A much more objectionable rewriting of history in the name of political correctness was the publication of an edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in 2011 with every mention of ‘nigger’ excised and replaced – over 200 times – with the word slave. It’s been described as a kind of ethnic cleansing, a whitewashing of the fact that black people in the American South in the mid nineteenth century were referred to as ‘niggers’. And a complete failure to understand that Huckleberry Finn is actually anti-racist.
The Americans are acutely sensitive about the n-word; it makes them linguistically twitchy. In 1999, David Howard, a white aide to the black mayor of Washington, DC, was having a financial discussion with a black colleague when he talked about being ‘niggardly’ with the budget. Now niggardly means ‘miserly’, probably from the Old Norse hnøgger for stingy. But it’s an uncommon word and it sounds like nigger, so was interpreted as a racial slur. A complaint was lodged, and Howard tendered his resignation. It was accepted with alacrity by the mayor. A national debate on political correctness ensued, with the chairman of the African-American civil rights group Julian Bond, opining: ‘David Howard should not have quit. Mayor Williams should bring him back – and order dictionaries issued to all staff who need them … Seems to me the mayor has been niggardly in his judgment on the issue.’ David Howard was brought back to work in the mayor’s office.
RAF crew and Guy Gibson making a fuss of their black Labrador dog, Nigger, who is wearing an Iron Cross
Racial linguistic sensibility is clearly not so acute in Britain, where society was largely white until the 1940s. Mass Afro-Caribbean immigration began after the Second World War, but it took decades before the word nigger was generally accepted as a racial slur. Love Thy Neighbour was a sitcom on ITV in the 1970s about a white family and a black family who lived next door to each other. Eddie, the white male character, talked about ‘sambos’ and ‘nig-nogs’. The scriptwriters claimed that Love Thy Neighbour was an attempt to address some of the issues raised by a growing immigrant population in Britain. The characters may have been racist, they argued, but the show wasn’t.
Black and gay stand-up comedian Stephen K. Amos was a schoolboy in south London when Love Thy Neighbour was broadcast. ‘I’d go to school on the Monday and be called a nig-nog because they’d see it on the show … I didn’t know I was a nig-nog until my classmates told me I was.’
Love Thy Neighbour, 1972
The interesting thing about today’s taboo words is that it’s seen as okay to use them if you’re part of the particular community. So Jews are allowed to say kyke; Stephen Amos is gay and feels comfortable about using the word queer. A lot of black comedians like the American Chris Rock use the n-word quite freely, and there’s even a group called NWA, Niggers with Attitude. Stephen says he doesn’t use the n-word personally but understands why others might want to reclaim the word. What’s more important for him is that taboo words cause comedians to think before they speak.
‘When people say political correctness has gone mad, I really get offended by that term because I don’t think it’s being politically correct if you have to think before you speak, if you have to think before offending people. If you’re a clever comedian and you want to upset the apple cart then, yes, do that, but do it in a way which makes us all think, not just by throwing in a word or having a go at a community or at disabled kids. If there isn’t a purpose or a point, there’s no point, because we could all do that.’
Slang
Language is in a constant state of change and reinvention, and slang plays a vital role in this evolution. Slang is described in early editions of the Oxford English Dictionary as the ‘language of a low and vulgar type … consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense’. The origin of the word slang is unknown. It doesn’t show up until the middle of the eighteenth century, when it was used to refer to the ‘special vocabulary of tramps or thieves’. Before then it was called cant or vulgar language.
Street slang, rhyming slang, back slang, teenage slang, text slang – there’s an abundance of slang in the English language, and the strong feelings it generates are nothing new. From the sixteenth century onwards, people were railing against use of the vulgar tongue. In 1621, John Milton’s headmaster, Alexander Gil, wrote about the cant speech of ‘the dirtiest dregs of the wandering beggars’. In his study of grammar and dialects, Logonomia Anglica, he described cant as ‘that poisonous and most stinking ulcer of our state’.
The satirist Jonathan Swift was a passionate advocate of the need to purify the English language. In an article published in the Tatler in 1710 he attacked what he called ‘the continual corruption of our English tongue’, not by the common people but by the writers and poets of the age. Swift denounced the use of abbreviations, in which only the first part of a word was used, and also:
the choice of certain words invented by some pretty fellows: such as banter, bamboozle, country put, and kidney, as it is there applied; some of which are now struggling for the vogue, and others are in possession of it. I have done my utmost for some years past to stop the progress of mobb and banter, but have been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to assist me.
Swift clearly failed to stop the entry of words like mob (from mobile vulgus, the Latin for fickle crowd) and banter into our everyday language.
The first substantial dictionary of slang, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, was published in 1785 by Francis Grose. He was a former soldier, innkeeper and champion drinker who collected slang from all corners of society – sailors, tradesmen, prostitutes, pickpockets and craftsmen. He and his assistant are said to have walked the slums of London at night, noting down the cant words spoken in the drinking dens and brothels. His dictionary included over 3,000 entries. Some of them are familiar – hen-pecked, topsy-turvey, brat, sheepish (for bashful) and carrots (for red hair). Others are, rather sadly, obsolete. Words like circumbendibus (a wandering path or story) or scandalbroth (tea).
What Grose calls vulgar, we would probably call slang. His dictionary meaning for devilish, for instance, reads: ‘an epithet which in the English vulgar language is made to agree with every quality or thing; as, devilish bad, devilish good; devilish sick, devilish well; devilish sweet, devilish sour; devilish hot, devilish cold, &c. &c.’ Many of the words reflected the seamier side of life. A covent garden nun was a prostitute, and the delightful-sounding scotch warming pan was a word for ‘a wench, also a fart’. There are plenty of rude words. Shag, hump and screw are all there for copulation. Less familiar are bum fodder for toilet paper and double jugg for a man’s bottom. And there’s one listed simply as ‘c—t: a nasty name for a nasty thing’; elsewhere he refers to it as ‘the monosyllable’.
Francis Grose created the first dictionary of slang in 1785
Unlike Swift, Grose believed that the rich abundance of slang words in the English language was something to be celebrated: ‘The freedom of thought and speech, arising from, and privileged by, our constitution, gives a force and poignancy to the expressions of our common people, not to be found under arbitrary governments.’
There’s a fascinating postscript to this larger-than-life character. Grose met the Scottish poet Robert Burns when he was in Scotland, drawing sketches and collecting material for a book on local antiquities. They got on famously – Burns wrote: ‘I have never seen a man of more original observation, anecdote and remark’ – and Grose agreed to include a drawing of Alloway Kirk in his forthcoming volume, if Burns would provide a witch tale to accompany it. In 1790 Burns sent him the rhyming tale of ‘Tam O’Shanter’ – arguably one of the best examples of narrative poetry in the English language.
Costermongers loved to use the secret language of back-slang
Back-slang
The ‘secret tongue’ of the costermongers, the mobile fruit and veg sellers, was back-slang – essentially pronouncing a word backwards. There were tens of thousands of ‘costers’ in Vi
ctorian London, with a reputation, according to a book published in 1859 by John Camden Hotton entitled A Dictionary of Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words, of ‘low habits, general improvidence and their use of a peculiar slang language’. They were a tight-knit community with a common enemy – the police – and seemed to have developed back-slang, a private language which the punters and non-locals couldn’t understand. The back-slang was used mostly for words involved in their trade and everyday life – coins, vegetables, fruit and police. So dunop was a pound, yennep a penny, rape a pear, storrac carrots, spinsrap parsnips, slop a policeman. A costermonger told Henry Mayhew, author of the study London Labour and the London Poor (1851): ‘I likes a top o’ reeb.’ Almost all the words have become obsolete, except yob, which is, of course, ‘boy’ backwards.
Back-slang was gradually abandoned by the costers and replaced by rhyming slang. The butchers took it up, and by the twentieth century back-slang was regarded as entirely their secret language.
What is it about butchers that makes them so secretive? Butchers in Paris and Lyon developed their own secret language in the mid nineteenth century as well. It was a much more complicated slang called loucherbem, closer to Pig Latin than back-slang. The first consonant of each word is moved to the end, a suffix such as -em is added and the letter L is added to the start of the new word. Thus boucher (butcher in French) becomes loucherbem.
Cockney Rhyming Slang
Secret languages are the stuff of childhood. Generations of schoolboys have thrilled to the mystery of writing notes in invisible ink and speaking in a code which no one outside their inner circle of chums understood. Pig Latin was a language game beloved of schoolchildren. It wasn’t really Latin (just sounded a bit like it) and involved putting the first letter of a word at the end and then adding -ay. ‘Owhay oday ouyay oday?’ (How do you do?’). Pig Greek – or ubbi dubbi – is another one; also aigy paigy, Double Dutch and gibberish.
These secret languages are essentially games, abandoned in adulthood. But there are other ingenious, covert languages which have developed within a group or a community, often to hide illicit practices or allow coded talk about others without them knowing; in some instances, they’ve spread to become part of the general vocabulary. The argot which we are all most familiar with – especially through TV shows like Minder, Only Fools and Horses and EastEnders – is Cockney rhyming slang.
Del Boy carrying on the Cockney tradition
Much more fun than Pig Latin, rhyming slang is a glorious feast of linguistic gymnastics, peculiar to the English language and prevalent in the East End of London in the second half of the nineteenth century. The construction involves replacing a word (let’s say ‘feet’) with a rhyming phrase (‘plates of meat’) and then dropping the rhyming part of the phrase (‘meat’ goes, ‘plates’ stays). In practical terms it means that ‘feet’ become ‘plates’ and unless you’re familiar with the rhyme, the original word is hidden.
Have a go at translating this:
I had a Jane down the frog with a septic, his trouble and their dustbin lid. Would you Adam and Eve it? My old china was wearing a syrup under his titfer, a whistle, a Peckham and a pair of churches.
Translation: I had a wander (Jane Fonda) down the road (frog and toad) with an American (septic tank – Yank), his wife (trouble and strife) and their kid (dustbin lid). Would you believe (Adam and Eve) it? My old mate (china plate) was wearing a wig (syrup of fig) under his hat (tit for tat), a suit (whistle and flute), a tie (Peckham Rye) and a pair of shoes (church pews).
No one knows for sure when and where rhyming slang originated, but it was certainly flourishing in early Victorian England. Henry Mayhew noted: ‘The new style of cadgers’ [street sellers’] cant is all done on the rhyming principle.’ John Camden Hotton informs us that rhyming slang originated in the 1840s with ‘the wandering tribes of London’. Hotton is adamant that the rhyming wasn’t invented by costermongers – who took up the rhyming slang later – but by two other types of street traders.
There exists in London a singular tribe of men, known amongst the ‘fraternity of vagabonds’ as Chaunters and Patterers. Both classes are great talkers. The first sing or chaunt through the public thoroughfare ballads – political and humorous – carols, dying speeches, and the various other kinds of gallows and street literature. The second deliver street orations on grease-removing compounds, plating powders, high polishing blacking, and the thousand and more wonderful pennyworths that are retailed to gaping mobs from a London kerb stone.
They are quite a distinct tribe from the costermongers; indeed, amongst tramps, they term themselves the ‘harristocrats of the streets,’ and boast that they live by their intellects. Like the costermongers, however, they have a secret tongue or Cant speech, known only to each other.
This cant … is known in Seven Dials [a notoriously disreputable part of London] as the Rhyming Slang, or the substitution of words and sentences which rhyme with other words intended to be kept secret.
Hotton’s Glossary included rhyming slang still in currency today: apples and pairs – stairs; elephant’s trunk – drunk; pen and ink – stink; mince pies – eyes; macaroni – a pony; sugar and honey – money; other ones, like Duke of York – take a walk; and Top of Rome – home, have disappeared.
It was called Cockney rhyming slang but really it was a Londoners’ slang and especially working-class Londoners. The word Cockney is thought to have derived from cockeney, a fourteenth-century word used to describe both a misshapen egg (hence a cock’s egg) and a spoilt, ‘cockered’ child. By the early seventeenth century, the two meanings of being odd and being spoilt appear to have merged into a contemptuous name used by country folk for a soft, puny townsperson, typically a Londoner. Another derivation for the word was suggested by Frances Grose in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:
A citizen of London, being in the country, and hearing a horse neigh, exclaimed, Lord! how that horse laughs! A by-stander telling him that noise was called Neighing, the next morning, when the cock crowed, the citizen to shew he had not forgot what was told him, cried out, Do you hear how the Cock Neighs?
So a Cockney was a Londoner in general, or more specifically, according to John Minsheu in his Ductor in linguas (Guide into Tongues) dictionary in 1617, ‘one born within the sound of Bow bell, that is in the City of London’. The Bow Bells were in the church of St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside, an area that today is largely non-residential. The bombing of the East End of London during the Second World War meant the migration of huge numbers of traditional Cockneys to the new towns on the outskirts of Greater London. You’re more likely to hear old-style Cockney rhyming slang in Basildon or Harlow in Essex and in parts of Hertfordshire than in Cheapside or Whitechapel. In turn, waves of immigration into London’s East End – most recently Bengali – have provided a melting pot mixture of different languages. East end teenagers today talk about skets not eggs and kippers (slippers) or creps rather than Gloria Gaynors (trainers). And life isn’t so much Robin Hood (good) as Nang! Years before the traditional Cockney-speakers were displaced to the London outskirts, Cockney rhyming slang was spreading itself throughout Britain and beyond. Observers commented on how the language of the first convict settlers to Australia was that of Cockney London, and the exuberance of today’s Australian slang has undoubtedly been influenced by it. In Britain, some of the words and phrases have lodged so firmly in our everyday language that we’d be hard put to recognize them as original rhyming slang.
Born within the sound of Bow Bells and you are officially a Cockney
Rabbit on (rabbit and pork – talk)
Use your loaf (loaf of bread – head)
Have a butchers (butcher’s hook – look)
Don’t say a dicky bird (word)
Blow a raspberry (raspberry tart – fart)
Tell a porky (pork pie – lie)
On your tod (Tod Sloan – alone)
Tod Sloan, the American jockey, introduced the ‘monkey crouch’
Sometimes with slang, the more people that understand it, the more you have to change it. If they work out that china plate means ‘mate’, you drop the rhyme word and just say china. Or if they unravel what to kick someone in the cobblers awls means, then you shorten it to cobblers. Or the orchestras (stalls). Or the Niagras (Falls). The rhyming slang for ‘arse’ is especially confusing. The first rhyme was bottle and glass, then simply bottle, then Aristotle and finally aris. This is occasionally extended further to April (in Paris) and you’re left with a sentence like ‘She fell on her April.’
Rhyming slang words can be passed down through the generations or they might be hugely popular for a few years and then be overtaken by the next fad. Some words depended on knowledge of London. If someone threatened to kick you in the Hampsteads, you had to be familiar with Hampstead Heath to know it meant teeth. People still talk about going to the barbers to get their barnet cut. This word for hair has been around since at least the 1850s and comes from the popular Barnet Fair in north London. Hampton Wick (near Teddington) is rhyming slang for prick or dick and is often just Hampton or wick. He gets on my wick – meaning he’s annoying – is one of those innocuous phrases that’s actually rather rude. Spike Milligan managed to introduce a character called Captain Hugh Jampton into a Goon Show episode in 1958. The BBC banned a further appearance when they worked it out. The Carry On films had a field day. Lord Hampton of Wick appeared in Carry on Henry, and the nurse and doctor Carry On films were based at Long Hampton Hospital. And the first of the serials within The Two Ronnies TV show was called ‘Hampton Wick’.
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