Vulgar Tongues

  To Captain Francis Grose (1731–1791), whose books

  sent me down this path thirty-five years ago, and to

  my father John (1932–2011), who knew an appropriate

  slang word for most situations, good and bad.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE MARK OF A DECADENT MIND

  SLANG ORIGINS

  VAGABOND SPEECH AND ROGUE’S LATIN

  ONE THE BEAST WITH TWO BACKS

  TWO THE OLDEST PROFESSION

  THREE THIS BAG OF BONES

  FOUR POLARI MISSILES

  FIVE HERE’S TO CRIME

  SIX TAILS YOU BOOZE

  SEVEN HIGH AS A KITE

  EIGHT DIG THAT SOUND

  NINE IT TAKES A RECORD COMPANY WITH MILLIONS TO PUSH US FORWARD

  TEN BURN BABY BURN

  ELEVEN UNIFORM PATTERNS OF SPEECH

  TWELVE THE LAST WORD

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  THE MARK OF A

  DECADENT MIND

  Slang, n.

  a. The special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable character; language of a low and vulgar type.

  b. The special vocabulary or phraseology of a particular calling or profession; the cant or jargon of a certain class or period.

  c. Language of a highly colloquial type, considered as below the level of standard educated speech, and consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense.

  Oxford English Dictionary

  ‘If I say , “Come, lass”, I am using familiar English; if I address her as “Dear girl”, I am using ordinary Standard English; and if I say, “Come, sweet maid”, I am using Literary English. If, however, I allude to the girl as a dame or a Jane, I am employing slang; if as a moll, I am employing cant; if as – but perhaps I had better not particularize the vulgarisms for “girl” or “woman”.

  Eric Partridge, Here, There and Everywhere (1950)

  FOR CENTURIES AFTER THE NORMAN CONQUEST, the majority of the rich, the powerful and the learned in England were curiously reluctant to speak English. Latin and French held sway, both in conversation and in written documents or the printed word. It was considered courtly, polite and cultured.

  For the great mass of common people, however, English was the sole option – a forthright, earthy language which did not shrink from calling a spade a spade, or anything else for that matter. There was a street in Oxford in the 13th century named Gropecuntlane, and another in London called Gropecontelane; a variant spelling but the same meaning. In fact, this street name appeared in towns across the country in medieval times, often denoting the presence of a brothel. Not for nothing was the everyday speech of the common people known as the vulgar tongue.

  Times changed, literacy rates improved, newspapers blossomed and by the 18th century, many words and phrases which had previously been standard English began to be considered improper or, in some cases, obscene. This may have cut some ice in polite and well-heeled circles, but the common people had their own modes of speech, and just as the former group attempted to raise written and spoken English to new heights of elegance and correctness, the latter took an inventive and instinctive delight in the development of slang.

  The word slang acquired its current meaning only during the reign of George III. Back in the 1500s, it was the name for a type of cannon, and from 1610 it could also refer to a narrow strip of land. When Dr Johnson was compiling his Dictionary of the English Language in the mid-18th century, a long-established and rich underworld language could be found all around him in areas like Covent Garden and St Giles. However, if you look up the word ‘Slang’ in the Dictionary, the only entry Johnson provides is this quotation from the Bible:

  SLANG. The preterite of sling.

  David slang a stone, and smote the Philistine.

  I. Sam. xvii

  Yet if you search in the same dictionary for the word cant, his fourth entry under this heading is as follows:

  CANT

  4. Barbarous jargon.

  The affectation of some late authors, to introduce and multiply cant words, is the most ruinous corruption in any language.

  Swift

  Such talk was associated in the main with thieves, beggars and those on the margins of society. It was known as flash language, cant or pedlars’ French, and often looked down on – the common fate of slang through the ages. Yet within twenty years of the publication of Johnson’s dictionary, a character in Hugh Kelly’s play School for Wives (1773) was given the line: ‘There is a language which we sometimes talk in, call’d Slang’, and this eventually became the main term for all variants of insider speech.

  Tracing the threads over several centuries and across international borders, Vulgar Tongues is the story of how the English language of Shakespeare’s day fragmented and twisted into all kinds of shapes, as people like pickpockets, beggars, sailors, musicians, gangsters, whores, politicians, gypsies, soldiers, gays and lesbians, policemen, rappers, cockneys, biker gangs and circus folk seized the King’s or Queen’s English by the throat and took it to places it would probably regret in the morning.

  Perfectly ordinary banter, Squiffy

  THE SLANG DEVELOPED BY VARIOUS GROUPS or closed communities sets them apart from the everyday population. To belong, you need to understand the lingo. The World War II fighter pilots in Monty Python’s RAF Banter sketch (1974) experience a momentary communication failure when their squadron leader comes back from his mission and makes his report:

  Eric Idle: ‘Bally Jerry pranged his kite right in the how’s-your-father. Hairy blighter, dicky birdied, feathered back on his sammy, took a waspie, flipped over on his Betty Harpers, caught his can in the Bertie.’

  Terry Jones: ‘Er . . .’ fraid I don’t quite follow you, Squadron Leader.’

  Eric Idle: ‘Perfectly ordinary banter, Squiffy . . .’

  Other members of the squadron look equally bemused, then Michael Palin enters, uttering various phrases that no one else can understand, including the magnificent ‘sausage squad up the blue end’. This idea was adapted in recent years by the comedy team of Armstrong and Miller, who had wartime RAF pilots speaking in contemporary youth slang (‘I bought some really nice trousers in Camden. They is well hardcore with all pockets an’ shit’). All of which highlights two essential points; it’s no use coming out with the hippest phrases in town if no one else has a clue what you are on about, and up-to-date slang can sound absolutely ridiculous when used by anyone not part of the group.

  The continuing popularity over the years of various slang dictionaries – which attempt to explain for the benefit of the general public the mysterious phrases employed by one group or another – shows the hold that such language exerts upon the imagination, yet it has a habit of slipping away even as it is pinned down. Much slang starts out as a kind of low-level guerrilla warfare directed at straight society, designed to keep out the squares, or annoy them, or both, and is then abandoned by the group which originated it once the words have become common currency.

  Groovy was the hip new jazz word of the early 1940s, batted around carelessly by bebop musicians and pulp novelists. Twenty years later it was as mainstream as they come, co-opted by every branch of the media – so that today it is routinely taken for a sixties phrase. Fortysomething former members of the bongo-banging set were probably choking on their beards listening to Simon & Garfunkel in the ‘59th Street Bridge Song’ (1966) singing about ‘feeling groovy’, as a once-exclusive in-word suddenly flooded the airwaves. Having become indelibly linked with images of flower power, love-ins and psychedelia, its original context is lost. Also in 1966, when Bob Dylan was singing ‘Everybody must get stoned’ in ‘Rainy
Day Women #13 & 35’, old-school drinkers and members of the Rat Pack could have been forgiven for thinking that he was talking about the booze, rather than drugs, because formerly the word had meant a state of drunkenness.

  Having the barclays

  SLANG CAN BE THE GATEWAY to another world. When I interviewed Cynthia Plastercaster of Chicago – a delightful woman who has pursued a singular career since the 1960s making plaster impressions of rock stars’ genitals, Jimi Hendrix among them (an artefact dubbed the Penis de Milo) – she told me that as a teenage American girl around 1965, she developed an interest in cockney slang purely in an effort to better understand her favourite British Invasion groups. As luck would have it, there was a band living locally who hailed from the UK and explained a few suggestive phrases for her:

  They were called the Robin Hood Clan. Nobody I know has ever heard of them, from anywhere, but anyway, they came from Britain. They were slightly older guys, and there were six of them, that resided somewhere in Chicago. They taught us charver, barclays bank – rhymed with wank – and hampton wick. Those were the three, and that’s all I needed . . .

  Armed with these nuggets of wisdom, Cynthia felt confident enough to approach touring musicians, such as the Rolling Stones as they passed through Chicago. Hampton wick is the well-known rhyming slang for dick or prick, while readers of the superb diaries of Kenneth Williams will have encountered his familiar end-of-day phrase recording a successful bout of masturbation – ‘had the Barclays’ (or, on another occasion, a great session of Arthur’s Erotica’, also rhyming slang: J. Arthur Rank, wank). Charver, however, had survived in common parlance for over a century before the Robin Hood Clan taught it to Cynthia. A slang term for the act of sex, and also for a prostitute, it can be found in that indispensable 1846 collection of London low-life knowledge, The Swell’s Night Guide, whose full title left little doubt as to its contents:

  The swell’s night guide, or, A peep through the great metropolis, under the dominion of nox: displaying the various attractive places of amusement by night. The saloons; the Paphian beauties; the chaffing cribs; the introducing houses; the singing and lushing cribs; the comical clubs; fancy ladies and the penchants, &c., &c.

  Largely the work of Renton Nicholson (1809–61) – self-styled Lord Chief Baron of the Garrick’s Head and Town Hotel, Bow Street, and author of the posthumously published Autobiography of a Fast Man (1863) – it contains the following recommendation of a young lady: ‘An out and outer she is and no mistake, a rattling piece and a stunning charver.’

  Although one of the popular explanations for the development of slang is quite rightly that certain groups, such as criminals and beggars, have used it as a way of disguising their speech in front of straight society, other slang is adopted in certain circles purely as a way of defining a group identity. English public schools and certain universities have a long history of this. When the future Poet Laureate John Betjeman arrived at Marlborough College at the start of the 1920s, he needed to swiftly adapt his speech in order to fit in, as his biographer Bevis Hillier records:

  The ‘new bug’ at Marlborough had to learn the school slang in his first few weeks, on pain of beatings. Grey trousers were ‘barnes’. The cushion-cum-bag in which he carried his books was a ’kish’ . . . A characteristic word in the Marlborough argot was ‘coxy’. Suggestive of ‘cocksure’ and ‘coxcomb’, it had roughly the same meaning as the slang word ‘uppity’.

  This was a way of enforcing a sense of identity, as well as distinguishing the pupils of one establishment from those at other schools nearby, or, heaven forbid, boys from the local town. In Anthony Buckeridge’s post-war English school stories featuring a pupil named Jennings, a similar state of affairs applies:

  ‘You great, prehistoric clodpoll, Darbi,’ he complained, as he led the way up the cliff path. ‘What did you want to go and make a frantic bish like that for?’

  A bish, or mistake, is genuine primary-school slang, and was listed by Eric Partridge in his 1937 Dictionary of Slang as having first been used at Seaford College in Sussex from around 1925. It probably comes as no surprise to learn that Buckeridge himself attended Seaford as a child, and by using such terms in his vastly popular stories, he helped spread them among further generations of schoolchildren from 1950 onwards.

  Scurft at the gaff and kept in lumber

  NEWSPAPERS HAVE GENERALLY BEEN KEEN to give their readership an insight into the ways of slang. The Observer, a mere year after its first publication in 1791, was informing the public that ‘the Slang technical term for persons in the pillory is babes in the wood’, and later, when reviewing Disraeli’s novel Sybil, or the Two Nations, in 1845, noted that the hero, Charles Egremont, becomes ‘acquainted with some phrases in the slang of high society – for high society has its slang as well as low society – and there is little to choose between them on the score of fitness or elegance’.

  As for an even older newspaper, The Times, it entered enthusiastically into a detailed description of current pickpocket slang when reporting the following speech from a sixteen-year-old thief who’d been operating at the Croydon Fair in 1805:

  ‘Why, I have had good luck, me and the kid (pointing to a boy about fourteen years of age) have shook a dummy (slang for picking a pocket) at the gaff (the fair), with about 20l, of screens (Bank Notes)’; and observed the boy, his companion, was as good a kid (boy) as little Jack Parker, who was lately lagged (been transported), and that they had shook (picked pockets), and had got twenty-two fogills (pocket handkerchiefs) that morning. He had been scurft (taken into custody) at the gaff, for drawing (slang for taking any thing out of a pocket) a reader (a pocket-book), but he had dinged it (thrown it away); he was kept in lumber (confinement), and then they kicked him and let him go.

  A century and a half later, the newspapers’ urge to explain was just as strong, whether the subject was the latest teenage craze, or politics. Here is the Daily Express in 1963, giving UK parents the lowdown on surfer-speak in their regular column, This Is America:

  After phone-box packing and glue-sniffing, this year the hip fad is healthy surf-riding . . . This week the record companies jumped on the surf-board by issuing new rock’n’roll numbers with a beating surf background. Sample titles: ‘Hot Doggen’ (a doggen is an accomplished surfer), ‘Walking The Board,’ ‘Happy Gremmie’ (in teenage slang a gremmie is a surf crowd follower, too young to risk it).

  Moving forward a decade, there was more advice on transatlantic slang for UK readers, this time courtesy of a 1976 Daily Mirror article about President Ford’s new running mate, Bob Dole:

  In American political slang Dole is known as a ‘gun slinger’ and in the teenage slang of a senator’s daughter sizing up his sex appeal he was labelled ‘a fox’.

  While it is tempting to imagine readers of the paper forming a mental image of a politician living in an underground burrow, occasionally hunted by packs of dogs, this is just one of the pitfalls of unexplained slang. At least it was a marginally more interesting usage than the example chosen by Oxford Dictionaries, at the time of writing, as their ‘international word of the year, 2013’. Selfie is a blindingly obvious slang term for an action which is pretty much as old as the camera itself, but it apparently beat off fierce competition from the likes of twerk to win the accolade. As a news report issued by Australian Associated Press proudly stated, ‘it seems almost certain the selfie originated in Australia with a young drunk first using the word to describe a self-portrait photograph more than a decade ago’.

  Young and mentally immature

  AS WIDESPREAD AS IT IS, there have always been those who have deplored the use of slang. In addition to reporting new words, newspapers have long enjoyed making fun of slang phrases or denouncing the various groups who use them. For instance, in 1920, a writer named H. Addington Bruce published an article in the Milwaukee Journal claiming that ‘only the young and the mentally immature can possibly regard slang as witty’, Mr Bruce, author of timeless family favourites s
uch as Scientific Mental Healing (1911) and Nerve Control and How to Gain It (1918), was the ‘psychological advisor’ to the Associated Newspapers group. He asserted that ‘All slang is essentially vulgar and in bad taste’, and concluded with a terrible warning that ‘devotees of slang are further liable to suffer by being excluded from intimate association with truly cultivated people’.

  This view was hardly confined to America alone. In England in 1925, the Leader of the Opposition (and future Labour prime minister) Ramsay MacDonald declared that using slang in conversation was the mark of ‘decadent minds’, and that such language ‘murders truth itself’.

  Someone who would very likely have taken issue with this kind of opinion at the time was the poet Carl Sandburg, who defined slang simply as ‘language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands and goes to work’. However, whether it goes to work or not, people have often determined that it should be kept away from school. In October 2013, UK newspapers reported that a London academy was attempting to outlaw the use of certain slang words and phrases among its pupils, to help them perform well at interviews for universities and jobs. To that end, the school put up signs which read:

  BANNED WORDS

  COZ AINT

  LIKE BARE

  EXTRA INNIT

  YOU WOZ and WE WOZ

  Beginning sentences with BASICALLY

  Ending sentences with YEAH

  Leaving aside the mild irony of an educational establishment which leaves out the apostrophe in ain’t while trying to give a lesson in language, the objectives sound essentially well intentioned. Mind you, a school district authority in North Carolina went considerably further in 2006, banning all 1,508 pages of the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, reportedly under pressure from ‘conservative Christian groups’. Since slang has often been used as a way of saying the unsayable – from the scurrilous and the obscene all the way through to the shocking and the tragic – it is not hard to see why authorities of all kinds, whether educational, religious or political, have long tried to suppress it.