Vulgar Tongues

by Max Décharné

  Hold your vulgar tongue

  TODAY, WE LIVE IN AN AGE in which pretty much every sexual activity known to the human race has been filmed and is available to view via the nearest computer or smartphone – which many people back in the 1960s would probably have considered a liberated and long-overdue state of affairs – yet numerous slang words for describing them would now be deemed unsayable. That same technological advance, however, has also made it possible to view real-life atrocity footage online, and brutality can be routinely filmed by the perpetrators using a cheap device carried in almost everyone’s pocket. You can watch all of this at the click of a button, but mind your language when you talk about it.

  Were Francis Grose alive in today’s world, would his voice be heard, or might he in fact revel in the possibilities offered by new technology for tracking down new slang words and meanings, and the opportunities for publishing them independently online? Who knows? Perhaps a clue lay hidden in the definition he gave to the following piece of Exmoor slang, listed in his 1787 work A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions:

  Bloggy, to Bloggy. To sulk or be sullen.

  In the London of the 1780s, where Grose walked the back-alleys of Covent Garden, casual violence, heroic alcohol consumption and a multiplicity of sexual encounters were an everyday fact of life. The slang he preserved in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue addresses those events with an amused eye and evokes the realities of that time far more honestly than the corporate-speak and PC euphemisms of today could ever reflect our own. As for any potential offence caused by such language, Grose issued a mock-solemn apology for the slang terms which he had gleefully listed:

  To prevent any charge of immorality being brought against this work, the Editor begs leave to observe, that when an indelicate or immodest word has obtruded itself for explanation, he has endeavoured to get rid of it in the most decent manner possible; and none have been admitted but such as either could not be left out without rendering the work incomplete, or in some measure compensate by their wit for the trespass committed on decorum. Indeed, respecting this matter, he can with great truth make the same defence that Falstaff ludicrously urges in behalf of one engaged in rebellion, viz. that he did not seek them, but that, like rebellion in the case instanced, they lay in his way, and he found them.

  The following century, John Camden Hotten, in the preface to his own Dictionary of Modern Slang (1859), remarked that ‘it is quite impossible to write any account of vulgar or low language, and remain seated on damask in one’s own drawing-room’.

  Luckily, I never had a drawing-room in the first place.

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