Vulgar Tongues Page 18

  It was not just the Ku Klux Klan who were in favour of banning alcohol. Millionaire industrialist Henry Ford was also – as with many other aspects of everyday life – outspoken on the subject. ‘FORD SAYS HE’LL QUIT BUILDING CARS IF BOOZE EVER COMES BACK; COULDN’T TRUST DRINKING WORKERS’, read one 1929 headline. This, however, would not have come as a surprise to anyone who had encountered the virulently anti-Semitic four-volume compendium Ford had published in 1920, The International Jew, a vast, paranoid, conspiracy-theory exercise which included sections entitled ‘The Jewish Element in Bootlegging Evil’ and ‘How Jews Gained American Liquor Control’.

  Originally, in 17th-century England, a boot-leg was simply that, the leg of a tall boot. However, in America at the close of the 19th century, the term boot-legger came to assume its modern, alcohol-related meaning. An 1890 edition of a New York publication called The Voice explained things as follows: ‘The “boot-legger” is a grim spectre to the anti-Prohibitionist. . . He is a man who wears boots in whose tops are concealed a flask or two of liquor.’ It was also around this time that the slang phrase speakeasy appeared – another American coinage – meaning anywhere that engaged in the illegal sale of alcohol. Prohibition saw hundreds of thousands of such establishments opening across the US, which flourished despite the well-publicised efforts of the authorities to close them down, and the word was common currency in the post-First World War era, for instance in this 1930 headline from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ‘FEDERAL MEN HIT ELKS CLUB – Steel Door Bars Way Into Braddock Speakeasy’.

  Nix on those lush heads

  OF COURSE, IN THOSE DAYS, if you managed to find a joint that hadn’t been raided, the quality of the liquor on sale could vary enormously. The colloquial expression bathtub gin was often a literal pointer to the beverage’s origins, while some just cut to the chase and called it embalming fluid. In some of its rougher forms, the home-made product was pure poison, a hazard acknowledged among consumers even as they indulged. The hit song ‘Button Up Your Overcoat’ (1928), made popular by Ruth Etting, listed various potential dangers her lover should avoid, among them frozen ponds, peroxide blondes and, not least, bootleg hooch.

  Song titles and lyrics from blues, jazz, hillbilly and rock’n’roll records of the first half of the 20th century were often shot through with the kind of slang familiar to their target audiences. Unsurprisingly, a fair amount of it was drink-related. For instance, when jazz combo The Charleston Chasers, led by prolific bandleader Red Nichols, cut a tune called ‘Feelin’ No Pain’ for the Columbia label in 1927, they were not celebrating a successful visit to the dentist. Similarly, malleable art materials played little part in inspiring Chauncey Morehouse and His Orchestra when they recorded ‘Plastered in Paris’ for the Brunswick label in 1938. The following year, New Orleans blues singer Blue Lu Barker, backed by her husband Danny Barker and his Fly Cats, recorded four songs one afternoon for the Decca company, two of which had drinking slang in their titles: ‘Buy Me Some Juice’ and ‘Nix on Those Lush Heads’. While, to a toddler, the word juice might conjure up images of orange squash, as far as many adult Americans were concerned at that time it meant the hard stuff. Indeed, when Alabama sax player Cootie Williams recorded a number called ‘Juice Head Baby’ (1945), the subject of the song was no infant, and the liquid in question was unlikely to have been served at a kindergarten. Just as a juice head was a heavy drinker or alcoholic, so was a lush head, often shortened just to lush (such as in Orrie Hitt’s 1960 pulp novel The Lady Is a Lush), so the title of that second Blue Lu Barker song was a five-word condemnation of sloppy drunk behaviour. The word nix, an American slang term of refusal or rejection, had been around since Edwardian times – perhaps its best-known usage worldwide occurs in the lyrics to Elvis Presley’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’ (1957), when a character named Bugsy turns down the chance to escape in favour of dancing – while lush, as a term for drinking alcohol, has a venerable history, and was first recorded in the 1811 edition of Francis Grose’s dictionary.

  Of course, no discussion of music-related drink slang could possibly manage without a mention of Texas honky-tonk singer Bill Nettles and his landmark hymn to the joys of the inebriated hobo lifestyle, the ‘Wine-O Boogie’, recorded for the Starday label at Houston’s Gold Star Studios in 1954 – a curiously uplifting tale of the hazards of swigging cheap alcohol within sight of a policeman, in a country where packing a pistol might be perfectly fine, but being a tramp and then drinking booze in public could merit jail time. One of the first recorded uses of the term wino appeared in the classic hobo memoir, Jack Black’s You Can’t Win (1926), in which the author described his fondness for the rough, largely ad hoc drinking joints favoured by the tramps of the West Coast, and also listed some of their slang names for wine:

  The wine dumps, where wine bums or ‘winos’ hung out, interested me. Long, dark, dirty rooms with rows of rickety tables and a long bar behind which were barrels of the deadly ‘foot juice’ or ‘red ink,’ as the winos called it.

  In the early 1990s, when Johnny Depp was engaged to Winona Ryder, he had the words Winona Forever tattooed on his right arm. Forever turned out to be somewhere in the region of three years, after which they split, and he famously had it altered to read Wino Forever.

  Here’s lookin’ up your address

  PRIVATE EYES AND VILLAINS in pulp crime novels from the 1920s to the 1960s generally seemed to do a heroic amount of drinking, and the novelists responsible thereby preserved a fair slice of entertaining alcohol-related slang. To start things off, there were various phrases to be used by way of a toast. Here’s how was one common salutation, as was the ever-popular here’s to crime, which probably has its origins in the clandestine nature of alcohol buying in the bootlegging days. Consider this post-war example, from Bruce Manning’s Cafe Society Sinner (1960):

  He got up and went into the kitchen again. He built the drinks strong. ‘Jolt and a bolt,’ he said as he handed her the glass. ‘Here’s to crime.’

  Other toasts are sadly less well known, such as this fine example from John D. MacDonald’s Soft Touch (1958):

  ‘Here’s lookin’ up your address,’ she said. She drank and sighed and said, ‘I needed this one.’

  As for stating your intent, here is a determined character in Erie Stanley Gardner’s 1935 novel This Is Murder:

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About getting crocked.’

  ‘You mean you’re going to get crocked?’

  ‘Absolutely pie-eyed. Polluted. I’m going to celebrate.’

  Or, if you prefer things more succinct, why not follow the example of someone in Richard Marsten’s The Spiked Heel (1956), and observe that ‘this is a good night to get pleasantly looped, don’t you think?’ For those requiring an excuse for such behaviour, Esquire magazine published a helpful list in their Handbook for Hosts (1954), entitled ‘365 Excuses for a Party’, which included 25 August (‘Independence Day in Uruguay’), 29 July (Mussolini’s birthday’), 30 October (‘Buy a Doughnut Day’), 7 April (‘birthday of Fala, President Roosevelt’s dog’), 24 July (’Mormon Pioneer Day’) and 20 July (Anniversary of the National Shuffleboard Open Championship’).

  During the course of an evening’s liquid entertainment, you could rely on your companions to let you know how things stand. Anyone showing signs of running a temperature – from the rosy alcoholic glow of the cheeks – might also be said to be burning with a low blue flame, awash, tanked, soused, in the bag, unable to see a hole in a ladder, behind the cork, all gone, in a heap or afflicted with the blind staggers, among many, many others. The idea of a body slowly filling up with drink from the feet upwards is reflected in a few expressions, such as saying that you’re going to get both your eyeballs wet. One of my favourites occurs in Budd Schulberg’s classic novel of a Hollywood get-rich’quick merchant, What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), in which someone remarks, ‘You’re drunk, Al. Your teeth are swimming.’ Late at night in a New York bar in t
he book Greenwich Killing Time (1986), Kinky Friedman’s detective alter-ego observes of his drinking buddy, ‘He was pretty bombed and I was just about walking on my knuckles.’ Meanwhile, Down South, you might just say that you had been Dixie fried, after the popular beer made by the Dixie Brewing Company of New Orleans, immortalised in the Carl Perkins rockabilly single ‘Dixie Fried’ (1956).

  The following day, assuming you have made it that far, some stocktaking is perhaps in order. After knocking on the door of a log cabin in The Lady in the Lake (1943) Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe encounters a bad-tempered gent who then apologises for his temper. ‘I was out on the roof last night,’ he explains, ‘and I’ve got a hangover like seven Swedes’ – a variant on the expression out on the tiles, deriving from the supposedly wild exploits of cats roaming at night. Or, to employ another Chandler phrase, he had simply been doing next week’s drinking too soon. A more direct way of saying much the same thing is employed by a character in the 1960 nautical crime novel Aground, by Charles Williams: ‘I feel like hell, I theeeenk. And if I ever catch that lousy parrot that slept in my mouth. . .’

  Booze heads, stay away

  DESPITE THE CLAIMS OF POLITICIANS, religious leaders and temperance organisations, Prohibition came and went in America, leaving behind a society just as partial to alcohol as before, perhaps even more so. In a 1949 edition of the US entertainments industry trade magazine Billboard, Arkansas carnival organisers the Crescent Amusement Company took out an advert looking for all manner of seasonal show people. As well as seeking ‘Hanky Panks, Six Cats, Glass Pitch, Bumper, High Striker, Novelties, Jewelry Set, Custard, Fish Pond’, and other specialists familiar in the trade, they also had need of drivers for articulated lorries who could restrain themselves from drinking their lunch out of a bottle:

  First Class Wheel Foreman and Second Men Truck Drivers for new No. 5; must be sober and drive semi trailers. Booze heads, stay away.

  Despite the abject failure of Prohibition in America, there are many dry counties to this day across the US, including the one where the Jack Daniel’s distillery is sited in Lynchburg, Tennessee, which means that the many thousands of visitors each year are able to buy all sorts of branded souvenirs there, but none of the district’s most famous product.

  While it is hard to imagine something like Prohibition ever making it onto the statute books in the UK, Cromwell’s 17th-century parliamentarians certainly had an equivocal view of alcohol, and there were numerous prosecutions of alehouses and inns. The staunch puritan MP Major General Charles Worsley – who commanded the party of musketeers that entered the House of Commons and closed down the Rump Parliament on Cromwell’s orders in 1653 – was certainly active in this field. The historian Bernard Capp notes that Worsley called alehouses ‘the very womb, that brings forth all manner of wickedness’, and that ‘in January 1656 he and his commissioners ordered the suppression of over 200 in and around Blackburn alone’. As it happens, it was another puritan MP of those days, the writer William Prynne, who, in his book The Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdomes (1643), first used that venerable slang term for water long popular among the teetotal fraternity, Adam’s ale.

  Quite what Worsley would have made of Britain in more recent times is anyone’s guess, particularly if given access to a selection of tabloid newspapers pursuing one of their favourite lines of enquiry – lurid tales of drunkenness. Perhaps especially disturbing to a man of his religious sensibilities would have been the alleged exploits of a senior London cleric in 2006, reported under the title ‘HE MITRE HAD A PEW TOO MANY’. It was claimed that the man in question had climbed into the back seat of a stranger’s car in a state of some inebriation, and, when asked by the owner what he was up to, replied, ‘I’m the Bishop of Southwark, it’s what I do.’ These events then prompted a statement to the press from the bishop’s spokesman, which included a down-to-earth slang term more reminiscent of a rugby club than the General Synod: ‘He’d clearly had a glass of wine but does not recall being drunk as a skunk. . . That’s the strongest denial you’ll get.’

  Opening up the sluices at both ends

  IT WAS THE LONDON SATIRICAL MAGAZINE Private Eye which coined the famous expression tired and emotional – as a shorthand for drunk – in 1966, describing the bibulous condition of the then Labour cabinet minister George Brown. Two years earlier, they had begun publishing their Barry McKenzie cartoon strip, which helped cement the popular notion of the citizens of Australia being not averse to sinking a few swift ones. The cartoon provided an outlet for the Australian Barry Humphries to take numerous pot-shots at various targets he observed around him, as its artist Nicholas Garland later wrote:

  The author’s attitude to Poms and their poor old country was quite clearly conveyed in casual asides and by the ludicrous and hypocritical behaviour of all Englishmen and women in the strip.

  Having landed in Britain, McKenzie tells his fellow train passenger on the way to London that he wants to celebrate my arrival with a skinful In the film adaptation, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), with a script co-written by Humphries, the titular hero then exclaims after drinking some beer, ‘I really needed that. I was as dry as a dead dingo’s donger.’ Recalling his flight over from Australia, McKenzie observes that it had ‘got a bit rough over the Hima-bloody-layas. One of the blokes starts chundering, y’know. Fella near me yodelling his jelly and ice cream.’

  Barry Crocker, the actor who played McKenzie, later sang the theme tune for quintessential Aussie soap series Neighbours – a far cry, perhaps, from the songs he had performed in the original 1972 film, such as ‘One Eyed Trouser Snake’ and ‘Chunder in the Old Pacific Sea’, the second of which also rounded up another term for drink-induced vomiting, the technicolor yawn. Unsurprisingly, the lyrics to both were also written by Barry Humphries – indeed, the earliest citing of the latter phrase given by the OED comes from this song, so it seems to be one of his own coinages. The word chunder, by contrast, was not. It was brought into international usage by the McKenzie cartoon and films, and also by Eric Idle on the 1972 LP Another Monty Python Record, speaking knowledgeably about imaginary Australian table wines such as Chateau Chunder, ‘an appellation contrôllée specially grown for those keen on regurgitation. A fine wine which really opens up the sluices at both ends.’ However, in 1964, the year that Private Eye began publishing the cartoon, the word was clearly in common use in Australia, appearing, for example, in the newspaper Woroni, the journal of the Canberra University College Students Club:

  The long-awaited Chunder report has at last been released. The work of a commission appointed by the A.P.C. (Association for the Prevention of Chundering), it represents an analysis of data collected over a period of ten minutes. There has, in the past, been much speculation as to the cause of chundering, a disease which half-kills more than 100,000 people in Australia every year, most of whom are students in the 17 to 22 age group.

  The OED gives the first written appearance of the word chunder in Nevil Shute’s novel A Town Like Alice (1950), but New Zealand pilots were certainly using the word as a slang term meaning ‘air-sick’ a decade earlier, as a 1941 report in the Auckland Star makes clear. Interestingly, Shute himself had previously enjoyed a very distinguished career as an aeronautical engineer and pilot. He was also what the locals would have called a pommy, having arrived from England only that same year, aged fifty-one. The origins of the word pommy or pom are often disputed, but the earliest citings from Australian newspapers in 1912 give it as a shortening of pomegranate, a tortuous play on the word immigrant: ‘Now they call ’em “Pom-mygranates,”’ said the Sydney newspaper The Truth in 1912, ‘and the Jimmygrants don’t like it.’ Poms, therefore, are not strictly the English at all, but newly minted Australians – a breed who two decades earlier might have been referred to by a different Australian slang name, squatters – people who had arrived in the country but were unable to gain permission to buy land outright. This term appears in what is often regarded as the
earliest home-grown Australian detective novel, Fergus W. Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, published in Melbourne in 1886. It is a fascinating book, yet anyone expecting it to be full of choice Aussie slang would be sorely disappointed. Moving forward half a century to another landmark Australian crime novel, Arthur Upfield’s The Mystery of Swordfish Reef (1939), set among the coastal fishermen of Bermagui, New South Wales, there is also surprisingly little indigenous slang in evidence. People are occasionally feeling crook (ill), and at one point someone says Day as a greeting (though not g’day). However, some of the slang which seems today to be most typical of Australia feels more like a post-Second World War development.

  Bring on the breathalyser bag

  IN 1967, WHEN CHURCHILL’S former wartime chauffeur appeared in court charged with being under the influence, one newspaper headline read: ‘SIR WINSTON’S DRIVER TOLD P.C.: I’M SLOSHED’, The person in question was then said to have exclaimed, ‘Bring on the breathalyser bag,’ and later, when taken into custody, allegedly declared, ‘I’m drunk, drunk as an owl.’ Some years afterwards, in 1981, it was Sir Winston’s twenty-one-year-old grandson who, as an Oxford University student and member of the Bullingdon Club, was interviewed by Peter McKay of the Daily Mirror about his use of a more recent upper-class term for inebriation, hog-whimperingly drunk. However, he stressed that ‘in fact, I used the expression to describe another club here who are a load of silly prats’.

  Four years later, a book of supposed Upper Class Rhyming Slang appeared, designed to be filed under ‘humour’, although the contents offered precious little of that: mont blanc, meaning plonk, or cabin cruiser for boozer, and so on. In the main, it served only to highlight the fact that most slang seems to originate lower down the social scale, although it often travels upwards. For example, in 2003, Prince William, when celebrating his twenty-first birthday in the company of Prince Charles – and within earshot of the press – asked his father after a number of drinks, ‘Are you trying to get me pissed?’ The Daily Mirror immediately weighed in with the results of a reader survey into this momentous event, which found that ‘80 per cent of people thought Prince William was right to use a swear word’. Meanwhile, the Daily Star offered a helpful list of fifty alternative slang terms for drunkenness – some obvious, some not – that he might have chosen instead, including wasted, banjaxed, ankled, paralytic, trollied, blotto, squiffy, plastered, mashed and legless. In some ways, times had changed very little since the Gentleman’s Magazine published their own, even longer, roll-call of such words back in 1770.