Vulgar Tongues Page 17

  An invention of the late 1880s, which became known variously as the sizzler, the waffle iron, the barbecue stool, the hot seat or the hot squat, was first used for a spectacularly botched execution in 1890, in New York. The following year, an electric chair was first used at Sing Sing prison, and it eventually acquired a nickname, Old Sparky, which sounds more like a lovable character in a children’s book than a repellent and inefficient machine for frying people. Other electric chairs in a fair number of states, including Kentucky, South Carolina and Pennsylvania, were also given this name. Such conformity looks a little uninspired, given that there never seems to have been a shortage of slang words for the device, most of them deriving from the same strain of pitch-black gallows humour. Dashiell Hammett used one in his novel The Glass Key (1931), when a character sarcastically asks another, ‘Is there anything you haven’t been through before? Ever been given the electric cure?’ Other common ways of expressing such a fate included saying that someone has a date with the fireless cooker, is due for a juice jolt, or – in an ironic nod to electric hair-tongs – they’re going to give him a permanent wave. Sometimes old hands might simply say, ‘He’s gonna sit in the old rocking chair up at Sing Sing.’

  Still, for every criminal whose career ended in the execution chamber, there were countless more whose life was simply a repeating cycle of offending, arrest, incarceration, release and then back to the start again, until prison became the only home they knew. Once they were thoroughly institutionalised, there was of course a slang phrase for the only thing left on the horizon to which they could look forward – pine box parole.

  SIX

  TAILS YOU BOOZE

  Clipping the King’s English

  IN NOVEMBER 1770, THAT EMINENTLY RESPECTABLE London publication the Gentleman’s Magazine entertained its readers by printing T. Norworth’s list of eighty names for having over-indulged in drink. Founded in 1731, it was the first magazine to actually call itself a magazine, and the first to abbreviate the latter word to mag when referring to itself in print, which still sounds surprisingly modern.

  The Gentleman’s Magazine printed this collection of slang phrases for drunkenness without any suggestion that these were exclusively the province of the lower, or even criminal, classes. Indeed, the business of becoming thoroughly, incapably drunk was relatively normal in much of 18th-century society, and winding up unconscious beneath the dinner table at the end of an evening in agreeable company often considered unremarkable. As Mr Norworth explained, his list of words was intended merely ‘to express the Condition of an Honest Fellow, and no Flincher, under the effects of good Fellowship’. The obvious suspects are there – drunk, intoxicated, tipsey, happy, boozey, in his cups, got his skin full, as drunk as a Lord – alongside many which might fail to register these days, such as overtaken, concerned or bosky, It was also said that someone has got his little hat on, been in the Crown Office, or that he clips the King’s English.

  Drink, and ways of describing it, were enshrined in the culture of the time – unsurprising in an age when sources of fresh water in the capital were scarce. Water could kill you, and it was safer by far to stick to fluid that had been either brewed or distilled, beginning at breakfast with the morning draught so popular with Pepys, and floating through the day on a steady diet of red fustian or kill priest (port), bingo or cool nants (brandy), rum guttlers (canary wine), bristol milk (sherry), knock me down (strong ale), or, if you were unlucky, balderdash (adulterated wine). These slang terms are just a few of the blizzard of expressions relating to alcohol consumption recorded by Francis Grose in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785). Interestingly, for everyone who thinks the term was probably invented in Kentucky, Grose also notes that ‘the white brandy smuggled on the coasts of Kent and Sussex’ was called moonshine, making it yet another in a long list of words which found their way across the Atlantic and have since come to be thought of as US coinages.

  The 18th-century London which Grose observed was a world of seasoned and sustained imbibement. Pupils at public schools such as Christ’s Hospital were served beer each afternoon, although of questionable quality. As an old boy of the time remarked, ‘we used to call it “the washings of the brewers’ aprons”’. Down at Winchester College, they drank a strong ale brewed at the school, known to the boys as huff, a local shortening of the wider 16th-century term huff-cap, meaning powerful liquor.

  There is little if any sense in Grose’s writings that drunkenness and its consequences carried any kind of social stigma; these things were noted more as a simple fact of life. Of the ruddy-faced intoxicated man, it was remarked that the flag is out (‘signifying, the man is drunk, and alluding to the redness of his face’) or he has been out in the sun. Alternatively, he might be called an ensign bearer, one who ‘hoists his colours in his drink’. Someone half seas over was only partially intoxicated, and could also be said to have just a little cut over the head, since to be cut meant drunk – a term which survives to this day in the phrase half-cut. On the other hand, anyone who had made a more thorough job of soaking, canting a slug into their bread room or bunging their eye (‘strictly speaking to drink until one’s eye is bunged up or closed’) might then be fairly described as wrapt up in warm flannel, or simply mauled.

  Other plain terms for being drunk which appear in Grose include cup shot, pogy, top heavy, flawd, groggy or grogified, corned and fuddled. The latter was venerable even then, being first recorded in 1656. Addison and Steele used it in an article in The Tatler, ‘From My Own Apartment’, in 1709:

  I remember, when I was a young Fellow, we had a Companion of a very fearful Complexion, who, when we sat in to Drink, would desire us to take his Sword from him when he grew fuddled, for ’twas his Misfortune to be quarrelsome.

  Cup shot, however, was even older, being a variation on the 14th-century expression cup-shotten, first recorded circa 1330, pre-dating the first surviving usage of the word drunk by roughly a decade. Pinning the blame for your inebriation on the drinking vessel or the bottle, rather than your own actions, seems to have been a popular theme, giving rise to such phrases as pot-shotten (1604), in one’s cups (1611), pot-sick (1611), jug-bitten (1630) or flagonal (1635). A tankard was frequently called a pot, and so a habitual drunkard, fond of throwing drink down their own throat, had therefore been logically known as a tosspot since the late 16th century. This archetypal character was later satirised in a poem published in the Morning Chronicle in 1809, entitled ‘Toby Tosspot’, which complained:

  But there are swilling Wights, in London town,

  Term’d Jolly Dogs, – Choice Spirits, – alias Swine;

  Who pour, in midnight revel, bumpers down,

  Making their throats a thoroughfare for wine.

  Dronke as a ratte

  WHILE MANY OF THE FOREGOING WORDS for the activities of the sons of Bacchus (drinkers, 1640) have long since fallen out of use, others still sound surprisingly contemporary. During much of the past hundred years, it has been common to say that a person in a state of intoxication through drugs is high, yet this is merely adopting a 17th-century expression for drunkenness. Indeed, the first instance of high meaning drunk occurs in Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1607). Francis Grose lists a nice variation on this, in which someone’s companions might note that the man is in his altitudes (‘the man is drunk’). Other venerable phrases which have yet to sound old-fashioned include well-oiled (1701), stewed (1737) and that perennial British favourite pissed (1812), By the same token, anyone these days using the common English expression rat-arsed, meaning drunk, is in some sense following in the fine tradition of the Lincolnshire writer Thomas Wilson, who employed the expression as dronke as a ratte in his work The Arte of Rhetorique (1553) – a book partly responsible for his later imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Catholic Inquisition in Italy.

  Unsurprisingly, alcohol features regularly in the works of Shakespeare. For instance, in Henry IV, Pt 1 (1598), Falstaff is referred to as ‘that huge bombard of sa
cke’ – a bombard being a leather bottle or jug, and sacke being the common term for dry white wine from Spain. In The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), Bardolph speaks of soenever forgettingmone being fap (drunk), while in The Merchant of Venice (published 1600), Portia tells Nerissa that she does not find the Duke of Saxony’s nephew appealing as a suitor, because of his excessive drinking habits: ‘I will do any thing, Nerissa, ere I’ll be married to a sponge.’

  Pour it back in the horse

  HISTORICALLY, BEER IN ENGLAND was credited with being one of the only sources of nutrition the poor ever consumed. Wholesome British beer was a source of national pride, as when Hogarth in a pair of matched engravings contrasted the apparently orderly, contented life in Beer Street with the chaotic depravity of Gin Lane, never forgetting that gin had been introduced into the country from the continent. This belief in the health-giving properties of certain types of alcohol also prevailed when sixty-year-old writer Phillip Thicknesse published The Valetudinarians Bath Guide, or, The Means of Obtaining Long Life and Health (1780). In addition to extolling the benefits of ‘having always partaken of the breath of young women whenever they lay in my way’, he also thoroughly recommended regular alcohol consumption:

  Old Saunders, the well known landlord of the Angel at Abergavenny, who died lately at a very advanced age, seldom went to bed for the last forty years of his life, before he had swallowed some quarts of strong liquor, without any regard to the quality of it, nor much to the quantity, yet he died, I believe, a stranger to the gout.

  Thicknesse was no shrinking violet when it came to expressing his views – indeed, one biographer later commented that he could ‘but marvel that nobody ever shot him or bludgeoned him to death’ – but in this instance, as an 18th-century Briton, he was hardly being controversial in his praise for strong drink. Unless, of course, it was rotgut, a term first used by the playwright and clergyman Peter Hausted in his comedy Rivall Friends (1632), and later defined by Dr Johnson simply as bad beer. However, in 19th-century Kent, for instance, agricultural workers complained to a journalist that they were being partially paid with low-quality rotgut cider, while in Prohibition-era America, the term was generally applied to low-quality spirits. Not to be outdone, a 1937 Daily Mirror columnist even managed to apply the word to badly brewed cups of tea, but perhaps he had been having a trying day.

  Of course, there have always been those who dislike one or another type of drink, regardless of the quality. ‘Ugh, how I hate beer!’ exclaims a character in one of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm novels (The Interlopers, 1970); ‘as the man said, they ought to pour it back in the horse.’ While that series of books was generally quite hard boiled, Dean Martin, who played Matt Helm in the film adaptations, brought his own particular supremely relaxed air of sun’s over the yardarm suavity to the role. As Dino’s friend Frank Sinatra remarked during a 1966 live show at the Sands casino in Las Vegas, ‘I would say, roughly, that Dean Martin has been stoned more often than the United States embassies’ – thereby employing a slang phrase which for years generally meant simply drunk, but in the past fifty years has come to signify a state of drug intoxication. To be fair, Dean’s own publicity people also played heavily on his amiable drunk persona, such as here in the brief sleeve notes to his 1968 LP, Dean Martin’s Greatest Hits, Volume 2:

  More sweet spice from the Potentate of Pop, guaranteed to hot your toddy, rum your collins, Cambridge your tea – and generally turn on aficionados from Mount Rushmore to Manhattan Beach.

  For some public figures, being associated with a bar-room air is all part of the attraction. Visiting Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, California, some years ago, on passing Errol Flynn’s grave, I was told that it is also supposed to contain six bottles of the finest whiskey. Whether true or not, this seems appropriate for a man who once shared a beach house with David Niven named Cirrhosis-by-the-Sea. Tom Waits, meanwhile, has said that around the time he recorded his superb 1976 LP Small Change, his alcohol consumption had become reasonably significant – as reflected in song titles such as ‘Bad Liver & A Broken Heart’ and ‘The Piano Has Been Drinking’. The album opened with the ultimate touring musician’s inebriated lament, ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets To The Wind In Copenhagen)’, Its subtitle being a variation on a two-hundred-year-old British nautical term for being under the influence, three sheets in the wind. This latter expression was in turn based upon the centuries-older mariners’ name sheets, meaning the ropes which control the action of sails on a ship – the implication being that an enthusiastic drinker would need to deploy several such ropes to keep them on a steady course after sinking a few. The term appeared, for example, in the following report in The Times in 1835:

  It is related of George III, that he once came down to Blackwall to review the troops previously to their embarkation. . . A ‘jolly tar,’ a little more than three sheets in the wind,’ but ‘brim full of loyalty,’ and consequently regardless of all the rules of etiquette or decorum, designed to approach ‘His Majesty’s royal person’ with a full quart of humble porter, which he had just bought from a neighbouring alehouse. Jack ‘tongued his quid’ [chewing tobacco], ‘unshipped his sky-scraper’ [took off his tall hat], ‘hitched up his canvass’ [trousers], and hoped His Majesty would not refuse to drink with a ‘true Blue.’

  George III took this very much in his stride, but then he was a product of the 18th century. His later successor, Queen Victoria, is not usually associated with slang words for the demon drink, but one of the oldest of them all appears in a fine tale of the musical tastes of the lady in question, related by Clarence Winchester in his guidebook to the capital, Let’s Look at London (1935):

  There is a story told of the late Queen Victoria who, it was said, once asked an official of Buckingham Palace to inquire the name of a tune that was being played by the Guards’ band outside. The official made the inquiries and returned to Her Majesty not without some embarrassment, for her command demanded obedience and he was compelled to say: ‘Madame, Come where the booze is cheaper’.

  This song, set in a Regent Street hostelry, was written in the final decade of Victoria’s reign, around 1890, by E. W. Rogers and A. E. Durandeau, and later featured briefly in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Of course, the concept of cheapness changes over time, and today, when a pint of beer in London is approaching the £5 mark, drink prices from bygone ages look enviably low. For instance, Alexander Warrack’s Scots Dialect Dictionary (1911) records that the local term in those days for a very strong ale’ was an eightpence drink. The word booze, meanwhile, can be traced back to the 14th century, generally at first rendered as bouse, bouze, bowze or bowse – the last being the spelling used in Thomas Harman’s A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones (1567).

  As full as a pair of goats

  THE WORD BOOZE SPREAD, like numerous other slang terms, from England over to America. It was defined simply in George W. Matsell’s New York dictionary, Vocabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon (1859), as ‘intoxicating drink’, where it appeared sandwiched neatly between booly-dog (‘an officer; a policeman’) and bordello (‘a house of ill-fame’). In June 1919, the powerful newspaper the New York World went so far as to refer to Wall Street as the ‘Booze Exchange’, but that was not because the financial traders were supposedly in the grip of the grape, stewed to the gills, or boiled as owls. The headline actually referred to an outbreak of stock movements in the brewing and distilling sectors in anticipation of the imminent legislation aimed at banning the manufacture, sale and importation of alcohol. Prohibition in America was in the offing, as the London Times’s New York correspondent reported:

  By a vote of 55 against 11 the Senate yesterday extinguished the last hopes of the ‘Wets’ . . . At the convention of the American Neurological Society Dr L Pierce Clark, a well-known New York physician, entered an eloquent plea ‘to save the bar-tender,’ whom he described as a great social force and the genial friend of multitudes of light tipplers.

&nbs
p; As it happened, the National Prohibition Act (1919–33) helped either create or popularise a vast quantity of alcohol-related slang, not to mention driving the majority of the US public into illegal activities, and giving organised crime a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity. After drink became illegal, otherwise law-abiding citizens had no one else to turn to except criminals in order to secure their regular supply of tonsil paint. The majority of the government may have voted in favour of Prohibition, but the majority of the electorate voted with their feet, straight down to the nearest speakeasy, looking for a liquid lunch. The original impetus for this legislation came from a group called the Anti-Saloon League – the clue is in the name – and these measures also found great favour with those horseback-riding stars of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), the Ku Klux Klan, who then enthusiastically enforced their protemperance views with violence in the 1920s. With friends like these, perhaps the only truly civilised response was to imitate a couple of characters in Dashiell Hammett’s 1924 short story ‘The Golden Horseshoe’, and hit the bottle high: as one of them remarks, ‘before long, we were as full as a pair of goats’.