Vulgar Tongues Read online

  In 2016, having apparently learned nothing from this, the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign group – headed by Conservative peer Lord Rose and partly bankrolled by a number of prominent hedge-fund managers – attempted to persuade young people to vote in favour of remaining in the European Union by means of a much-mocked, supposedly streetwise advert, complete with obligatory hashtag:

  WORKIN, LEARNIN, EARNIN, SHOPPIN, RAVIN, CHATTIN, ROAMIN, MAKIN, MEETIN, SHARIN, GOIN, LIVIN . . . Make sure you’re #VOTIN

  If the word yo was considered hip in certain circles in 1986 when Public Enemy used it, that status probably took something of a beating two years later when MTV launched the show Yo! MTV Raps, seemingly in response to complaints earlier in the decade that showing any kind of black music on screen was pretty much the last thing they had in mind. Yet George W. Bush grew up in Texas from the late 1940s onwards, and the word yo was certainly in use as a slang form of greeting in the American South in that era. For example, here is a quote from John D. MacDonald’s 1953 Florida-based crime novel Dead Low Tide, in which the narrator, a white real-estate contractor, goes to a local bar with a woman from his office:

  We went in. Some fans were humming. I gave a self-conscious,

  ‘Yo’ to a couple of commercial fishermen I knew.

  MacDonald had moved to Florida in 1949, so his dialogue would have sounded right for the time and location. Similarly, when I interviewed legendary 1950s Italian-American doo-wop star Dion DiMucci a few years ago, he began with his habitual greeting, the word ‘Yo’, and he is a man who started out in the Bronx, not South Central LA. Turning back much further, to 19th-century London, James Redding Ware’s Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909) cites the expression Yo, Tommy – ‘Amongst the lower classes it is a declaration of admiration addressed to the softer sex by the sterner’.

  So is yo a black expression which has turned white, or white slang which has turned black and then back again? It certainly does not appear in Clarence Major’s Black Slang – A Dictionary of Afro-American Talk (1970), whose words were drawn from ‘every-day conversations in the black community, biographies, films, periodicals and the compiler’s own black experience’. Major does lay claim to the word pad, however, meaning ‘one’s home, room, apartment’. Fair enough, you might think – given the fondness of 1940s jazz musicians for the term – except that if you go back more than two centuries to the anonymous London publication The Life & Character of Moll King (1747), you will find a character exclaiming ‘He doss in a pad of mine! No, Boy, if I was to grapple him, he must shiver his Trotters at Bilby’s Hall.’ Among the capital’s poor in those days, the word pad signified anywhere you could lay your head for the night, which was often just a rough mattress in the corner of a crowded room – literally a pad of material, As years went by, it came to signify the dwelling itself. Those Londoners who fell foul of the law would be, if not ‘turned off’ by the hangman at Tyburn, transported to the colonies, which, before 1776, often meant America. Naturally, they took their slang with them, where it spread among hoboes, itinerant musicians, travelling players, carnival folk and criminals, both white and black, and pad finally went mainstream and global by the 1960s.

  Passing through the mouths of illiterate clowns

  THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE HAS ALWAYS ABSORBED overseas influences; Yacht, for instance, is an Anglicisation of the Dutch word jaght (now spelt jacht), denoting a fast, light vessel, which first began appearing in English towards the end of the 16th century; arse, that classic staple of the language which has been in use for the best part of a millennium, derives from the Germanic, in which today’s equivalent is the word arsch.

  Eighteenth-century slang lexicographer Francis Grose, writing in his pioneering work A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (1787), complained of ‘words derived from some foreign language, as Latin, French or German, but so corrupted by passing through the mouths of illiterate clowns as to render their origin scarcely discoverable’.

  Half a century later, William Holloway made an attempt to record local English sayings, county by county, in A General Dictionary of Provincialisms (1839). He notes, for instance, that it would be said in Norfolk, Hampshire and Sussex of someone distinctly lacking in intelligence ‘that his Upper-Storey is badly furnished’ – a slang phrase which later surfaces in mid-20th-century American crime novels.

  Whereas two hundred years ago, it might take a slang word many years to reach from the county of its origin to London (or vice versa), cultural developments in the intervening years have greatly speeded up this process. The growth of the cinema as an international art form has certainly played its part in this, and long before television appeared in most homes, the cinema encouraged young people in places such as Penzance or Dundee to imitate the speech patterns of Bogart or Cagney. A far-sighted 1929 Daily Mirror article, ‘Will the Talkies Change Our Language?’, written by Tom Patch, addressed this question just as silent films were giving way to sound:

  I remember many years ago being very much amused by a notice that stood on the counter of a shop in a well-known resort in the South of France. It said: ‘English spoken – American understood.’ Now the talkies have arrived over here in force, and there seems to be some danger that our mother tongue will be almost wiped out of existence. . . . I gather from some of the more responsible Americans whom I know that what the talkies are pouring into the receptive ears of the youth of this nation is not so much the American language as its slanguage. . . . It has never sounded right to me when I have heard a full-throated singer from Lancashire giving voice to vocal Americanisms about ‘Sweeties’ and ‘Cuties’ and ‘Doggone wows.’ Similarly, I am horrified at the thought of a good old Londoner – a hearty fellow born within the sound of Bow Bells, allowing his extremely attractive vernacular to become clogged up with expressions from across the Herring Pond, however snappy and up-to-date they may be.

  It is hard to fault the accuracy of this prediction, as cockney and other regional UK slang has gradually given way on its home territory to that derived from American and other sources, mostly spread by means of film, television or music. With modern technology, these changes are now happening ever faster.

  Each year, newspapers run their annual ‘new words of the year’ articles, in which we are told, for example, that twerking has been brought in from the wilderness. This word for a type of dancing has been around in rap circles for roughly two decades – and in terms of song lyrics, it first surfaced in a 1993 New Orleans bounce track by DJ Jubilee called ‘Do The Jubilee All’ – yet its meaning would not have meant much to the residents of Basing-stoke or Brussels until very recently. Twerking came to worldwide prominence as a result of a performance by Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke on 25 August 2013 at MTV’s annual Video Music Awards – held, as aficionados of cockney rhyming slang will perhaps have noted – at the Barclays Centre in New York.

  Within weeks, riding the media storm generated by the performance, Miley had appeared alongside Justin Bieber singing vocals on a single by rapper Lil Twist. The song was called, with the deathless logic of a corporation at full cry in search of a dollar, ‘Twerk’. As blogger Perez Hilton put it, ‘On the heels of Miley Cyrus’ twerktastic evening at the VMAs comes the single that is going to BLOW YOUR TWEEN MIND!’ Or not, as the case may be. Among the comments left by fans below this news item were ‘puke’, ‘gross’, ‘this song sucks’, and the considerably more eloquent ‘I think this song signals there is no hope for us, it’s over, we had a good run, society, however, has failed’.

  Owing to the internet and the globalisation of 24-hour rolling media, the word twerk went from cool to embarrassing in record time. Its recognition factor spreading so far outside its original core group that Private Eye magazine was able to print a cartoon just weeks after the MTV controversy which showed a group of elderly gents in cloth caps gyrating arthritically in a building labelled ‘Twerking Men’s Club’, confident that their readers of all ag
es would understand the meaning of the word.

  But enough of the present; where did it all begin?

  SLANG ORIGINS

  VAGABOND SPEECH AND

  ROGUE’S LATIN

  EVERYDAY SPEECH USED TO BE largely a transient thing. Today, though, the spread of mobile devices has enabled millions to capture random moments of passing life in sound and vision. The current social-media-obsessed age seems to have an urge to record for posterity virtually every aspect of life, however trivial. Given that agencies of government are apparently also logging and eavesdropping on every phone call, email or mouse click made by their electors with a thoroughness that would make the Stasi green with envy, the historians of the future will be positively drowning in evidence of how 21st-century people dressed, thought, acted and spoke.

  Of course, this was not always the case. Consider the musician Robert Johnson. Arguably the most famous bluesman of all time, he cut a series of recordings in the 1930s which by the sixties were being hailed as all-time classics, yet it was not until 1986 that a single authenticated photograph of him was discovered. Even today, the count has risen only to three. Now imagine how many individual photographs have been taken, both officially and at concerts, of any member of whichever transient boy band happens to be bothering the charts this year. Turning to the written word, William Shakespeare has been world famous for centuries, yet there are just six surviving examples of his signature known to exist. As for what he actually looked like, the arguments continue, with only two images considered authentic, neither of which was made in his lifetime.

  If it is this difficult to establish such basic facts about certain well-known people from the distant and even the recent past, how did the slang of the everyday people survive – for example, the casual speech of the masses, such as those who lived in 17th-century England, when it was technically possible to be born and work, marry and be buried without leaving any trace in the written records whatsoever? Not all marriages took place in church, not all graves had a marker, and many who ploughed fields or thatched roofs for a living could neither read nor write. Speech, of course, was plentiful among the common people – sometimes referred to by their educated social superiors as the mobile vulgus; literally the fickle crowd, or, in its shorter version, the mob – but it generally left few traces.

  ‘Peddelars Frenche or Canting’

  IN 14TH- AND 15TH-CENTURY ENGLAND, everyday conversation was conducted in what is now termed Middle English, but legal and literary documents were often in French or Latin. Even the unauthorized publication of an English translation of the Bible at that time was fraught with danger, and open to charges of heresy. Later, however, under the reign of Henry VIII, the first officially sanctioned translation appeared, known as the Great Bible (1539), and its use in church services throughout the nation helped standardise the pronunciation and spelling of English. Religion still dominated the land, but for any 16th-century reader wanting to encounter a slightly different turn of phrase to ‘These are the generacions of Pharez: Pharez begat Hezron: Hezron begat Ram, Ram begat Aminadab, Aminadab begat Nahson,’ there were shortly to be other options.

  During the explosion of semi-legal and clandestine publishing activity which occurred in the later 16th century, mixed in among all the political and religious broadsides, some pamphlets appeared dealing with the activities of beggars, cony-catchers (cheats or swindlers) and notorious criminals, which inevitably recorded something of the language employed by such people. In much the same way that 1960s and 1970s television crews reported back from mud huts on the banks of the Amazon, so that comfortable families in Dorking or Harrogate would know something of the lives and customs of various tribes deemed to be still living a ‘Stone Age’ existence, the first slang compendiums were assembled by writers significantly more privileged than those they described. The prime source for the vagabond slang of Elizabethan times is a book entitled A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones (1567) by Thomas Harman, a man of some substance in Kent, who claimed to have spent twenty years questioning any of the itinerant poor who called at his door asking for money. In addition to detailing the varieties of beggar at large in the kingdom, and naming some of the most well-known individuals, his book included a glossary of cant terms. This was the first written use of the word cant, defined by Harman as meaning both ‘to aske or begge’, and also to speak in the language or dialect of beggars and thieves.

  Thomas Harman’s stated purpose, however, was not to entertain his readers, but rather to alert them to the identities and likely tactics of such people, and advise them what to do if any of them appeared at their door. In the preface, addressed to his neighbour, the Countess of Shrewsbury – one of the wealthiest women in the country – he said that he had written a book about vagabonds:

  . . . to the confusion of their drowsey demener and unlawfull language, pylfring pycking, wily wanderinge, and lykinge lechery, of all these rablement of rascales that raunges about al the costes of the same, So that their undecent, dolefull dealing and execrable exercyses may apere to all as it were in a glasse, that therby the Iusticers and Shréeves may in their circutes be more vygelant to punishe these malefactores.

  Small reward, then, for all the beggars who had shared the secrets of their ‘unlawful’ language with him. Yet, whatever his declared intentions, this seems to have been the first organised attempt to set down such speech in a book or pamphlet, and was such a success that it was pillaged as source material by writers and dictionary compilers for at least the next two hundred years.

  Harman fixed in the mind of the reader several stereotypes concerning these ‘wretched, wily, wandering vagabonds calling and naming them selves Egiptians’ (gypsies). According to him, they lived completely immoral lives, bedding down indiscriminately on one occasion in a barn for drunken couplings, ‘seven score persons of men, every of them having his woman, except it were two wemen that lay alone to gether for some especyall cause’. As for their speech, ‘which they terme peddelars Frenche or Canting’, Harman asserts that ‘the first inventer therof was hanged, all save the head; for that is the fynall end of them all, or els to dye of some filthy and horyble diseases’.

  In Harman’s valuable glossary of the ‘pelting speche’ of ‘these bold, beastly, bawdy Beggers’, several slang words occur which have remained part of everyday language since Shakespeare was young – such as fylche, meaning to rob – while others are self-explanatory: stampers are shoes; a prauncer is a horse. Nevertheless, anyone today attempting to use some of the other expressions over a few jars at their local hostelry would probably meet with blank incomprehension. Maunde (ask) your friend if they can provide you with a Lypken (house to sleep in) during the darkemans (night), because you’ve just mylled a ken (robbed a house) – netting a grunting chete (pig), some Rome bouse (wine), a pair of slates (sheets), a caster (cloak), three wyns (pennies) and halfe a horde (a sixpence) – and they will very likely ask the landlord for a few pints of whatever you’ve been drinking.

  Cony-catching and the upstart crow

  A CAVEAT OR WARENING for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones sold in good quantities, and was used a decade later as source material by pioneering Elizabethan historian William Harrison over several pages of his landmark Description of England (1577). It also provided inspiration for the various cony-catching pamphlets by one of the most successful writers of the Elizabethan age, the playwright Robert Greene. In fact, any reader encountering the latter’s A Notable Discovery of Coosnage, Now daily practised by Sundry lewd persons, called Connie-catchers, and Crosse-biters (1591) would have needed a fair understanding of vagabond slang merely to decode the title. Coosnage or cozenage was cheating or fraud; connie-catching, more usually called cony-catching, was the early word for a confidence trick (the victim – whom 20th-century con men would call the mark – being the cony, the original common name for a rabbit); while cross-biting is the business of cheating the cheater. Greene, who wrote at least t
hree other works on a similar theme around this time, listed in A Notable Discovery the slang names given to the various thieves involved in such swindles; for example:

  The partie that taketh up the Connie, the Setter

  He that plaieth the game, the Verser

  He that is coosned, the Connie

  He that comes in to them, the Barnackle

  The monie that is wonne, Purchase

  Another writer who lifted large sections from Harman’s work was the anonymous author of The Groundworke of Conny-Catching (1592), while the poet and dramatist Thomas Dekker went on to reprint Harman’s glossary of thieves’ terms in his 1608 pamphlet Lanthorne and Candle-light.

  During the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare had begun his rise to prominence on the London stage – indeed, the earliest mention of his theatrical career comes in a barbed attack from the very same cony-catching authority Robert Greene, in a work published shortly after the latter’s death in 1592. Greene’s fame as a playwright at this time far outstripped that of Shakespeare, yet he felt the need to make reference to the younger man in his splendidly titled valedictory effort, Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentance, Describing the follie of youth, the falshoode of make-shift flatterers, the miserie of the negligent, and mischiefes of deceiving Courtezans:

  . . . there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.