Vulgar Tongues Read online

  The big boys just give a couple of the plumbers your address and that’s it. If the first set of plumbers don’t fix the leak, they send another set.

  Tools of the trade like machine guns, pistols, knives, coshes and various types of explosive all acquired slang names. The Thompson sub-machine gun, patented in 1920, became an icon of the gangster era, peppering the soundtrack of films such as The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932). The exploits of Al Capone’s mob when using this kind of hardware also gave rise to another popular expression, used here in the January 1932 edition of Black Mask magazine: ‘If that louse makes a play for me, he’ll get hit by Chicago lightning!’ It was also sometimes known to mobsters, journalists and novelists by nicknames like Chicago typewriter, Chicago piano, equaliser or chatterbox, but mostly just called a tommy. Anyone on the receiving end of such a weapon was said to have been hosed down, drilled or greased.

  A shotgun was a crowd-pleaser or scatter-gun, while most types of handgun were simply a rod, a gat, a roscoe, a piece, a heater, a cannon or just iron. A dirt-cheap weapon – sometimes home-made, and more likely to injure those using it rather than the intended victim – was a Saturday night special, or a zip-gun.

  With the public fascination for tales of real and fictional gangsters, the spread of these terms internationally was swift. They surfaced in works like Nighthawks (1929), a tale of the Soho underworld by the prolific crime writer John G. Brandon, who was born in Australia but moved to England and wrote a dizzying number of London-based novels. The book’s title employed a wide-ranging slang name which took in anyone from criminals, prostitutes and habitual party-goers to insomniacs and many other denizens of the night (over a decade before the most famous use of the term, as the title of a 1942 Edward Hopper painting). At one point in the novel, a relocated American mobster attempts to educate a French woman in Soho about crime-speak back home, after first asking her not to speak French, because ‘I’m the horse’s wish-bone [i.e. useless] when it comes to idle chatter in any other spiel [language] than English’:

  Well, if I don’t keep on forgettin’ you ain’t wise t’ good li’l’ ol’ New York’s language. Packin’ a rod means carryin’ a gun . . . I’m ain’t [sic] a soft bimbo myself, babe; but I dunno I would be achin’ t’ carry the trouble to him on a tray [pick a fight with him].

  There was certainly a significant transatlantic exchange of crime terms over the years. In a 1911 article entitled ‘Slang of the Criminal’, which appeared in the Milwaukee Sentinel, a lawyer is a mouthpiece, a shoplifter is a booster, while the average policeman is termed a harness bull – all terms which would later become familiar to readers of US pulp crime fiction. However, venerable survivals from the Old Country include beak for judge, moll buzzer for one who robs women, and doss meaning to sleep. The longevity of these expressions during the 20th century was perhaps aided by the publication of American books such as Herbert Asbury’s non-fiction work The Gangs of New York (1928), which, although written during the era of the tommy gun, dealt with a fair number of 19th-century hoodlums and therefore contained an appendix of criminal slang drawn directly from George W. Matsell’s Vocabulum, Or the Rogue’s Lexicon (1859), which was itself full of 17th- and 18th-century London criminal words such as ken for house or cove for man.

  Raymond Chandler’s novels, rich in the slang of Los Angeles hoodlums, enjoyed great popularity in Britain, and it is a very short distance from some terms describing money in Farewell My Lovely (1940) – ‘Fish, iron men, bucks to the number of one hundred’ – to the following dialogue spoken by Jack Lang’s London wide boys in his 1967 novel The Hard Case: ‘Two hundred iron men will get you five that he’s washed up.’ However, iron itself was an all-purpose 18th-century English slang name for money, which could well have influenced the later American usage.

  Indeed, anyone consulting that evergreen family favourite, Reg Kray’s Book of Slang (1989), will find that this archetypal East End gangland villain rounded up pure cockney terms alongside others more associated with the days of Prohibition-era US mobsters such as Lucky Luciano or Meyer Lansky. This is not to say that the likes of Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll would have been likely to remark that a friend was going ‘on the hot cross’ (hot cross bun, on the run) having robbed a fish-and-tank (bank). However, he would certainly have understood the term knock-off gee (mob hit man, assassin). Indeed, he followed that profession himself, until developing an acute case of lead poisoning when a Thompson sub-machine gun caught up with him in an 8th Avenue drugstore in 1932.

  From wrong gee to O.G.

  JUST AS A KNOCK-OFF GEE was a killer, an untrustworthy man was a wrong gee – both expressions employing gee (the letter G, short for guy, or indeed geezer, also common in the US at that time). Gee was originally American hobo slang, dating from before the First World War. In recent years, if you call someone an O. G., this is a hip-hop term, meaning original gangsta – which is slightly ironic, since organised gang crime came very late to the black community in America, compared with other groups. The original gangsters of the Prohibition era were either Jewish (such as Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel), Italian (Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello) or Irish (Legs Diamond, Machine Gun Kelly), arising out of late 19th-century New York street gangs such as the Hudson Dusters or the Five Points Gang. This is not to suggest that there was a shortage of violence in black districts, a fact reflected in blues lyrics of the time, such as ‘Brown Skin Woman Swing’, recorded in Chicago in 1939 by Roosevelt Scott – a jaunty number urging a woman not to kill her errant boyfriend (‘don’t shoot him, don’t cut him’) – but this was not organised crime. Knife crime was common enough in those circles for the bloody wounds inflicted by edged weapons to be nicknamed Harlem sunsets. By contrast, the two most famous Los Angeles black gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, were not even formed until 1968 and 1972 respectively. In a 1999 episode of the The Sopranos, Tony’s nephew Christopher encounters a rap record mogul named Massive Genius, some of whose crew are impressed to be meeting a real mafia member – ‘So you is an OG?’ one says, which Christopher brushes away disgustedly with, ‘Yeah, whatever. . .’

  In his second James Bond novel, Live and Let Die (1954), which was partially set in Harlem, Ian Fleming called attention to the historical lack of black organised crime, when 007 is sent to investigate a ghetto kingpin called Mr Big (a name which coincidentally foreshadows the one adopted by million-selling 1990s gangsta rapper Notorious BIG, killed in a drive-by shooting in 1997), although Bond’s opinions are clearly those of his time and background:

  ‘I don’t think I’ve heard of a great negro criminal before,’ said Bond, ‘Chinamen, of course, the men behind the opium trade. There’ve been some big-time japs, mostly in pearls and drugs. Plenty of negroes mixed up in diamonds and gold in Africa, but always in a small way. They don’t seem to take to big business. Pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought except when they’ve drunk too much.’

  The alternative spelling gangsta came to international notice with the 1988 release of the hip-hop album Straight Outta Compton by NWA – one of the founding statements of what was to become known as gangsta rap – which contained a track entitled ‘Gangsta Gangsta’. Reviewing the record in The Times the following year, Robin Denselow commented that ‘this is a report from the California the Beach Boys never told you about’, and by the early 1990s a debate was raging in the media as to whether this sub-genre of hip hop was reporting or glorifying the criminal lifestyle, a controversy which has rumbled on ever since. Indeed, at the time of writing, the co-founder of rap label Death Row Records, Marion ‘Suge’ Knight, is in prison awaiting trial on murder charges arising from a fatality which occurred in South Central LA during the shooting of a film entitled Straight Outta Compton. In 2009, when Death Row auctioned off the contents of their offices after filing for bankruptcy, one of the top items under the hammer was an electric chair, which sold for $2,500.

  Yet popular songs had always documented the exploits of thi
eves and outlaws. For example, in the collection of centuries-old English and Scottish traditional songs known as the Child Ballads (published 1882–98), there are murders by the score, and a great many ballads devoted to the adventures of Robin Hood. Similarly, in late 19th-century Australia, there were songs depicting the exploits of Ned Kelly and his gang.

  Oddly enough, popular songwriters failed to make much of the exploits of the famous gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s – although Woody Guthrie wrote a song called ‘The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd’ (1939), commemorating the deceased Georgia bank robber who became Public Enemy No. 1 after the death of John Dillinger. As for the music taste of the mob themselves, bar-room pianist and pulp author Jack Woodford – author of timeless gems such as Indecent (1934), The Abortive Hussy (1950) and The Evangelical Cockroach (1924) – recalled in his memoirs that the one tune which Al Capone requested him to play, time and again, was the sentimental British First World War song ‘Roses of Picardy’ (1916).

  One gang that was singing, and also the subject of a song, was Billy Fullerton’s 1920s Scottish Protestant outfit the Billy Boys, who composed their own lyrics to the tune ‘Marching through Georgia’, including a line about being ‘up to our knees in Fenian blood’. Their activities are said to be the inspiration for the classic novel of the Glasgow razor gangs, No Mean City, by Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long, published in 1935. In this book, a street fight is a rammy, the police are the busies, and the way to offer someone a drink is to say, ‘I’m holding [i.e. I’ve got some money], what’ll it be?’

  However, the main group of musicians who developed a fascination with crime films and gangster mythology long before the gangsta rappers were those of the Jamaican reggae, ska and rock steady scene. From Prince Buster’s landmark single ‘Al Capone’ (1964), it was a short step from singing about mobsters to adopting their names, so that Lester Bullock began recording as Dillinger, and Dennis Smith became Dennis Alcapone. As for Toots Hibbert, of Toots and the Maytals, he commemorated his time in jail with the fine song ‘54–46 That’s My Number’ (1968), The pinnacle of this trend was the 1972 Jamaican crime film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff as a gun-toting singer on the run from the police, whose hugely successful soundtrack album included the 1967 rude boy classic ‘007 (Shanty Town)’ by Desmond Dekker & the Aces. One of its other highlights was a tale of the perils of the criminal lifestyle, ‘Johnny Too Bad’ by The Slickers, about a tooled-up young man walking around carrying a gun and a knife (‘a ratchet in your waist’). As the author of the original LP’s sleeve notes remarked of the group, ‘they should know: when the lawyer was getting copyright clearance on that tune, one of the writers was underground. The other was on death row.’

  Sadly, the other side of this fascination with gun culture has seen the violent deaths of fine Jamaican musicians such as Prince Far I, Winston Riley (who wrote and produced the 1971 Dave and Ansell Collins hit ‘Double Barrel’) and two of the Wailers, drummer Carlton Barrett and founding member Peter Tosh. Bob Marley himself was shot and wounded, along with his wife and manager, in 1976.

  I smell of the bucket

  GAOLS AND PRISONS HAVE ALWAYS loomed large in the mind and language of those whose activities were more than likely to land them in such an establishment. Appropriately enough, perhaps the oldest slang term for a prison derives its name from a real institution – London’s the Clink, on the southern bank of the Thames, which entertained numerous malefactors from the 12th century up until its destruction in the Gordon Riots of 1780. The city’s gaols had a rough time during that uprising, and among the others burnt down during a week of mayhem was the King’s Bench prison. Standing near the present site of Water-loo Station, its formidable walls were topped with iron spiked defences known colloquially as Lord Mansfield’s teeth, after the then Lord Chief Justice.

  Francis Grose listed other slang names for prison which were in use at that time, such as the iron doublet, the sheriff’s hotel, lob’s pound, the boarding school, limbo, the repository and the spring-ankle warehouse. He also recorded that such a building was called a queer ken, and defined queer birds as ‘rogues relieved from prison, and returned to their old traded’, a usage which survived virtually intact into the 20th century, as in the classic 1936 London underworld novel The Gilt Kid by James Curtis, in which an ex-convict encounters an old friend in the street:

  ‘Christ, Curly. I didn’t recognize you.’

  Curly laughed. It was a satisfied sound.

  ‘Yes,’ he said looking down on his striped suit with obvious pride, ‘this whistle I got on’s a bit different from the old grey one they dish you out with back in the queer place.’

  In the same novel, prison warders are known as screws – a term also familiar in America at least thirty years earlier – yet this term also carries its older meaning of burglary, as when a character says ‘I got nicked for screwing’. It had no sexual connotations in this context, and nor did another deceptively familiar phrase which occurs later in the same conversation, where to have it off is to commit a robbery:

  ‘Had it off, since you come out?’

  ’For God’s sake, Curly pal, give us a chance. I’ve only been out just under a week.’

  Curly nodded and took another pull on his beer.

  ‘I had it off last week,’ he said with a wink. . .

  Of course, anyone now using such language in a television costume drama would draw unintentional laughs from today’s audience – however historically accurate it may be – yet conversely, the BBC TV series Peaky Blinders felt able to have a 1920s Birmingham character remark that ‘if the cops find us, we’re screwed’, despite the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest written example of screwed meaning in trouble dates only from 1955.

  That distinctive air which the recently released prisoner seems to carry around when back in circulation can be summed up in another phrase recorded by Raymond Chandler in his 1936 short story ‘Goldfish’, when a character fresh out of detention says, ‘I smell of the bucket.’ This term was one of many that characterised prison as simply a dumping-ground for those that society wanted to keep at arm’s length. Other American terms, many along the same lines, were storage, the pen, the calaboose, the can, the iron bungalow, pokey, the refrigerator and the cooler, while a women’s prison was a hen pen. A fine old London word for prison shows up in A. J. La Bern’s superb novel of low life in the capital, It Always Rains on Sunday (1945), in which it is said of East End villain Tommy Swann, ‘He joined up with the Notting Hill boys, some of whom he had met in chokey.’

  Satirical references to the supposed luxuriousness or educational benefits of this kind of establishment were inherent in the names county hotel and stone college, where lucky individuals might be said to be enjoying breakfast uptown, In America, Sing Sing prison has long been the big house (or the big house up the river, denoting its location in relation to New York City), a name which itself echoes the British 19th-century habit of referring to the local workhouse as the big house. The name Sing Sing is of Native American origin, and translates, appropriately enough, as ‘stone upon stone’. This is in marked contrast to the very earliest days of the colonial settlements in New Zealand, where the phrase describing the action of debtors who opted for a short prison sentence in lieu of payment was, according to an 1844 issue of the Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, that ‘he “takes it out in wood,” as the slang phrase is – our gaols being wooden ones’.

  A hot squat on the waffle iron

  ONCE INCARCERATED, A PRISONER MIGHT be serving a life sentence with no remission – otherwise known as doing the book, or sweating out the rest of it. Habitual reoffenders were said to have done more time than a clock, and regular escapers thought to have jack rabbit blood.

  Shorter prison sentences had various nicknames. In America, a very brief stay was simply wino time, while the slang expression for a five-year jail term was a nickel, after the five-cent coin, as in the 1977 Tom Waits song ‘A Sight For S
ore Eyes’, where a character is described as being up north (i.e. in Sing Sing) doing a nickel’s worth. A ten-year stretch was of course a dime. Longer sentences carried a certain status, as did certain criminal professions. When two black criminals meet in jail in Trick Baby (1967), the trivial charge one has been arrested for confuses the other:

  One thing puzzled me. How did a fast grifter like him wind up serving a chump’s ten-day bit? One thing for sure, he knew the con game backward.

  Describing a prison term as a bit dates back at least until the early 20th century, and appears in Jackson and Hellyer’s Vocabulary of Criminal Slang (1914), which also gives such other long-standing variants as a jolt and a stretch. All of these have survived the last hundred years very well, but one prison slang word it lists is much less common, which is tent, meaning a cell: ‘He’s doing penance in a tent’.

  These days it is a commonplace to picture life inside prisons being dominated by gang culture and inter-gang violence, especially in America, and usually divided along racial lines. Yet this is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. As the journalist Graeme Wood states, ‘New York has had street gangs for well over a century, but its first major prison gang didn’t form until the mid-1980s.’ Currently the six main gangs in California prisons today are the Northern Structure, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Nazi Lowriders, the Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia. Still, long before the advent of such organisations, aside from the ever-present threat of being attacked with a shank (home-made prison knife), the principal danger which has occupied the coiners of prison slang is that found in the execution house.

  Judicial hanging was long the method on both sides of the Atlantic, and in W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar (1929) one character makes the following laconic reference to someone else’s likely sentence: ‘Well, they’re gonna put a necktie on Gus he won’t take off.’ One of the oldest terms for death by hanging is to step off, dating back to the business of being pushed off a cart on which you were standing at Tyburn by the hangman, which over the years has become a general slang phrase for dying. Something more ‘modern’ came along in 1924, when some US states began favouring the newly devised gas chamber over hanging. Arizona, which switched over to it in the 1930s, was still occasionally using this method as recently as 1999, which helps explain the old prison slang expression ‘you’ll be sniffing Arizona perfume’. Nevertheless, nothing seems to have stirred the slang imagination of the underworld quite like that frequently unreliable piece of hardware, the electric chair.