Vulgar Tongues Read online

  In America, of course, if you say that you are pissed, it means angry – a shortening of pissed off – rather than drunk; however, its British usage dates back two centuries, whereas the earliest listings in the OED for the US variant are post-Second World War. On the face of it, the word paralytic, for incapably drunk, might sound equally modern, but it is first recorded in 1843, and of Australian origin. It appeared in an irreverent four-page publication from Sydney called the Satirist and Sporting Chronicle, under the slight variant paraletic, in a short paragraph strewn with sexual innuendo suggesting that a gentleman named Brook had been seen too often in this condition coming home from ‘the little house under the hill’, having been ‘fishing for salmon out of season’. Other gossip items in the same publication give a picture of free-spirited life in the city at the time, with seemingly relaxed attitudes to alcohol and sex, such as the following cryptic entry:

  The Pitt-Street Auctioneers – These gentlemen had better attend to their business, and knock-’em-down, than to visit Biddy’s, at twelve o’clock at night, to take their ball – it’s no go long nose; Hannah says she’s engaged, and that you had better attend to Cavanagh’s bar maid, who will in all probability meet you.

  Yet there was another side of Australia with quite a different attitude to strong drink, as seen in another newspaper from the same year, the Teetotal Advocate – published in Launceston, the second-largest city in the penal colony Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) – whose correspondents described spirits as distilled damnation and liquid fire. However, despite the resistance to alcohol of some sections of Australian society, it is worth remembering that there, as in England, your friendly neighbourhood apothecary of those days was happy to supply a wide variety of other substances quite legally over the counter. Among the items listed for sale in an advert from the firm of W. Paxton on the front page of an 1841 edition of another temperance-friendly newspaper, the Adelaide Independent and Cabinet of Amusement, were sulphuric acid, opium and arsenic. Each to their own.

  Pumping ship in the used beer department

  ONE INEVITABLE RESULT OF ALL THIS INGESTION of fluids is the eventual need to expel it, and there have always been slang ways of describing the process. Touring musicians in cheap tour vans are well used to requesting that the driver pull over at the next available stopping point for that purpose, and, among those of my acquaintance, one common phrase is to say you need a quick guns n’ roses, since that band have a guitarist called Slash, which in England obviously has other connotations. In Philip Atlee’s 1963 American spy novel The Green Wound, the lavatory in a bar is referred to as the used beer department, while Anthony Burgess described the use of the equivalent facilities in a provincial British pub in his novel The Right to an Answer (1960) as follows:

  The ladies, in sororities, made excursions to the toilet. The men went out to pump ship.

  In employing the latter expression, Burgess was probably well aware that it dated back to the late 18th century, and is of nautical origin – indeed, this is yet another phrase that was rounded up by Francis Grose in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Another slang term which has lasted down through the centuries is leak, which was used by Shakespeare in Henry VI, Pt I (1598), and later by Jonathan Swift in his satirical poem about a honeymoon couple, ‘Strephon and Chloe’ (1734), although here the cause was non-alcoholic:

  Twelve Cups of Tea, (with Grief I speak)

  Had now constrain’d the Nymph to leak.

  This point must needs be settled first;

  The Bride must either void or burst.

  Although there are slang terms for drinks that are brewed, distilled or even alcohol-free, perhaps it is fitting to leave the last words to the drinkers of spirits. First, a salutation, from the title character in Francis Grierson’s entertaining novel of West End low life, The Buddha of Fleet Street (1950); ‘May you never go ragged to mass’. To conclude, an expression which occurs in John Le Carré’s 1968 espionage novel A Small Town in Germany, as two characters are drinking whisky:

  ‘Do you like water?’ he asked, and added a little to each of their glasses, but it was no more than a tear shed for the sober.

  SEVEN

  HIGH AS A KITE

  Portable ecstasies corked up in a pint bottle

  PRIOR TO THE 20TH CENTURY, many of the drugs on which the governments of our own time have declared ‘war’ were legally available. Indeed, as Thomas De Quincey pointed out in the introduction to his pioneering narcotic memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), his daily doses of opium were purchased over the counter from ‘respectable London druggists’. They assured him that he was not alone in his habit, and that, as he later put it, ‘the number of amateur opium-eaters (as I may term them) was, at this time, immense’. However, despite this level of popular narcotic use, the cant and slang dictionaries of the time, so rich in terms for alcohol and drunkenness, remained virtually empty of drug-related phrases. Indeed, the vast range of colloquial names which exists today for drugs and their effects is almost entirely a product of the years since 1900. As a broad generalisation, before that date, drugs were usually known only under the straightforward names used by chemists and apothecaries. Opium was simply opium, rather than hop, tar, midnight oil, fireflower, God’s medicine, skee,gong or Chinese molasses, as the 20th century variously called it.

  De Quincey has sometimes been accused of making the whole subject of drug addiction too attractive in his book – and it is easy to see why, given the following, which appeared under the forthright subheading ‘The Pleasures of Opium’:

  Here was a panacea . . . for all human woes: here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle: and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail coach.

  It is tempting to think that the shade of De Quincey might be amused to know that roughly 160 years after he coined the term ‘portable ecstasies’, some people in early 1980s Texas rebranded the drug MDMA – first synthesised as far back as 1912 – with the self-consciously trendy name ecstasy.

  Opium in De Quincey’s day was hardly new to the capital, having long been traded by the East India Company in a complex web of arrangements between the UK, India and China. Looking back to the 17th century, it can be found openly listed for sale in a newspaper broadsheet entitled The Prices of Merchandise in London (1674). Gathered together with various items labelled ‘Drugs’ – although the others would not now be considered so – it cost eight shillings a pound, as opposed to ‘Rubarb of Turky’ at twelve shillings, ‘Quicksilver’ at four shillings, and ‘Turmerick’ at a whopping 52 shillings a pound. A decade later London apothecary Thomas Pritchard, at the Pestle and Mortar in Watling Street, advertised ‘fine Coffee-Powder from 2 s. 6 d. to 3 s. per Pound’, as well as ‘Tea and other Drugs at reasonable rates’, which serves to show that the word drug – which dates as far back as Langland’s Piers Plowman (1378) – was applied rather more loosely in Restoration England than in our own time. Imagine, if you will, if one of the even older names for such a substance had instead been the one which had taken hold, and the politicians of our own day had to speak in stern tones of the need to clamp down on dealers selling that evil substance treacle (1340).

  The only narcotic reference in that fine slang compendium A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew (1699) is to an alcoholic beverage drink called China ale, so called ‘from the well known East-Indian Drug of that Name’ The substance in question was china root – used, for example, in the 16th century when treating syphilis – and the dictionary compiler’s only complaint was that there was not nearly enough of it in his beer, blaming landlords for ‘making it sweet only and adding a little spice’. Meanwhile, although the indigenous peoples of South America had by this time been chewing coca leaves for centuries owing to the latte
r’s narcotic properties, cocaine as such was not isolated as a substance until the 1850s, and so the appearance in the Canting Crew of the slang word coker signified not an enthusiastic snowman or coke fiend, but simply a bare-faced lie. Even as late as Farmer and Henley’s all-inclusive compendium Slang and Its Analogues (1890), when they quote the colloquial insult ‘Go and eat coke’, the suggestion refers simply to the hard fuel substance derived from coal, which even the most spaced-out 1970s Laurel Canyon musician would have difficulty hoovering up their nose.

  Slinge like a dope

  THERE ARE FURTHER TRAPS when seeking historical antecedents for today’s drug slang. On 20 March 1661, Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary some new ecclesiastical appointments to the House of Lords, at which the crowd in Westminster Hall shouted ‘No Bishops! No Bishops’, which prompted him to comment that ‘indeed the bishops are so high, that very few do love them’. In this case, high meant an elevated station, and giving youself airs and graces, although even at that time it could also be a term denoting alcoholic intoxication, three hundred years before it was applied to the effects of drugs.

  Opium may have been openly sold at auction in the capital in those days, but its dangers were evident, as reflected in this London newspaper report from the year 1700:

  Christened this week 313, buried 411, decreased [sic] 6. Casualties, one drown’d in the Thames, one hanged himself being Lunatick, 4 killed, one by a fall, one by a Coach, one by a Dose of Opium, and the 4th by the biting of Dogs.

  Despite this, however, opium was many 18th-century Londoners’ first port of call when afflicted with gout, although a 1773 edition of the London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post noted that the pain relief it afforded in such cases was ‘dearly paid for, by the disagreeable effects of that languid and enervated state into which the poor patient is plunged by the use of this drug’. Self-medication by means of opium, or laudanum (tincture of opium), led a great many law-abiding people into accidental addiction, sometimes with fatal results. In contrast to the image of drug addicts as young, lawless, borderline criminals which developed in the 20th century, the following typical example from an 1850 issue of the Illustrated London News shows how the profile was very different in Victorian times, for example:

  On Saturday, an old woman named Elizabeth Draper, aged 82, resident at Donington, Lincolnshire, who was an habitual opium-eater, poisoned herself with an accidental over-dose.

  In addition, as journalists, MPs and De Quincey himself noted, in the harsh working conditions of the Industrial Revolution, drug use was endemic, not just among employees, but also their dependants. Speaking in a parliamentary debate on factory conditions in 1844, Lord Ashley commented that hours were so long that it denied mothers ‘the possibility of them attending to their natural duties, and thus their children were drugged with laudanum until it became almost a necessary of existence’. Furthermore, in a different debate on taxation some forty years earlier, a Mr Vansittart had informed the House of Commons that ‘with respect to opium, it was also intended to increase the duty, as great quantities, he understood, were used in adulteration of beer’.

  Yet despite these bastions of the British Empire being seemingly awash with dangerous narcotics, the colloquial terms to descibe them had not yet arisen. For instance, the earliest use of the word dope, in any context, occurs in an anonymous nineteen-page pamphlet entitled A Glossary of Provincial Words Used in the County of Cumberland, issued in an edition of just sixty copies in London in 1851. The word was defined as ‘a simpleton’, and appeared alongside other indispensable stand-bys of the English north-west such as wantle (‘to fondle’), slinge (‘to go creepingly away, as ashamed’), glop (‘to stare’), cobbs (‘testicles’) and dadge (‘to walk danglingly’). It is, of course, tempting to wonder if the last two expressions are in any way connected.

  A rare example of a drug reference surfacing in a slang dictionary of those days can be found in that very fine book from 1823 compiled by a man signing himself John Bee (John Badcock), whose title very much does justice to its contents: Slang. A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, the Pit, of Bon-Ton, and the Varieties of Life, Forming the Completest and Most Authentic Lexicon Balatronicum Hitherto Offered to the Notice of the Sporting World, etc. Badcock was a man with a deep knowledge of the sporting and gambling worlds. This makes it less surprising that he included the following term, which could apply equally to humans or animals, since the illegal use of drugs on racehorses was a matter of serious concern to those with money riding on the outcome:

  Hocus, or hocus-pocus – A deleterious drug mixed with wine, &c. which enfeebles the person acted upon. Horses, too, are hocussed, at times: Dawson was hanged for hocussing Sailor, because it died.

  Rosy cheeks, plumpness and health

  IN THE MAIN, THE AVERAGE 19th-century drug user called these substances by their proper names, with little recourse to slang. Consider the opening chapter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four (1890):

  Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt cuff.

  A similar scene in any 1950s pulp crime or juvenile delinquent novel would have gone to great lengths to play up the horror, degradation and also the illegality of such a scene, but this is late Victorian England, no law is being broken, and the narrator, Dr Watson, blithely poses the following question:

  ‘Which is it to-day,’ I asked, ‘morphine or cocaine?’

  He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened.

  ‘It is cocaine,’ he said, ‘a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?’

  In the language of today’s authorities, this would make Holmes not just a user but also a would-be pusher. At that time, some people could trace the origins of their addiction to a simple visit to the dentist. In 1897, the South Eastern Gazette, from Kent, drew attention to the drawbacks involved in the common use of cocaine during treatment, ‘and the craving developed by the patient after a few applications for its use habitually afterwards’. They further stated that ‘in the United States it was found that the almost general application, by dentists, of cocaine had led to the development of a new form of disease, especially among society women in need of an artificial stimulant’.

  Of course, if you were not having your teeth fixed, you could always buy that invigorating new beverage, Coca-Cola, which, from its beginnings in the 1880s until 1903, featured cocaine as one of its ingredients. However, non-narcotic salvation was at hand, according to an advert in an 1896 edition of the Illustrated London News:

  DRUGS WON’T DO

  Free Trial Of Something That Will Do

  Now, strength and muscular activity, rosy cheeks, plumpness,

  and health can be obtained without medicine.

  The name of this miracle product – ‘a perfect, flesh-forming, palatable, and agreeable Food beverage’ – was Dr Tibbies’ Vi-Cocoa.

  If only someone had informed Mr Holmes.

  Worse than a crime like murder

  IT WAS THAT WELL-KNOWN UPHOLDER of law and order, President Richard M. Nixon, who is usually said to have launched the expression war on drugs – which probably sounded dynamic to whatever overpaid focus group dreamt it up, but also conjures up visions of heavily armed troops breaking into your friendly neighbourhood chemists and machine-gunning boxes of haemorrhoid suppositories. (Back in 1930, the Illustrated London News had published an article about the destruction of heroin and opium supplies in Cairo, entitled ‘Egypt’s War Against Traffic in Dangerous Drugs’, which was undoubtedly more precise, but clearly inferior as a soundbite.) Vague it may have been, but Nixon’s slogan was still somewhat better than the one later used by George W. Bush, who in 2001 declared a war on terror, thus no doubt striking fear into a word which had been happily existing as a noun since around 1480.<
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  ‘NIXON CALLS FOR A WAR ON DRUGS’, said the headline in the Palm Beach Post on 21 March 1972, quoting a phrase he had first employed the year before. The president told reporters that ‘I consider this to be the No.1 domestic problem that concerns the American people’. He also called drug trafficking ‘the most reprehensible of all crimes. It is worse than a crime like murder, a crime like robbery, a crime like burglary.’ Clearly, in the intervening three-quarters of a century, the world had moved a long way from simple domestic chit-chat such as ‘Which is it today, morphine or cocaine?’ As for ‘a crime like burglary’, this was something much closer to home as far as Nixon was concerned. Three months after he made that statement, five burglars paid by Nixon’s own staff broke into the Watergate building in Washington, DC, looking for compromising material about his political opponents. This eventually cost him the presidency, but Nixon’s war on drugs is still with us.

  Just as Prohibition in 1920s America drove millions of otherwise law-abiding people into the hands of the mob when looking to buy alcohol, the gradual criminalisation of formerly legal drugs during the 20th century has been a colossal business opportunity for the underworld. As Mike Jay points out in his fine book High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture (2010), ‘Today’s illicit drugs trade, estimated by the UN at $350 billion USD a year, now constitutes one of the three largest international markets on the planet, along with arms and oil.’ As far as wars go, it seems pretty clear who is losing.