employed the first of these terms on a political talk show in April 2016 is an interesting question. As the Daily Mirror commented the following day:

  Pundits were baffled yesterday when [Osborne] unveiled the working behind his claim Brexit would cost £4,300 for every family in Britain. Mr Osborne smiled as he told ITV’s The Agenda: ‘That’s a gravity model – a regression gravity model with a general equilibrium NiGEM model for the economy. Obvs!’

  The Chancellor has form in this area, the paper explained, having recently outed himself as a fan of gangsta rap group NWA, enjoying tea at Downing Street with the band’s Dr Dre a couple of years ago, and then in January 2016 being referred to by Ice Cube as my homie. Which, in certain circles, presumably qualifies as dench.

  In 2014, footballer Rio Ferdinand ran into difficulties with the FA, having used the word sket in a Twitter message. This – as the print media were happy to inform the many millions of readers who had not encountered it before – is Jamaican-derived street-gang slang for a promiscuous woman. It is hard to believe that all the members of the FA Independent Regulatory Commission were entirely familiar with the term before this matter arose, but in such ways these words become more widely known.

  According to a March 2016 report in the Daily Mail, Facebook has now secured a patent in America to use artificial intelligence to ‘trawl posts and messages for slang words before they get picked up by the rest of the crowd’. The object is apparently to ‘better target its adverts to a wider range of social groups’, and ‘if the use is new, these neologisms will be added to a social glossary’. Unfortunately, their existing technology is apparently sometimes thrown by very old usages, as in the case of a venerable Welsh pub in the Brecon village of Llanfihangel Talyllyn, which has traded since 1840 as the Black Cock Inn. Sure enough, the landlord reported at the end of 2015 that the hostelry’s profile had been suspended by Facebook for ‘racist or offensive language’ on account of their name.

  Increasingly, language is being monitored – by private organisations, by governments, by student bodies and by sections of the general public. This has been a creeping process which has developed over the past three or four decades, now greatly enabled by internet technology. The critic Robert Hughes had this to say about the state of things in his 1993 book Culture of Complaint – The Fraying of America, published a few short years before the net would change everythi
ng:

  We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism. . . Just as language grotesquely inflates in attack, so it timidly shrinks in approbation, seeking words that cannot possibly give any offence, however notional. We do not fail, we underachieve. We are not junkies, but substance abusers; not handicapped, but differently abled. And we are mealy-mouthed unto death: a corpse, the New England Journal of Medicine urged in 1988, should be referred to as a ‘non-living person.’

  The fact is, the vast majority of the language and sayings documented in this book would now be unacceptable to someone somewhere, busily taking offence on behalf of everyone else.

  Since the 1980s, a new wave of puritanism has emerged from US campuses under the cloak of political correctness, which increasingly seeks to ban anything it holds to be suspect. Witch-hunts are conducted against words, thoughts and modes of behaviour. Judgements are made, sentences passed, and appeals are futile. Ultimately, slang will have no place in this world, because the best of it is almost guaranteed to offend someone, somewhere.