By the mid twentieth century many rhyming slang expressions used the names of contemporary personalities, especially actors and performers. Ruby Murray was a Belfast-born singer, popular in the 1950s at the same time as Indian restraurants were becoming widespread. So today her name Ruby lives on as rhyming slang for a curry. ‘I’m going for a Ruby.’ One of the rhyming slangs for deaf is Mutt and Jeff or simply mutton. I wonder how many people using the phrase know it comes from characters in an American comic strip created by Bud Fisher in 1907. Your grandmother might have got new Teds or Ted Heaths (false teeth). Or, referring to a more recent personality, you could say she’s got a nice pair of Penelopes (Keith). A pair of knickers are Alan Whickers or simply Alans, as in the film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels: ‘All right, all right, keep your Alans on!’
Rhyming slang can evolve more than one meaning. Woe betide if you have a name that rhymes easily. Actor Gregory Peck’s name was both ‘neck’ – get that down your Gregory (or as characters in the Minder TV show were constantly urging ,‘Let’s get a Ruby down your Gregory’), and ‘cheque’ – I’m going to cash a Gregory. It can also be used in the plural, as in wearing my gregs – ‘specs’. A Melvyn, from the arts broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, has been used at various times to mean ‘shag’, ‘fag’ and ‘slag’. A Melvyn is not to be confused with a melvin, which, according to the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, means ‘pulling someone’s pants up sharply to wedge them between the buttocks’.
Television and films, the internet, texting and tweeting, together with a much greater racial and cultural mixing pot, ensure that most of the new rhyming slangs are ephemeral, discarded as quickly as the next celebrity or fad comes around. And yet, to mix a metaphor, amidst the chaff there are some gems. A market stall holder in London’s Soho was heard to say, ‘Oh, it’s the tourists … I’m not Listerine but they get on my goat.’ Rhyming slang for American is septic (from septic tank – Yank). So if you’re Listerine (a mouth-wash), you’re anti-septic, i.e. anti-American.
Some Cockney cabbies talk about how the Cockney they grew up speaking is gradually fading away.
‘Well, we’re losing it, aren’t we? But then, our way of life is changing, isn’t it? See, we used to have stall holders, in the markets, and their children would come up and they would learn the patter, and that was handed down. Well, now them children are going to university or whatever because they always try and do better for their children. You’ve only gotta look at your kids. Your kids are picking up the hip-hop type of language. As much as you try, when they’re at school they’re picking up the various patters. In the same way we used to, ’cos it was always Cockney that was spoken.’
One cabbie says his children still recognize some Cockney rhyming words but, as all slang does, they’ve evolved. So instead of asking his daughter whether she’s having a tin, meaning laugh (tin bath), he’ll ask her whether she’s having a bubble. The old tin bath isn’t around any more.
These cabbies reckon their rhyming acts as a sort of safety valve, helping to take the edge off offensive or racist labelling. They describe their fares as seppos (Yanks) or tiddly winks (Chinks), or fourbytwos, tinlids or front wheel skids (Jews and Yids).
‘A Cockney has got a cheerful way about him. So when he’s saying it, it’s not in an offensive manner, it’s in good fun, it’s always with a good humour. It’s always with a smile on his face.’
Rhyming slang is a bit like one of those minced oaths. We know we can’t say the taboo word so we come up with a cheerful alternative which makes us smile. Most of the time.
Polari
In rhyming slang a gay man might be a ginger (beer – queer) or King Lear (queer again) or iron (hoof – poof). But gay men know all about secret codes themselves. Back in the 1960s, homosexuality was still a crime, and gay men in London used a secret language to identity and secretly communicate with each other. The language was called Polari and it had a vocabulary of about twenty key words, mainly describing people’s looks, clothes and sexual availability: bona for good; omi man; palone woman; omi-palone gay man; eek face (from back-slang ecaf); fabulosa wonderful; riah hair (back-slang); vada to look; naff not available for fucking; camp effeminate (also from Kamp, acronym for ‘known as male prostitute’); zhoosh to fix or tidy.
Gay journalist Peter Burton included an example of Polari in his autoboigraphy Parallel Lives.
As feely ommes … we would zhoosh our riah, powder our eeks, climb into our bona new drag, don our batts and troll off to some bona bijou bar. In the bar we would stand around with our sisters, vada the bona cartes on the butch omme ajax who, if we fluttered our ogle riahs at him sweetly, might just troll over to offer a light for the unlit vogue clenched between our teeth.
(As young men … we would style our hair, powder our faces, climb into our fabulous new clothes, don our shoes and wander/walk off to some fabulous little bar. In the bar we would stand around with our gay companions, look at the fabulous genitals on the butch man near by who, if we fluttered our eyelashes at him sweetly, might just wander/walk over to offer a light for the unlit cigarette clenched between our teeth.)
The origins of Polari are unclear. It’s a linguistic mongrel, borrowing words from Occitan, Romany, Shelta (the cant of the Irish tinkers), Yiddish, back-slang and rhyming slang – all interspersed with words of Italian origin. One theory is that Polari – from the Italian parlare, to talk – was the lingua franca of seafarers and traders around the Mediterranean ports in the Middle Ages. It made its way to Britain via travelling circuses and fairgrounds and was used widely on board British Merchant Navy ships.
Between the 1930s and 1970s, Polari was used in theatres and private gay drinking clubs, especially in London. In 1965, Polari came to the attention of a much wider audience with the arrival of a new BBC radio comedy programme, Round the Horne. More than 9 million people tuned in every Sunday afternoon to listen to the sketches, one of which featured two camp out-of work actors called Julian and Sandy, played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams. Their torrent of double entendre and innuendo included Polari terms which would have sounded like gibberish to most people but which regular listeners learned to decipher. The host, Kenneth Horne, would visit a new enterprise each week – Bona Pets or Bona Ballet or Bona Books or something – and enter saying, ‘Hello, is there anybody here?’ He’d be greeted by the camp duo. ‘Hello, I’m Julian, and this is my friend Sandy.’ ‘Oh, Mr Horne, how bona [good] to vada [see] your dolly [pretty] old eek [face].’
In the sketch ‘Bona Law’, Barry Took and Marty Feldman included the line: ‘Omes and palones of the jury, vada well at the eek of the poor ome who stands before you, his lallies trembling’ (‘Men and women of the jury, look well at the face of the poor man who stands before you, his legs trembling’). Barry Took explained later that he had learned some of the Polari words during his time as a music-hall comic in the West End. He said Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick were always speaking Polari to one another and would sometimes adlib the sketches to include more Polari.
Some of the material was really quite risqué. In one episode Sandy refers to Julian’s skill at the piano as ‘a miracle of dexterity at the cottage upright’. Only the Polari cognoscenti were likely to have known that a cottage was the term for a public toilet where men met for sex and upright meant an erection.
By the end of the 1960s, Polari was in decline – partly as a result of the decriminalization of homosexuality and the advent of gay liberation and in part, no doubt, to the success of Round the Horne. The secret language was no longer secret. Indeed, some Polari and words have entered into mainstream language: butch, naff, queen, mince, camp, drag, fab, dishy, butch, bijou, savvy, scarper, tat and bevvy.
Polari may not be used as a secret language by the gay community any more but it is seen as playing an important part in gay cultural history. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an order of gay and lesbian nuns and monks, translated the King James Bible into Polari in 2003 and posted it on
the internet.
In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was nanti form, and void; and munge was upon the eke of the deep. And the fairy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas.
And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle
And Gloria vardad the sparkle, that it was bona: and Gloria medzered the sparkle from the munge.
Round the Horne, full of risqué Polari and double entendre
Aussie Slang
It’s impossible to write about the uses and abuses of language without mentioning Australia – for it is here we find some of the most playful, colourful, sometimes vulgar uses of the English language. If Shakespeare walked this earth today, he’d feel a lot more at home in Streaky Bay, South Australia, than Stratford-upon-Avon. From budgie smugglers (brief swimming trunks) to liquid laughs (vomit), the Australians do seem to have an awful lot of fun with their words.
When the first Europeans set foot on the island, there were perhaps 300 native Aboriginal languages. Today, that stands at around seventy, and most of them are endangered. English is the dominant language, spoken by 99.8 per cent of the population. From the moment in 1770 when Captain Cook and his botanist Sir Joseph Banks asked the local Aborigines for the name of that strange hopping animal, the Australian language has been lending, borrowing, developing and inventing words. The animal was noted down as ‘gangurru’; the myth that the gangurru reply in fact meant ‘I don’t understand you’ has, alas, been debunked. The locals were simply describing a particular species of kangaroo.
Captain Cook claimed Australia for the British Crown and almost immediately this outpost on the other side of the world was turned into a penal colony. Around 160,000 male and female convicts from England and Ireland were shipped to Australia between 1788 and 1868 (when transportation ended); their numbers were swelled by the wool and gold rushes of the 1850s.
Author Kathy Lette grew up a surfer girl in Sydney but moved to London in her twenties. She points out that the Australians have spent years suffering the jibes of being a nation of convicts.
‘A lot of English people see Australians as a recessive gene, sort of the Irish of the Pacific. They can’t believe that they sent all the convicts out to the sun while they stayed there in the rain. My grandmother told me something fantastic when I was leaving for England, because sometimes the English can have a condescension chromosome about Australians. She said to me, “Ah Kath, you can’t possibly go and live in London, that’s where all those terrible convicts come from.” ’
Soon after the arrival of the first immigrants, a distinct accent began to emerge. One theory about the lack of lip movement in Aussie-speak is that the European arrivistes had to learn to open their mouths as little as possible when they talked to keep the flies out.
Observers described the language of the early nineteenth century as being heavily influenced by the rhyming slang of the Cockney London convicts. In 1827 Peter Cunningham, a Scottish convict ship surgeon, reported in his book Two Years in New South Wales that the native white Australians spoke with a distinctive accent and vocabulary: ‘This is accounted for by the number of individuals from London and its vicinity … that have become residents in the colony and thus stamped the language of the rising generation with their unenviable peculiarity.’
Today there are three broad layers of social accents. Cultivated British English, which is spoken by around 10 per cent of the population (think actor Geoffrey Rush); a broad working-class accent (Steve Irwin); and general Australian, spoken by the majority (Kylie Minogue, Russell Crowe).
Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee, 1986
There’s some debate about how much of the Australian language derives from the convict immigrants and how much evolved later. The word Pom or Pommie, which the Australians use to describe the English (as in whinging Pommie bastard) was thought to have derived from POM – Prisoners of Her/His Majesty or Port of Melbourne, where the immigrant ships docked – or from POME – Prisoner of Mother England. Current thinking is that Pommie is a more recent word – as described by D. H. Lawrence in his 1923 novel Kangaroo.
Pommy is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Pomegranate, pronounced invariably pommygranate, is a near enough rhyme to immigrant, in a naturally rhyming country. Furthermore, immigrants are known in their first months, before their blood ‘thins down’, by their round and ruddy cheeks. So we are told.
‘Naturally rhyming country’ is a most apt description, for the Australians love to play with their words: have a Captain’s (look – from Captain James Cook); steak and kidney – Sydney; dead horse – tomato sauce. As with Cockney slang, Americans are septic or seppo. Many of the rhymes are based on popular culture. Grundies and Reginalds are undies or underpants, named after TV mogul Reg Grundy. To do a Harold Holt is to bolt or run away, after the Australian prime minister who disappeared while swimming. If something’s a shocker, i.e. dreadfully bad, it’s a Barry Crocker or simply a Barry (Barry Crocker is a popular Australian singer who sang the original Neighbours theme on TV).
Rhyming slang apart, some of the words and phrases are delightfully visual. Kathy Lette has made her name with her irreverent wordplay.
I think it’s something to do with our Irish heritage, because it’s a love of language, there’s an irreverence there, but it’s often quite loquacious too.’
A beer belly becomes a veranda, sandwiches are a cut lunch, and vomit is a technicolor yawn. As the English reputedly don’t wash, deodorant is Pommie shower, and if something is completely dry it’s as dry as a Pommie’s bath-towel. If you give an Aussie salute, you’re brushing flies away; an ankle biter is a small child; and don’t come the raw prawn means ‘don’t play the fool with me’. Someone who is mentally unbalanced has got candles in their top hat or kangaroos mad in the top paddock. A novice surfer is a shark biscuit, and if something’s in short supply it’s scarce as rocking-horse manure.
And then there’s the unique set of diminutives Australians use – putting ie or o at the end of a shortened word. ‘We shorten everything,’ says Kathy Lette, ‘like cozzie, mozzie, truckie, sickie, quickie. It’s not just because it’s too hot to say the whole word, it’s also because it’s a way of being informal and friendly. It keeps us a bit like children … we haven’t quite grown up.’
Other popular diminutives are arvo – afternoon; smoko – tea break; blowie – blowfly; sunnies – sunglasses; coldie – a beer; snag sanga – sausage sandwich.
The Anglo-Saxon earthiness of the language reflects a deep-seated loathing of pomposity. There’s a story about the Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who was at a dinner party with a self-regarding broadsheet editor. The English editor announced to his fellow diners: ‘I’ve met six British prime ministers, four French presidents, four American presidents and three popes and, do you know, not one of them struck me as having a first-class mind.’ There was a pause around the dinner table, and then Murdoch said, ‘Did it ever occur to you that they probably thought you were a bit of a dick too?’
It seems to be a defining quality of Australians that they can’t let a remark like that go unchallenged. There’s a characteristic which Australians call the Tall Poppy Syndrome – slang for someone with a big ego who needs to be brought back to the level of his peers through put-downs. It can be seen as a reasonable way of keeping inflated egos in check or evidence of an inferiority complex, a desire to punish anyone who sticks their head above the rest and is flamboyant or high-achieving or successful. The instinct to cut people down to size finds its most natural home among Australia’s politicians, whose level of insult hurling can be breathtaking. Mark Latham, when he was leader of the opposition, called Prime Minister John Howard an ‘arselicker’ and described the members of the Liberal Party front bench as a ‘conga line of suckholes’.
The master of the colourful insult was former Prime Minister Paul Keating, whom Kathy Lette describes as ‘having a black belt in tongue-fu’. Nicknamed the Lizard
of Oz, he called his opponents, variously, ‘gutless spivs’, ‘foul-mouthed grubs’, ‘painted, perfumed gigolos’ and ‘simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up’. Many of his insults were directed at John Howard, then leader of the opposition, whom he dubbed ‘brain-damaged’, ‘mangy maggot’ and ‘the little desiccated coconut’. It makes Denis Healey’s ‘like being savaged by a dead sheep’ seem quite tame.
Some of the most well known of the Australian euphemisms – the ones that have entered the British English language – flow from the pen of one particular Aussie – satirist and actor Barry Humphries. Humphries, who achieved worldwide fame with his alter ego, Dame Edna Everage, travelled to London in the 1960s and wrote a comic strip for the satirical magazine Private Eye. ‘The Adventures of Barry McKenzie’, illustrated by Nicholas Garland, chronicled the exploits in London of Bazza, an uncouth, loud-mouthed, beer-swilling ‘ocker’. Bazza, writes Humphries, initiated readers ‘into the mysteries of Australian colloquial speech’. He spoke a ‘synthetic Australian compounded of schoolboy, Service, old-fashioned proletarian and even made-up slang’.
In fact, Humphries created so many of his own made-up euphemisms that have entered the vernacular that it’s almost impossible to say what’s invented and what isn’t. Most of the expressions relate to bodily functions and sex. Multicoloured yawn, pointing Percy at the porcelain, siphoning the python, one-eyed trouser snake, dining at the Y, shaking hands with the wife’s best friend, sinking the sausage. Some phrases, like chunder (to vomit) and up shit creek, were dying out until Humphries resurrected them.
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