Vulgar Tongues Page 2

  The most obvious cultural reference point for this impulse is, of course, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell’s masterful summary of the mindset of totalitarian regimes, in which state control of language is central to the control of the population. On the face of it, the ruling party’s three key slogans are a denial of the meaning of words: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. In constructing its own language, Newspeak, the authorities are gradually outlawing thousands of words and the concepts behind them. The central character, Winston Smith, is given a lesson in the purpose of all this by his colleague, Syme, one of the people working on an updated edition of the Newspeak dictionary, which is getting smaller month by month:

  Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

  While such aims might bring joy to the heart of any would-be dictator – and the occasional school authority – they attack the very impulse which gives rise to slang; a type of speech which revels in multiple layers of meaning and alternative readings of familiar words.

  Orwell’s novel gave a name to the concept of thoughtcrime. Since the rise of the political-correctness movement in the 1980s, there are a fair number of slang phrases which, if uttered or written today by a public figure, would be enough to swiftly terminate their career, causing them to be hounded out by the massed ranks of media pundits, bloggers and Twitter users. The business of shutting down opinions or words which are considered offensive was more often associated in the past with despots and totalitarian regimes. Various high-profile court cases from the sixties onwards – in particular the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, which led to several respectable UK newspapers printing the word fuck in full for the first time – might, at the time, have led some to envisage a world where society became gradually more free from censorship of the written and spoken word, barring libel and slander. However, in recent decades, things have changed significantly.

  It is still common to quote Voltaire’s much-praised sentiment ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ (a phrase actually coined by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing as S. G. Tallentyre, in her 1906 biography The Friends of Voltaire). However, unpopular views and words are now routinely banished to the outer darkness, although the internet comment pages have lifted the lid on all manner of discredited sayings and opinions which continue to bubble to the surface as fast as online moderators can delete them.

  On British television, the critic Kenneth Tynan deliberately uttered the word fuck one night on the BBC’s BBC3 show in 1965, breaking another cultural taboo. These days, it is a commonplace to expound the view that American television shows are vastly superior to those produced in the UK, and yet the only reason excellent, slang-heavy shows like The Sopranos can be made is that they are funded by and broadcast on the subscription channel HBO, and therefore free from the normally very censorious mainstream US TV arbitrators, who blush with horror at the slightest ‘wardrobe malfunction’ or swear word. Not so The Sopranos, whose elderly character Corrado ‘Junior’ Soprano responds to the sharp pain of falling over in the bath and hurting his spine with the choice expression ‘Your sister’s cunt!’ Similarly, in literature, the language of the streets can surface in a mixture of slang, swearing and multi-faceted abuse, such as in the following tirade directed at a black street-preacher in late 1950s Chicago by a group of passing black youths:

  You shit-coloured, square-ass poor mother-fucking junkman. Stop bullshitting the people. Ain’t no God for Niggers. Fuck you and your peckerwood God in the ass, and fuck the Virgin Mary, too.

  Iceberg Slim, Trick Baby (1967)

  Just thirty words, but there’s something there to offend everybody – and that was, of course, the point. Iceberg Slim (Robert Black) had been a long-time pimp and serial jailbird before he turned to crime writing, so he knew his material inside out, and the language he employed was authentic. Trick Baby even came with a glossary of street terms, such as pull coat (‘to inform or alert’) and peckerwood (‘contemptuous term referring to white men’).

  If the phrases employed by criminals tend to be abrasive, so, too, do those employed by soldiers. Most front-line troops in wartime are generally not long out of school, heavily armed and scared to death, and the slang they use to describe their day-to-day struggle for survival is generally brutal, often bitterly funny and right to the point. RAF pilots in the Battle of Britain wouldn’t say that a friend had crashed; they would employ the bleakly deadpan expression ‘Newton got him’. Or, as one Vietnam veteran told the journalist Mark Baker: ‘If someone you’re close to dies, you feel the pain in your heart, naturally. But the attitude you pick up quick is, “Oh. Shit. Dime a dozen. Travel light and carry a heavy bag.” A heavy bag was a bag of dope.’

  Pretending, in speech and drama, that all sections of society live life as if it were one continual vicarage tea party is a cultural dead end. (Mind you, it is easy to imagine a clergyman nowadays mildly berating someone who has done something stupid with the quaint old term nincompoop – a seemingly innocuous word – unaware that in the 18th century this was an obscene insult, as a contemporary slang compendium had it, for ‘one who never saw his wife’s ****’).

  Slang generally exists at the sharp end of the vulgar tongue, which is why so many of its dictionaries in earlier times were clandestine publications, and frequently anonymous. In the 1990s, Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews, scriptwriters of the Father Ted series, famously satirised the censorship impulse by having Ted and Dougal protesting outside a cinema holding placards which read ‘Careful Now’ and ‘Down With This Sort Of Thing’. Today, however, newspaper items about people taking offence at a huge variety of word usage seem to appear almost daily. Attempting to ban or suppress certain phrases – in effect, to declare ‘I disapprove of what you say, and I will pillory, fine or imprison you because you say it’ – is at best an urge to return to the days when Dr Bowdler and his family took a puritan axe to the collected works of Shakespeare, and at worst a way of lining yourself up with the kind of regimes which Orwell had in his sights when writing Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  All right, Dad, shed the heater . . .

  IF THERE IS ONE WRITER whose continuing worldwide success proves beyond doubt that the liberal use of slang is no barrier to understanding, then it is probably the great Raymond Chandler. His seven novels and various short story collections have been continually in print ever since they first began appearing in the 1930s. After an apprenticeship writing short, hard-boiled tales for pulp magazines like Black Mask, he secured his reputation with his 1939 debut novel, The Big Sleep, which gloried in the tough-talking, slangy narration of its detective Philip Marlowe, and whose title is itself a slang term for death.

  Naming a book after the sordid business of climbing the six-foot ladder went down so well that Chandler did it again in 1953 with The Long Goodbye. In his work, characters are either busily engaged brandishing roscoes (guns), being fitted for a Chicago overcoat (coffin), jumping in their heap (automobile), dipping the bill (drinking) or trying to make some cabbage (money). You don’t need a dictionary in order to enjoy reading these stories, because the context usually gives the sense of the term even if it is unfamiliar, but it is these phrases which give the language such a distinctive flavour, and which lesser writers have been attempting to copy ever since.

  In more recent times, Irvine Welsh came to international prominence with his 1993 novel Trainspotting, shot through with Edinburgh street expressions and slang, which reached an audience way outside those who might themselves employ such language. For instance, someone at a middle-class suburban dinner party, rising to go to the lavatory because of over-indulgence in alcohol, and also wished to stress that they were not carrying any drugs at that moment, would be unlikely to phrase it in quite the following way:

  Ah’ve been oan the peeve fir a couple ay days, mate. Ah’m gaun fuckin radge
wi the runs here. Ah need tae shite. It looks fuckin awfay in thair, but it’s either that or ma fuckin keks. Ah’ve nae shit oan us. Ah’m fuckin bad enough wi the bevvy, nivir mind anything else.

  Here, as in Chandler’s novels, the context usually provides the meaning, whether readers have encountered specific phrases before or not. Many terms have a life of a decade or two, then pass out of common use. A fair few of the bewildering variety of expressions employed by 18th- or 19th-century Londoners would not be recognised by its citizens today, but some words and phrases seem almost indestructible. For instance, keks (trousers) and bevvy (beer or drink), which appear in the above passage, both date back to Victorian times but are still part of today’s everyday speech. Similarly, the word radge, meaning mad in this context, has come a long way since it was first recorded in J. Sullivan’s Cumberland and Westmorland, the People, the Dialect, Superstitions and Customs (1857), pausing briefly to make an appearance in ‘I Can’t Stand My Baby’, the 1977 debut single by Edinburgh punk band The Rezillos. Shite, in the above quote, is to excrete, but shit is heroin.

  Memorable balls

  THE TROUBLE WITH SLANG, and language generally, is that it doesn’t stay still; meanings shift and mutate with the passing of time or the coming of new associations, and yesterday’s plain speech can become today’s double entendre. The children’s author Shirley Hughes wrote a popular tale in 1977 about a boy and his battered soft toy of the canine variety. It was called Dogger, and the colloquial meaning of that particular word has changed beyond all recognition over the past few decades, conjuring up images of semi-clad figures scrabbling around in car parks looking for sex. A similar problem afflicts the title of one of the great pre-war jazz novels, Dorothy Baker’s thinly disguised fictionalisation of Bix Beiderbecke’s life story, Young Man with a Horn (1938) – a title to send Viz magazine’s double-entendre-obsessed Finbarr Saunders into paroxysms of spluttering. (Indeed, when the book was filmed under that title in 1950 starring Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall, the picture was prudently renamed for its UK release Young Man of Music.) Yet here was a case of new slang meeting old slang; 20th-century jazz musicians habitually referred to the instrument they played as their horn, but as an English slang term for an erection, getting the horn dates at least as far back as Shakespeare’s day.

  A fine selection of volumes whose titles were left high and dry by the changing meanings of words over the years was rounded up by Russell Ash and Brian Lake in their entertaining 1985 collection Bizarre Books. These included Perverse Pussy, a children’s story about a cat published in 1869 by the American Sunday School Union; J. Osborne Keen’s Suggestive Thoughts for Busy Workers (1883), issued by the Bible Christian Book Room; Memorable Balls (1954), James Laver’s recollection of dances attended; and John Denison Vose’s immortal university story The Gay Boys of Old Yale (1869). Taken together, all of these have titles which would give any self-respecting customs official pause, yet seekers after filth would surely retire disappointed – although doubtless better informed – after having perused them.

  It might be thought that the originators of a popular jazz dance back in the 1930s called The Shag had seen the title of their creation given an unfortunate double entendre with the passing of time. However, the word was current in the 1780s, and listed in Captain Francis Grose’s indispensable slang compilation the Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (‘Shag, To copulate’). As for the bebop fraternity, always keen to distinguish themselves from the squares, they shared that sentiment with the London underworld of the 1780s, who termed any man who would not steal, anyone honest, a square cove – from the Masonic fraternity’s description of a trusted person as on the square, one of us.

  Plenty of these words are old, some of them ancient even in Captain Grose’s day. There are also many phrases which sound deceptively new, yet date back much further than people imagine. For instance, anyone familiar with the 1979 Neil Young song ‘Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black)’ would be pulled up short when chancing upon the words of the philosopher Bishop Richard Cumberland (1631–1718), a school friend of Pepys, who asserted that ‘It is better to wear out than to rust out’. A shock of a greater kind awaits any Robert Browning enthusiast of a delicate disposition encountering his lengthy poem Pippa Passes (1841), not because it contains the much-quoted lines ‘God’s in His heaven / All’s right with the world’, but rather because of these:

  Then, owls and bats,

  Cowls and twats,

  Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,

  Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

  The reason why a distinguished and respectable Victorian poet publicly employed a slang term for the female pudenda is very simple – he had no idea what it meant. Or, to be precise, he thought it was an article of clothing worn by nuns, yet for two hundred years the word twat had meant exactly what it means today. Browning’s confusion seems to have arisen from his misinterpretation of an anonymous satirical poem from 1660, ‘Vanity of Vanities, or Sir Harry Vane’s Picture’, which read in part:

  They talk’t of his having a Cardinall’s Hat,

  They’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s Twat

  All things considered, Browning would have been better off reading the playwright Thomas D’Urfey’s Wit and Mirth (1719), where the meaning is marginally more clear:

  I took her by the lilly white Hand, And by the Twat I caught her.

  Hip to be hep

  ONE OTHER OBVIOUS DRAWBACK for the slang user is that sometimes the hip word of today will turn unexpectedly into the embarrassingly square word of tomorrow. Indeed, the word ‘hip’ itself became hip only after its predecessor ‘hep’ fell out of favour, as noted by Blossom Dearie in the song ‘I’m Hip’ (1966), written by Dave Frishberg and Bob Dorough – ‘When it was hip to be hep I was hep’. One example of this kind of change has a personal resonance for me. In the year 2000 I published a book of words and phrases drawn from a lifetime’s obsession with the language of vintage pulp crime fiction, film noir and jazz, blues, hillbilly, rockabilly and rock’n’roll music. I called the book Straight from the Fridge, Dad, which was an adaptation of a slang phrase meaning ‘cool’ that I’d heard in that jewel among teenage exploitation films, Beat Girl (1960). The implication being that the book was a compendium of phrases associated with the hipper or more outré fringes of society – musicians, mobsters, beatniks, con artists, etc. – as they existed during the first half of the 20th century – the language of outsiders, not the straights and the conformists. In the book’s subtitle, I used a sobriquet which most jazz musicians of the late 1940s bop era would have been proud to bear – hipster – which meant someone who was one of the best, the sharpest, the most in the know, a solid sender, a cool operator. The rockers and delinquents of the 1950s adopted the term, and there it remained, a proud flag of suavedom for decades to come, so that I had no problem subtitling my book ‘A Dictionary of Hipster Slang’.

  Two years after it was published in the UK and US, an American book appeared called The Hipster Handbook by Robert Lanham, full of nerdy lifestyle material seemingly aimed at Ivy League squares, and somehow this has become almost the default modern meaning of the term, firstly in America and then in the UK. Geek chic. People who, according to Lanham, enjoy ‘strutting in platform shoes with a biography of Che Guevara sticking out of their bags’. Leaving aside the question of why anyone would think it was cool to carry a book about a man who enthusiastically lined up significant numbers of his fellow citizens in front of firing squads, it also shows the extreme distance the word hipster has travelled since the days of 1940s originals such as alto sax giant Charlie Parker or boogie pianist Harry ‘The Hipster’ Gibson. For whatever reason, in England these days, to call someone a hipster is to insult them, in much the same way that, in the punk days of the late 1970s, one of the most damning labels you could hang on anyone was to call them a poser.

  Times change, meanings change.

  Yo, Jimbo . . .

  BY THE SAME TOKEN, the
slang greeting ‘Yo!’ has taken a long strange path over the years. When hard-line rappers Public Enemy named their 1987 debut LP Yo! Bum Rush the Show, this was very much the language of the street. Yet fast-forward two decades to an off-air private conversation between two politicians at the G8 summit in Switzerland, as jive-talking George W. Bush greets the then British prime minister Tony Blair:

  GWB: Yo! Blair, how are you doing?

  TB: I’m just . . .

  GWB: You’re leaving?

  TB: No, no, no, not yet. On this trade thingy . . .

  This kind of language is a long way from the formal, statesman-like way in which Hollywood or the BBC have traditionally portrayed conversations between world leaders. A little later in the conversation, Bush talks about the need ‘to get Hizbullah to stop doing this shit’ – another slangy phrase. Mind you, this is a man who warned a Washington audience in 2004 about ‘these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat’, and assured a New Hampshire Chamber of Commerce in 2000 that ‘I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family, so he clearly had a special relationship not so much with England but with the English language.

  At first glance, this might look like a straightforward case of a politician making a lamentable attempt to be ‘down with the kids’. Yet the conversation between Bush and Blair was recorded without their knowledge, and there was no thought of trying to impress the younger members of the electorate with this language. Which is not to say that politicians are immune to such behaviour. Such toe-curling verbal anachronisms were roundly satirised by a sketch on the British TV show Do Not Adjust Your Set (1968), in which Eric Idle appears as a newly groovy Tory minister giving a party political broadcast:

  Good evening, and hello young electors, or may I call you cats. I’m Daddy-O Smythe, formerly known as Lance Captain Sir Archibald Barrington-Smythe – but you can call me Duggie – and I’m here to tell you about the new, switched-on, trendy, swinging, extremely psychedelic Conservative Party happening group thing . . . So do make like hippy hippy go-go people. Be like granny, take a trip along to your polling boutique, and put your tip for the top on us at the next vote-in. Swinging . . .