Vulgar Tongues Page 10

  Inevitably, perhaps, they began with ‘Apples (apples and pears), stairs’, moving on to such staples as ‘Daisies (daisy-roots), boots’ and ‘Elephants (elephant’s trunk), drunk’. Unsurprisingly, a good proportion of their list had an anatomical theme, such as ‘North an’ (north and south), mouth,’ ‘Mince (mince pies), eyes’, ‘Chevy (Chevy Chase), face’ and ’Barnet (Barnet fair), hair’. Even less surprisingly, they failed to include some of the more risqué common examples, like bristols (Bristol City, titty), or the venerable bottle (bottle and glass, arse).

  Arse longa, vita brevis

  IN OCTOBER 2007, the then Labour prime minister Gordon Brown failed to call a snap election which might have consolidated his position. A little over a month later, events had overtaken him, his government was under siege, and the press crowed that he did not have the stomach for the fight. ‘How he must regret that he lost his bottle when fate beckoned,’ wrote Frederick Forsyth in the Daily Express, alluding to the term that many commentators used for the PM on this occasion, Bottler Brown. Yet, although the prime minister was widely said to have bottled it, few journalists bothered to spell out for the non-cockney-speaking reader the precise meaning of this expression, which is earthy and unambiguous. Someone whose bottle and glass has gone has lost all bowel control through fear. As Alan Lake’s character says, taunting a nervous-looking Ian Hendry in a 1975 episode of The Sweeney, just before they’re about to pull a criminal caper, ‘Is your bottle twitching?’ Since Lake was a friend of the Kray twins, this was effective casting.

  The use of this particular slang term for the nether regions was hardly a first for the press. Whether it was the Daily Mirror in 1988 reporting a London policeman’s comment that a recent armed robber was ‘an amateur who lost his bottle’, or the radio correspondent of the Church Times in 2002, reviewing a programme about the Cuban Missile Crisis, remarking that ‘it was fascinating to hear how quickly Khrushchev lost his bottle’, it has achieved a certain respectability over the years. Mind you, the word arse itself, while considered crude in many quarters, is hardly off limits in the media. For example, Peter Ackroyd, in a lengthy contemporary review in the Spectator of Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), damned the film with very faint praise and complained of ‘howls of laughter from the audience every time someone said “arse” or even, for one horrifying moment, showed one’.

  Although dictionaries now categorise the word arse as vulgar, for almost a thousand years it was merely standard English, yet bottom, by contrast, dates only to the 1790s. Indeed, flag down a passing Anglo-Saxon in the run-up to the Norman Conquest, utter the word arse, and they would certainly have known what you were talking about, although if they belonged to that select minority of the population who could actually write, they would most likely spell it ærs or even ears. The latter rendering could, of course, lead to some confusion, especially among headphone manufacturers.

  A woody word

  THE LETTER R IN ARSE is crucial, and the link with other Germanic languages is crystal clear when you compare the venerable English arse with the modern German equivalent, Arsch. It is what the Monty Python team would have described as a woody word – one you can, ahem, get your teeth into – and can be spoken with all kinds of intonations, best exemplified by a character from another classic television comedy programme, Father Jack Hackett of Father Ted, who punctuated most episodes with regular cries of ‘Drink! Feck! Arse!’ Yet the r in this most expressive of words now seems in danger of dying out, despite its thousand-year lineage, owing to the increasing usage both in the media and the population at large of the US variant, ass.

  The worldwide reach of popular music sung in English, of course, has helped the spread of American spellings, as has the long-time ability of US film companies to influence what is shown in cinemas and also to have a say in the selection of films that appear on television. In this way, the language of urban and suburban America becomes something of a default setting, crowding out other alternatives.

  If you hear people say ass when they mean arse enough times, then that becomes the default setting. Consider the success of the Hollywood productions Kick-Ass (2010) and Kick-Ass 2 (2013). Thirty years ago, these would have been films about donkey abuse.

  His body of booty work

  YET ASS HAS NOT ALWAYS been the default US spelling of the word. Here is the critic John Simon, from the American magazine New York, reviewing a new Broadway musical, Celebration, in 1969:

  Rich complains, ‘I haven’t had an erection in 25 years,’ and sings about his lost youth, ‘Where did it pass?’ (Chorus echoes: ‘Arse, arse, arse!’)

  More recently, a 2003 issue of the US supermarket tabloid World Weekly News took time off from its usual stories about mysterious sightings of a reanimated Elvis to inform its readers about a man from Richmond, Virginia, who painted pictures with his hindquarters: ‘The arse artiste’s specialty is nature, and a botanical theme is evident in his body of booty work.’

  The variant ass meaning arse seems to derive from black American speech, popularised greatly through its use in music and film. A significant example would be the 1970 ground-breaking album Free Your Mind. . . and Your Ass Will Follow by Funkadelic, although Clarence Major’s dictionary Black Slang, published the same year, lists only ‘Ass: one’s self or a dumb person’. However, the word was certainly in. use among other sections of American society some time earlier than this. For instance, two years before Yoko Ono made her short film of various people’s naked posteriors, Bottoms (1966), Andy Warhol produced a feature-length film at the Factory entitled Taylor Mead’s Ass (1964), his camera trained unswervingly the whole time on the buttocks of his assistant. It was, as film historian J. J. Murphy wrote:

  . . . made in direct response to a letter of complaint by film-maker Peter Emanuel Goldman in the Village Voice that he was tired of Jonas Mekas praising ‘films focusing on Taylor Mead’s ass for two hours.’ Since no such film actually existed, Warhol and Mead playfully set about creating a film devoted to this premise.

  All of which goes to show that in the right New York circles, an arse was an ass half a century ago, regardless of ethnic origin. However, if you reach back much further, to the 1920s, when the blues was first allowed into recording studios, the slang word yas was doing service as way of implying ass or arse, presumably a corruption of your ass. There is little in the way of ambiguity about the title ‘The Duck’s Yas Yas Yas’ by James Stump Johnson (1929). In the same era, blues singer Merline Johnson was known as ‘The Yas Yas Girl’, but it was the great Peetie Wheatstraw – billed as ‘The Devil’s Son in Law’ and ‘The High Sheriff from Hell’ – who really spelled it out in his song ‘Shack Bully Stomp’ (1938): ‘I used to play slow but now I play it fast / Just to see the women shake their yas, yas, yas’.

  A booty, of course, used to be an item of baby’s footwear, but has now become an arse, rising to international fame in 1976 with the hit ‘(Shake Shake Shake) Shake Your Booty’ by KC and the Sunshine Band. Despite this being swiftly mocked by Frank Zappa in the title of his 1979 LP Sheik Yerbouti, the lyrical tradition continued in the rap and R&B field in songs, such as the posthumous release ‘Big Booty Hoes’ by Notorious B.I.G. featuring Too Short (1999).

  An Englishman might have asked you not to butt in, but it was an American who would tell you to butt out. Nowadays, though, the term butt – which in Britain was either the stock end of a rifle or the remaining part of a cigarette after it had been smoked – has gained ground. It even appears on the health advice pages of the NHS website, which not only includes exercises for what they call a firm butt (‘Lose the droopy booty and get the perfectly toned posterior’), but also to combat that recent discovery, bingo wings (‘Banish those flabby upper arms for good with this 10-minute bingo wings workout’).

  In the comedy series The Fast Show, which began in 1994, one of Arabella Weir’s recurring characters was an insecure woman who continually asked, ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ Twenty years later, in a
world where buttock-enhancement surgery has literally become a growth industry, the question in parts of the entertainment field had changed to ‘Does my bum look big enough in this?’ In 2014, as reality TV star Kim Kardashian’s substantial rear end stared out from magazine and newspaper covers, rival hip-hop singers Meghan Trainor and Nicki Minaj each made a career of their rear, with the tunes ‘All About That Bass’ and ‘Anaconda’ fighting for supremacy in the singles charts in what the Independent described as ‘the battle of the “booty songs”’.

  Fanny by Gaslight

  OF COURSE, THE CONTINUING UK/US struggle to find a proper slang name for the behind is even more complicated than it may at first appear. In 1933 Al Jolson sang the Rodgers and Hart song ‘Hallelujah I’m A Bum’ in the American film of the same name. It was also popular in the UK, despite the fact that it sounded to British listeners as if the vocalist was claiming to be a pair of buttocks. In public schools as far back as the 18th century, when a sound flogging on the posterior was an integral part of the happiest days of your life, an alternative name for a teacher was bum-brusher. In America, a bum is a hobo or tramp, and they call your bum a fanny, which is just one of the many transatlantic traps for the unwary. In England, the slang word fanny has always meant – as Farmer and Henley noted in their multi-volume, privately printed, late Victorian scholarly landmark Slang and Its Analogues (1890) – ‘the female pudendum’. To take just one of many examples from a privately printed erotic magazine from Oxford, whose name was itself a slang word for the vagina (The Pearl – A Journal of Facetiæ and Voluptuous Reading, No. 5, 1879), here are a few lines of that old family chastisement favourite, ‘The Spell of the Rod’:

  She had been most naughty, and a bad rude girl

  Who presumed the hair on her fanny to curl;

  But the birch reached her quim as well as her bum

  The height of her agony was glorious fun.

  A generation later, First World War tommies in the trenches nicknamed any woman in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (officially FANY) a fanny, doubtless aware of the double meaning, and the word duly shows up with two ‘n’s rather than one in Eric Partridge and John Brophy’s Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, 1914–1918 (1930).

  In America, since at least the 1920s, they have it backwards, to coin a phrase. A fanny is an arse (or ass, as they would say, which is of course a donkey, or an idiot, but you follow the point). Hence, that magical item of waist apparel consisting of a belt with a hump-shaped zippered bag – which, perching above the buttocks, is guaranteed to reduce anyone’s sex appeal by at least 85 per cent – is known in the UK as a bum-bag. In America, it is a fanny-pack, which sounds either like a pubic grooming kit or the Stateside equivalent of the group of ladies who used to assist Radio One DJ Annie Nightingale on her late-night shows, the pussy posse.

  The English novelist Michael Sadleir raised a few eyebrows in 1940 with the publication of his novel Fanny by Gaslight, a melodrama set in Victorian times, with a heroine named Fanny, and prostitution among its themes. Filmed in London under the same title by the Gainsborough company in 1944 and released over here with a royal premiere attended by the Duchess of Kent, it fell foul of US censors – where its title suggested an illuminated posterior – and saw only a belated American release four years later, under the suitably vague name Man of Evil.

  A typical late 20th-century instance of the British use of the word fanny occurs in Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis (1970, usually reprinted these days under its film title, Get Carter), during a scene in which a woman deliberately leans over while wearing a very short skirt:

  As she poured, she swayed, allowing me to see right up to the maker’s name. Cliff saw me looking.

  ‘Glenda,’ he said. ‘Your fanny’s in Jack’s face.’

  Still leaning over, Glenda screwed her head round to look at me.

  ‘I don’t see him complaining,’ she said.

  Contrast this with an American usage of the same word from another great post-war crime writer, John D. MacDonald, one of whose characters is described as being ‘thirty inches round the fanny’. In the States, no problem; in England, see a doctor immediately.

  Merkin class heroes

  FANNY IS OF COURSE JUST ONE of the many English slang words for the female genitals. Perhaps the most controversial, cunt, is also the oldest, with the OED citing around the year 1230 as the earliest documented usage. Once again, for hundreds of years this was not remotely a taboo or slang word, but merely everyday speech. It was cognate with similar words in many European languages, such as kunt in Middle High German, or kunte in Danish and Norwegian. We have the Norman Conquest to thank for the next-oldest appellation, chose (thing), as used by Chaucer, who also employed the term queynte. This was followed in turn by such names as shell – it may be fortunate that there was no such thing as a petrol station in 1497 – and the even more blankly descriptive bearing-place (1587).

  These latter examples have long since fallen from use, but, as is often the case with many time-honoured slang words, once you start to approach the 17th century, the territory becomes much more familiar: in relatively short order, cunny appears in 1593, then quim, merkin and twat (1613, 1656, and 1656 respectively, in this instance sounding oddly like a venerable legal firm. These days, it is only merkin’s earlier variant meaning denoting a pubic wig that survives). Few today, except scholars of a particular bent, would recognise crinkum-crankum (1670), but before that century was over, it had given us another triumvirate of favourites, all of which are still in regular use: honeypot (1673), muff (1699) and the now ubiquitous pussy (1699).

  Television viewers laughed knowingly during the long-running series Are You Being Served? (1972–85) at middle-aged cat-owner Mrs Slocombe making repeated references to the condition of her pussy. Some of the ancestors of those same viewers may have been moved equally to laughter by the publication in 1854 of the English translation of popular French children’s textbook Le Grand-Père et Ses Quatre Petits-Fils. Admittedly, its US editor saw fit to warn readers in his introduction of the ‘necessity of expurgating [it] for American children’, but the shameless depravity which had offended his puritan soul was simply that the young people in the original text ‘engage on Sunday in labour and amusements’. In fact, it was not the mild contents of the book which encouraged sniggering in some quarters, but the name of its author, Madame Fuqueau de Pussy, who was clearly born a century and a half too early to fully exploit such a handle by becoming a cutting-edge rap artist or porn star.

  About the Bush

  ANTHONY BURGESS’S 1983 OBSERVER REVIEW of a dictionary of euphemisms – winningly headlined ‘About the Bush’ – noted the listings for terms like box, Cape Horn, the golden doughnut, snatch and grumble’. Most of these slang words for what Captain Grose two centuries earlier customarily referred to as the monosyllable would have been unfamiliar to the author of the Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, but the latter contained some fine 18th-century examples which have since faded from use. Among these were Eve’s custom house (‘where Adam made his first entry’), Miss Laycock, the mother of all saints, the bottomless pit, the black joke and the tuzzy-muzzy. This, however, is nothing, compared to the encyclopaedic selection of English synonyms gathered together one hundred years later under the entry for monosyllable in Farmer and Henley’s Slang and Its Analogues (1890). Here can be found terms such as the Low Countries, the happy hunting-grounds, the manhole, the leading article, Cock Lane, Bluebeard’s closet, standing-room for one, Hairyfordshire, the goatmilker, the doodle-sack., the bung-hole, County Down, the parsley-bed, home-sweet-home, the pulpit, Fumbler’s Hall, the spit-fire, the pleasure ground, Sportsman’s gap, Bushey Park, the oyster-catcher, the Midlands, rest-and-be-thankful, rattle-ballocks, nature’s tufted treasure, the flower of chivalry and one of the agreeable ruts of life.

  The authors record that Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611–60) – the Royalist translator of Rabelais, rumoured to have died of laughter in exile when hear
ing the news of Charles II’s restoration – had many ingenious names for that region. He variously referred to it as the cunny-burrow, the skin-coat, the carnal trap, the justum, the solution of continuity, the intercrural trench, the contrapunctum, the hypogastrian cranny and the aphrodisiacal tennis court – new balls, please? – but whether the ladies of his acquaintance had the first idea what he was talking about is open to question. Agatha Christie, meanwhile, may or may not have been aware that one of the other words listed by Farmer and Henley was the mousetrap, while Lemmy from Motörhead might have appreciated the fact that another name was the ace of spades.

  Feline groovy

  OTHER TERMS ANTICIPATE BY SOME DECADES the near-the-knuckle tendencies of some 1920s and 1930s American blues singers. Blind Boy Fuller’s spirited 1938 recording, ‘What’s That Smells Like Fish?’, finds an earlier echo in the synonyms fish and fish-market given by Farmer and Henley. Similarly, the expression front-garden – a forerunner of today’s euphemism lady garden – also pre-dates one of the avalanche of superb double entendres in Ethel Waters’s ‘My Handy Man’ (1928, lyrics by the great Andy Razaf), praising the titular gentleman’s supposed horticultural skill at ‘trimming the rough edges off my lawn’.

  While the top-selling female blues singers of those days were capable of being as smutty as anyone – other fine contenders in this department include Hattie North’s ‘Honey Dripper Blues’ (1938), and Sippie Wallace’s ‘I’m a Mighty Tight Woman’ (1926) – the men could also hold their own, as the saying goes. One star performer in this respect was Bo Chatman, who recorded a great deal of risque material under the name Bo Carter, and was seemingly never short of a good synonym for carnal activities or erogenous zones. On Thursday, 4 June 1931, he recorded the immortal ‘Banana in Your Fruit Basket’, and still found time for eleven more numbers, including ‘Ram Rod Daddy’, ‘I Love That Thing’, ‘Pin in Your Cushion’ and, the strain obviously showing, ‘My Pencil Won’t Write No More’.