Vulgar Tongues Page 11

  However, it was not only in the black American blues market that such things occurred. Over in London that same year, Harry Roy co-wrote and sang a song that has since become something of a classic, and which still leaves most present-day listeners wondering how he got away with it. Despite one of the words in the title having long functioned as a pet name for a cat, and opening the performance with fake meowing sounds, Roy was perhaps going out on a limb in calling a song ‘My Girl’s Pussy’ and singing lines like ‘I stroke it every chance I get’.

  Harry Roy, a mainstream bandleader, appearing regularly in the West End and on BBC radio, was in this particular instance operating very much in the music-hall tradition, where ribald songs could apparently have a perfectly innocent meaning. This was the argument put forward by Marie Lloyd (1870–1922), who once said, ‘If I was to try to sing highly moral songs, they would fire ginger beer bottles and beer mugs at me. I can’t help it if people want to turn and twist my meaning.’ Indeed, anyone who read something smutty into her song about one woman’s misadventures on the railway system, ‘She’d Never Had Her Ticket Punched Before’ (1897), or that tragic lament ‘It Didn’t Come Off, After All’ (1902), clearly had a dirty mind to begin with. Indeed, in Harry’s defence, he could have pointed to cat-care adverts in the national press around that time urging readers to ‘Think of PUSSY’ (‘Pussy, too, needs a tonic to keep her in good condition’).

  This damn bust fetish

  ALL THIS IS, OF COURSE, somewhat below the belt, and ignores the various slang names derived over the years for the breasts. In Richard Marsten’s 1956 American novel The Spiked Heel, a woman and a man engage in the following conversation at a party, having already consumed their fair share of adult beverages:

  ‘That’s an indication of how far this damn bust fetish has gone in this country. Why, I bet I can think of a dozen words all by myself. Now, what’s so special about breasts when you ask yourself the question? Fatty tissue, that’s all.’

  ‘Titty fassue,’ Aaron corrected.

  ‘See, there’s one expression. And how about bubbles?’

  ‘Or bubbies?’

  ‘Or balloons?’

  ‘Or coconuts?’

  ‘Or mammaries?’

  ‘Or headlights?’

  ‘Or grapefruits?’

  ‘Or bazooms?’

  ‘Or balloons?’

  ‘We said that one.’

  ‘All right, how about knockers?’

  Knockers, although sounding to English ears like a typical 1970s Benny Hill Show expression, is first recorded in that classic wartime dictionary of expressions heard at the lunch counters of America, Jack Smiley’s Hash House Lingo (1941). Indeed, it even shows up a decade later in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) – ‘Her name was Lillian Simmons. My brother D.B. used to go around with her for a while. She had very big knockers’ – but has long since crossed the Atlantic. In 1985, the Daily Mirror regaled their readers with this stirring tale of gallant nocturnal crime-fighters, under the heading ‘The Too Blue Line’:

  Police on night shifts used a new computerised telex system to send sexy messages to women colleagues at other stations. One said: ‘Have you got big knockers?’ Another asked: ‘Do you do a turn?’ And the girls sent replies that were just as steamy.

  As much older English slang, a knocker was someone extremely good looking, very similar in meaning to the much more recent expression a knockout. It is used in this sense in Thomas Middleton’s Jacobean comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheap-side (1613) – ‘They’re pretty children both, but here’s a wench will be a knocker’.

  There are perhaps fewer slang names for the breasts down through the ages than one might expect. Poets such as Allan Ramsay (1684–1758) made heroic efforts to popularise the term milky way (‘Behold her heav’nly face and heaving milky way’), while Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) offered the less-than-serious coinage fore buttock (‘Her Fore Buttocks to the navel bare’). A century later, according to the anonymous author of the flash dictionary at the end of that indispensable early Victorian guide to the murkier aspects of the capital, Sinks of London Laid Open (1848), breasts were known as heavers. None of these lasted, and in the main it has been a few tried-and-trusted expressions that have stayed the course. Titties (1746) became tits during the 20th century, and the word bubbies, known to Dr Johnson, became boobies in the hands, so to speak, of Henry Miller in the 1930s. This was then shortened to boobs round about the 1960s, thereby gradually subverting the latter’s original slang meaning of a mistake. Indeed, the word boob shows up repeatedly in the UK press in the 1960s and 1970s, nearly always denoting an error, rather than a portion of anatomy, but here, for example, is Pamela Vandyke Price writing in the Spectator in 1973:

  Beneath the sexy sweater of today lie the dangling boobs of tomorrow. A girl who is not aware of this has demonstrated, at the very least, a lack of capacity for long-term planning.

  Boob is also listed in drugs counsellor Eugene E. Landy’s narco-centric compendium of hippie language, the Underground Dictionary (1971), alongside jug, globe and bazoom, together with more rarefied expressions such as big brown eye and marshmallow. The latter may have been current among the ageing flower children who Landy canvassed, but if he had turned at that time to members of the Royal Navy for examples, he could also have listed jahooblies and BSH (British Standard Handfuls).

  Back in 1950s America, when falsies were a common trap for the unwary, the narrator in Sam S. Taylor’s crime novel Sleep No More (1951) expressed his dilemma in these terms:

  As she stood there the rhythms of her body seemed in constant motion. I wondered if those two delightful ski jumps in black wool were real.

  Venturing further back, before the invention of foam rubber, we find the following entry by the ever-reliable Captain Grose, in his second edition, from 1788:

  DAIRY. A woman’s breasts, particularly one that gives suck.

  She sported her dairy; she pulled out her breast.

  All of which sounds somewhat reminiscent of what the Guardian’s reviewer termed the ‘lascivious double entendre’ inherent in the chorus of the 2003 song ‘Milkshake’ by female R&B singer Kelis. When asked what exactly the song meant, with its apparent suggestion that she was driving all the boys into a frenzy with her own particular dairy-based beverage, she took the Marie Lloyd approach of claiming that people could read into it anything that they wished. There are also references to milk in the subtly titled hip-hop song ‘My Humps’ (2006) by the Black Eyed Peas. Although cameltoe is one of the less appealing current synonyms for the female pudenda, this particular song was not, as it happens, a tale of body-positive dromedary empowerment, but rather a celebration of breasts and buttocks, with its talk of ‘lovely lady lumps’. In this, there are echoes of one character’s description of a female spy in Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953): ‘She has black hair, blue eyes, and splendid. . . er. . . protuberances. Back and front.’

  The man who utters this phrase is a Frenchman – René Mathis of the Deuxième Bureau – sadly living half a century too early to take advantage of the wealth of material available to students of the English language in Viz magazine’s epic Roger’s Profanisaurus (1998). Here, he could have taken his choice from norks, charlies, headlamps, chebs, leisure facilities, the Bristol Channel (for the cleavage) and, perhaps most descriptive of all, dead-heat in a Zeppelin race.

  Be firm, my pecker

  THE PENIS HAS BEEN EQUALLY WELL SERVED by the coiners of slang down the ages. Some names derive from its shape, others from its actions, while many are concerned with size (or the lack of it). Timothy Lea, in one of the Confessions books, offered some thoughtful words of advice for women on this subject:

  You can work wonders with a shy, sensitive lad if you give him a bit of admiration and encouragement. ‘What an attractive spot to have a prick’ or ‘Goodness! I doubt if my slight frame will be able to withstand the onslaught of such a monster,’ go down a lot better than ‘
Everything seems to be miniaturised these days doesn’t it?’ or ‘OK, vole parts, let’s be having you!’

  With luck, those who have had the size of their sex organs compared to those of a small furry rodent are mercifully few in number, but the term prick – old enough to have been employed by Shakespeare – remains one of the most ubiquitous slang names for this organ. Not that it finds favour in all quarters; 1960s Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver saw this purely in terms of size and race (with just a hint of car mechanics thrown in):

  The black man’s penis was the monkey wrench in the white man’s perfect machine. . . . Notice the puny image the white man has of his own penis. He calls it a ‘prick,’ a ‘peter,’ a ‘pecker.’

  This is all very well, but the oldest word for the penis listed by the Oxford English Dictionary, dating back just over a thousand years, is in fact weapon – hardly a shy or puny synonym to give to such a thing. Almost as long-standing, as they say, is the term yard, a usage which occurs in the Wycliff Bible of 1382. Mention of the word yard, these past hundred and fifty years, often conjures up images of Scotland Yard – an odd coincidence, since the word dick is a slang name for both a detective and a penis. The 1971 film Shaft exploited the double meaning behind the phrase private dick to the full, and indeed, the title character’s surname was itself an English synonym for the penis dating back to 1772. As for the other two terms mentioned by Cleaver, both are relatively recent, and mostly used in the US: peter dates to 1870, and pecker, 1902. Mind you, just to confuse matters, in criminal circles for all of that time a peter has been a safe, and a peterman a safecracker, while in 19th-century Australia a peter was a prison cell. Then, of course, in the UK, to keep your pecker up has long meant to show resolve and be of good cheer. Hence, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Trial by Jury (1875), the character of the Defendant sings ‘be firm, be firm my pecker’, just after being led into the courtroom, which is certainly one way of making an impression.

  Upstanding members of the community

  THAT CONTROVERSY-HUNGRY American television programme The Jerry Springer Show (1991–present), when not tackling subjects like ‘Gay Cousins in Love’ or ‘I Married a Horse’, once broadcast an episode entitled ‘I Cut Off My Manhood’, thereby employing a term for the penis which had been around since 1640. Had the producers opted for other 17th-century variants – ‘I Cut Off My Prependent’ or ‘I Cut Off My Runnion’ – viewing figures might perhaps have been less impressive. Nevertheless, it was that century which also gave us one of the most enduring names, that of cock (1618).

  It may be that there are few people these days who would refer to the organ in question as a membrum virile (1672), but the business of calling it a member is still quite prevalent, despite the fact that it dates back over seven hundred years – which, by an odd coincidence, is the same age as the House of Commons, whose occupants still refer to each other as members on a daily basis.

  The term meat has an earthy and relatively modern air about it, typified in the classic 1936 salacious blues recording ‘Take It Easy, Greasy’ by Lil Johnson, off to see the butcher, looking for ‘a piece of his good old meat’. Yet this, too, dates to the end of the 16th century, and can be found a century later being employed by the character Learcus in Sir John Vanbrugh’s play Æsop (1697):

  Offspring of Venus. But I’ll make you stay your stomach with meat of my chusing, you liquorish young baggage you.

  Speaking of literary men, Sir Thomas Urquhart was just as adventurous when turning his attention to the correct names for male genitalia as he had been with the female, among which he numbered Master John Goodfellow, the tickle-gizzard, the jolly member, the cunny-burrow ferret, Don Cypriano, the crimson chitterling, the nine-inch-knocker, split-rump and the live sausage. If all this sounds rather conventional by Sir Thomas’s usual standards, rest assured that he also referred to the organ in question at various times as nilnisistando, bracmard and nudinnudo. John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–80), by contrast, was a trifle more direct, preferring the expression whore-pipe.

  Some of the highlights among the many rounded up by Farmer and Henley at the end of the 19th century include the tent-peg, beard-splitter, crack-hunter, quim-stake, bald-headed-hermit, rolling-pin, middle leg, solicitor-general, bush-whacker, tool, eye-opener and the Member for Cockshire, They also note some specifically Scottish examples, such as dirk, cutty gun, Little Davy, mowdiwort and dibble (the latter last seen holding down a job as a fireman in the 1967 animated series Trumpton). They note that Irish root was itself an English slang word for the penis, but Irish terms themselves are represented merely by Langolee and jiggling-bone.

  Privates on Parade

  IT HAS LONG BEEN TRADITIONAL among men in pubs, when rising to visit the lavatory, to announce to their mates that they are off to shake hands with the wife’s best friend, to shake hands with the unemployed, syphon the python or unleash the one-eyed trouser-snake. In all-male societies such as the army, where men are thrown together in close proximity and showers and sleeping arrangements are communal, there will always be banter about people’s wedding tackle, their meat-and-two-veg, or, in Royal Navy slang, their toggle-and-two. In the first volume of his Second World War memoirs, Adolf Hitler – My Part in His Downfall (1971), Spike Milligan recalled in particular the after-dark barrack-room performances put on by the prodigiously endowed Gunner ‘Plunger’ Bailey, who, by torchlight, ‘manipulated his genitals to resemble “Sausage on a Plate”, “The Last Turkey in the Shop”, “Sack of Flour”, “The Roaring of the Lions”, and by using spectacles, “Groucho Marx”, Finally for the National Anthem he made the member stand.’

  When the playwright Peter Nichols used his own 1940s army days as the inspiration of a play in 1977 – memorably described by Irving Wardle in The Times as ‘altogether the kind of piece George Orwell might have turned out for the Carry On team’ – he employed a winningly evocative double entendre as a title, Privates on Parade, The expression private parts had been around since 1623 as a way of referring to the genitals, which was itself a less judgemental version of what in earlier times had been variously called the shameful parts (Wycliff’s Bible, 1382), or even the filthy parts (1553).

  Filth was certainly much under discussion in 1977, when the title of the LP Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols caused it to be dragged through the courts on obscenity charges. In fact, while it may have been slang for much of its life, bollocks is actually the oldest word we have for the testicles, pre-dating stones (1154) and balls (1325). Captain Grose in the late 18th century listed expressions such as nutmegs, bawbles and tallywags, while nuts and knackers entered the language almost at the same time in the mid-1860s, but it took until the 1930s for the appearance of that evergreen item of rhyming slang, cobblers (cobbler’s awls – balls).

  Enveloping the pair in question, we have the bag of skin formerly known as the cod or cods (1398) – hence the term codpiece, that singular item of Tudor clothing, favoured in recent times by singers such as Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull and Larry Blackmon from Cameo. Another singer, the late, great Viv Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, in his intermittent series of radio broadcasts for the John Peel Show about Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1975–91), memorably named the character of the ancient butler Old Scrotum, since the man was a ‘wrinkled old retainer’.

  In the end, the album title chosen by the Sex Pistols was cleared of obscenity charges, and indeed was soon looking relatively quaint, in the light of subsequent LPs such as that perennial family singalong favourite, Flux of Pink Indians’ The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks (1984, also prosecuted for obscenity, also acquitted). The word cunt, of course, remains the term most likely to be censored with asterisks or bleeped out in the media, for fear of causing offence. This despite various campaigns to ‘reclaim’ the word, beginning, perhaps, with Germaine Greer’s winningly titled article ‘Lady Love Your Cunt’ (Screw magazine, 28 June 1971). In prosecuting the Sex Pistols’ LP title, using a
19th-century obscenity law, no one seemed to be claiming that the word bollocks was offensive to men, the possessors of said body parts, nor is that argument advanced when people are variously insulted with names such as dickhead, knob-end, old scrote or prick, though few people would necessarily want these terms as a character reference. Cunt, it seems, has always been a tricky one. Indeed, in Captain Grose’s first edition from 1785, he explains that even in those days it was possible to offend the police by placing the emphasis sharply on the first part of the word constable, a habit which has survived in some quarters to this day:

  THINGSTABLE. Mr Thingstable; Mr Constable: a ludicrous affectation of delicacy in avoiding the pronunciation of the first syllable in the title of that officer, which in sound has some similarity to an indecent monosyllable.

  As for the bollocks, never mind.

  Working your ground-smashers overtime

  IT IS TEMPTING, AFTER THE FOREGOING SEA of erogenous zones, to conclude that the only parts of the body of interest to the coiners of slang are those of a sexual nature. They certainly account for a very large percentage of anatomical nicknames, but other limbs and extremities do occasionally get a look-in. Different societies and closed groups have all originated their own particular variants over the years, but to take one particular example as a case in point, imagine that you are a hip-to-the-tip American jazz musician, some time around 1942. What the cognoscenti would have called a hep-cat, a solid-sender, a pressed stud or, the new word of the day – whisper it quietly because it has had a hard time of late – a hipster. Here is how things would shape up, from head to foot.

  Your body generally was a chassis, covered in enamel (skin). As for your head, that was the top storey, fusebox, knowledge-box or crust. Covering that, unless you were bald, was your moss, rug or wig, and the face as a whole was your puss, or pan – hence the origin of the expression deadpan, when you deliver a message with a straight face. On either side of the head were your lugs, and right in the centre of that face you had a smeller (nose), below which was your yap or piechopper, containing a certain quantity of crumb-crushers or biters. You looked out at the world from a pair of Edisons, baby blues or lamps, maybe through a pair of cheaters (glasses). Your arms were pretty much just your arms – although if you were on the sleeve, that meant you were injecting drugs – but down at their furthest extremities it was a whole different story. Here could be found your lunch-hooks, grabbers, biscuit-snatchers, flippers, mitts or paws. The middle of your body would be somewhat vague – apart from your pump (heart), and the numerous words for what was in your underwear, front and back. Holding up the whole construction were pegs or gams (legs), and, if kneeling, you are on your prayer-bones. As for the feet, take your choice between gondolas, dogs, pedal-extremities, crunchers, hooves, ground-smashers or roach-killers.