Vulgar Tongues Page 5

  In 1754, an anonymous successor to Captain Smith and Nathan Bailey compiled The Scoundrel’s Dictionary: or, An Explanation of the Cant-words used by Thieves, House-breakers, Street-robbers, and Pick-pockets about Town, To which is prefixed, Some curious Dissertations on the Art of Wheedling: And a Collection of their Flash Songs, with a proper Glossary. The title page of this entertaining document further attempts to claim authenticity for its contents with a subtitle stating that every word was direct from the horse’s mouth: The Whole printed from a Copy taken on one of their Gang, in the late Scuffle between the Watchmen and a Party of them on Clerkenwell-Green; which Copy is now in the Custody of one of the Constables of that Parish.

  Regardless of the legitimacy or otherwise of that assertion, this publication is especially valuable for its language, and in particular its explanation of the hierarchy of thieves and the names they gave to their various illegal occupations: Besides the strolling Beggars and pretended Egyptians, there are others that use the Cant, who are most of the Town Thieves; or such as harbour about London, and are distinguished by several canting Names and Titles, viz.

  The High-Pad, or Highway-Man. The Low-Pad, or Foot-robber. The Budge, who makes it his business to run into Houses, and take what comes first to hand. The Diver, or Pick-Pocket. The Bulk, or one that is his Assistant, in creating Quarrels by jostling, &c to gather a Crowd that the Diver may have a better Opportunity to effect his Purpose. The Jilt is one that pretending Business in a Tavern or Alehouse, takes a private Room, and with Pick-locks opens the Trunks or Chests, and taking what he can conveniently, locks ’em again, pays his Reckoning and departs. The Prigger of Prancers is one that makes it his Business to steal Horses. The Ken-miller is one that robs Houses in the Night-time, by breaking them open, or getting in at the Window, and seldom goes alone.

  She may he a punk

  ON 14 APRIL 1755 – one year after the publication of The Scoundrel’s Dictionary – a lexicographical work of a different kind appeared: Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, a towering achievement by any standards, and one of the most influential dictionaries of all time. It had been commissioned almost a decade earlier by a group of London booksellers for the extremely substantial advance of 1,500 guineas. The scope of the work was wide, but not unprecedented. In fact, as Johnson’s biographer David Nokes observes, ‘Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum included fifty per cent more words’, and he further notes that the good doctor avoided many of the more salty expressions of the English tongue. When the omission of rude words was noted with approval by some of his female friends, Johnson apparently replied, ‘What, my dears! Then you have been looking for them?’

  This, of course, is the problem with prudery: no one would be able to search for such words if they did not know them already, and also have a fair idea how to spell them. Where, then, is the shock in seeing them written down? By contrast, for the modern reader, the chief surprises afforded by Johnson’s Dictionary come from words which have acquired secondary meanings in the intervening years (although the first example is perhaps nearer the mark than some):

  To RAP out. To utter with hasty violence.

  He was provoked in the spirit of magistracy, upon discovering a judge, who rapped out a great oath at his footman. Addison.

  HIP-HOP. A cant word formed by the reduplication of hop.

  Your different tastes divide our poet’s cares;

  One foot the sock, t’other the buskin wears:

  Like Volcius, hip-hop, in a single boot. Congreve.

  PUNK. n. f. A whore; a common prostitute; a strumpet.

  She may be a punk, for many of them are neither maid, widow, nor wife. Shakespeare.

  Then of course, any streetwise person these days speaking of their posse might – if they think about the origin of the word at all – logically assume it is of American origin, from the days of the Old West, where the town lawmen rounded up a group of locals and set off in pursuit of criminals. Which is fine, as far as that goes, but like many other phrases, this one also came over from England in the 18th century, as Johnson’s Dictionary confirms:

  POSSE. n. f. [Lat.] An armed power; from posse comitatus, the power of the shires. A low word.

  As if the passion that rules, were the sheriff of the place, and came off with all the posse, the understanding is seized. Locke.

  The amiable Captain Grose

  IF DR JOHNSON’S DICTIONARY (1755) for the most part avoided cant and slang – hardly surprising, given that he defined to cant as to speak in ‘jargon’, while his entry for jargon simply reads, ‘Unintelligible talk; gabble; gibberish’ – this is not a charge that can be laid at the door of Captain Francis Grose. This gentleman unleashed a book some thirty years later containing a heroic number of slang terms and expressions which, through no fault of their own, had fallen completely outside the scope of Johnson’s work. Eric Partridge, arguably the greatest slang lexicographer of the 20th century, called Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) ‘by far the most important work which has ever appeared on street or popular language’. Partridge further stated that ‘every entry bears the unmistakable imprint of the vivid accuracy and the jolly, jovial earthiness of the greatest antiquary, joker and porter-drinker of his day, and one of the happiest wits of the 18th century’, a judgement with which it is hard to disagree.

  The pages of Grose’s work bring to life the teeming, bawdy street-life of 1780s London – in particular the drinking establishments and brothels around Covent Garden – at a time when its population was somewhere around three quarters of a million (compared to Paris at 550,000; Moscow, 175,000; Rome, 160,000; and New York, the largest city in North America, 30,000). Dr Johnson, of course, also knew these streets well – the bookshop where he first met James Boswell was in Russell Street, just off Covent Garden piazza – but what Grose had in mind was a dictionary of another type altogether. His purpose, outlined in the preface to the first edition, was to utilise ‘the freedom of thought and speech, arising from, and privileged by our constitution, [which] gives a force and poignancy to the expressions of our common people, not to be found under arbitrary governments, where the ebullitions of vulgar wit are checked by the fear of bastinado, or of a lodging during pleasure in some gaol or castle’. As a declaration in favour of free speech, and a gauntlet thrown down against official censorship, moralists and the easily offended, this is hard to beat.

  The Classical Dictionary provided a window into a world of barking-irons (pistols), member mugs (chamber pots) and horse-godmothers (large masculine women), where people blow the gab (confess) or decorate the sheriff’s picture frame (the gallows), where a Covent Garden Abbess is a madam, and her workforce of whores Covent Garden Nuns, This is a place where people speak St Giles Greek (‘the slang lingo, cant, or gibberish’). Some phrases have survived into the present day – to screw is to copulate, to kick the bucket is to die – while others, of course, have not. Even at the time, a fair few of them would have been used only in particular circles and not usually in print, which makes their appearance in this dictionary even more remarkable, and must also have seemed that way to its original readers. Johnson’s Dictionary ranged far and wide, but it is impossible to imagine it containing entries such as the following ripe example from Grose, printed in its original somewhat censored form:

  A BITER, a wench whose **** is ready to bite her a–se, a lascivious, rampant wench

  Captain Grose, as his title suggests, had been a military man for a fair number of years, first in the Howard’s and then in the Surrey regiment. He was also an artist and antiquary, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy. However, like many before him, he turned to writing books of various kinds in order to try to reduce his considerable debts. A native Londoner, he seems by all accounts to have been an amiable gentleman, equally well able to converse with anyone from the members of the armed forces, pickpockets and card-sharps to the habitués of the euphemistically named riding academies in Covent Garden.
He died suddenly on a visit to Dublin in 1791, but his dictionary stands alongside that of Dr Johnson as one of the most valuable records of 18th-century English.

  Grose national products

  THE 1785 FIRST EDITION of the Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was successful enough that Grose issued a second, marked ‘Corrected and Enlarged’, three years later. However, readers who had enjoyed the first may have felt alarm when reading the preface to the new one, which claimed that ‘some words and explanations in the former edition having been pointed out as rather indecent or indelicate’ had now been ‘omitted, softened, or their explanations taken from books long sanctioned with general approbation’. That may be, but, for example, the definition of the word biter quoted above survived word for word into the new edition. Indeed, it seems as if the good captain was jesting somewhat in his preface about ‘softening’ or omitting’ indecencies, given that his original entry s—t sack (‘a dastardly fellow’) was not only also included in the second edition, but with a new and lengthy explanation as to exactly how the unfortunate man confined in a sack had come to soil himself in the first place. This entry was then followed by another one, not present in the first, for the equally decorous phrase sh-t-ing through the teeth (‘Vomiting. Hark ye, friend, have you got a padlock on your a-se, that you sh-te through your teeth?’)

  Grose did, however, amend some entries, and left out many more potential candidates which he had collected in the interim, that are preserved handwritten in his own working copy, which came into the hands of a London bookseller in 2013. These lost phrases included turd hampers (‘breeches’) and goose neck and giblets (‘a man’s tackle’).

  These two editions were the only ones which appeared in the author’s lifetime. However, the popularity of his dictionary continued to the extent that a third edition was issued in 1796, five years after his death. Confusingly, this was also marked ‘Corrected and Enlarged’, although the vast majority of entries remained unchanged from Grose’s second edition. The coming of the new century saw it issued again in 1811, but with a different title and a parade of other persons, named and anonymous, attempting to take credit for the work, to the extent that it is surprising they managed to find space for the original author at all:

  Lexicon Balatronicum – A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence, Compiled Originally by Captain Grose, and now Considerably Altered and Enlarged, with the Modern Changes and Improvements, by a Member of the Whip Club, Assisted by Hell-Fire Dick, and James Gordon, Esqrs of Cambridge; and William Soames, Esq of the Hon Society of Newman’s Hotel

  The most obvious change here to Grose’s original title is the prominent use of the word slang itself. While it had only a walk-on part in the editions published in the captain’s lifetime, taking a very secondary role to the standard 18th-century term cant, here it is placed centre stage. The new title was clearly intended to appeal to Regency dandies and students, while playing down somewhat the low-life angle. This was the era of Brummell and Byron, and wealthy young men ruining themselves gambling on games of Macao at exclusive gentlemen’s clubs such as Watier’s in Piccadilly. Inside, however, it soon becomes clear that the vast majority of the book was Grose’s third edition, almost verbatim. Considerably altered and enlarged? Not really. Yet it did record some of the newer names for slang, such as:

  FLASH LINGO – The canting or slang language

  PATTER. To talk. To patter flash: to speak flash, or the language used by thieves. How the blowen lushes jackey and patters flash; how the wench drinks gin and talks flash.

  Also among the new entries was at least one which former student radicals who manned the barricades in 1968, or read Oz magazine and the International Times back in hippie days, would certainly recognise:

  PIG. A police officer. Floor the pig and bolt; knock down the officer and run away.

  A little over a decade later, the writer Pierce Egan largely restored the original title, issuing the book as Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Revised and Corrected, With the Addition of Numerous Slang Phrases, Collected from Tried Authorities. Egan, whose own bestselling nightlife stories of two London characters, Tom and Jerry, were themselves larded with the slang and flash talk of the day, provided his own thoughtful preface to the edition. He also included a lengthy and sympathetic biographical essay about Grose, with insights into the nightly London explorations made by the late captain and his manservant, Batch, in search of material in the rookeries on the north-western edge of Covent Garden:

  The Back Slums of St Giles’s were explored again and again; and the Captain and Batch made themselves as affable and jolly as the rest of the motley crew among the beggars, cadgers, thieves &c who at that time infested the Holy Land!

  Also, as a measure of how the cultural landscape had shifted since the previous edition of the Classical Dictionary, one of the new entries coined by Egan read as follows:

  DANDY. In 1820, a fashionable non-descript. Men who wore stays to give them a fine shape, and were more than ridiculous in their apparel.

  By the time this was published, Brummell was in exile and Watier’s Club – the dandy haunt par excellence – had closed with many of its high-rolling members ruined. Instead of buckish slang, this edition gave more emphasis to sporting matters such as boxing, a particular interest of Egan.

  During the intervening two centuries, it is the edition misleadingly renamed Lexicon Balatronicum that has most often been reprinted, usually under the equally inappropriate title 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. This makes Grose’s book sound like a product of Regency London, yet his world was the capital city’s seedy underbelly of thirty years before, and he died long before the heyday of the dandies. The Classical Dictionary is a true 18th-century artefact, and should be recognised as such.

  There iz no alternativ

  PROBABLY THE EARLIEST ATTEMPT by a nation to put some distance between the English they used and the place where it originated was of course that of America. Noah Webster, the pioneering lexicographer of American letters – who, with his spelling books and dictionaries, did more than anyone else to influence and record the way that nation spoke and wrote – was, in the words of Eric Partridge, a man of ‘intensely anti-British bias’. The War of Independence was probably far too recent for this situation to have been otherwise. Webster is the person who made a host of changes such as removing the ‘u’ from the word colour, but in his early works he wanted to go much further. Consider this radical approach to spelling from the introduction to Webster’s work, A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings on Moral, Historical, Political and Literary Subjects (1790):

  In the essays ritten within the last yeer, a considerable change of spelling iz introduced by way of experiment. This liberty waz taken by the writers before the age of Queen Elizabeth, and to this we are indeted for the preference of modern spelling over that of Gower and Chaucer. The man who admits that the change of housebonde, mynde, ygone, moneth into husband, mind, gone, month, iz an improovment, must acknowlege also the riting of helth, breth, rong, tung, munth, to be an improovment. There iz no alternativ.

  Some would argue that there was indeed an alternative throw away the language altogether if it bothers you that much, and come up with your own – but Webster never quite went that far. He did, however, much later in his career, attempt to do for the Bible what the Bowdlers had done to Shakespeare, making thousands of changes to the text of the King James Bible in an effort to root out anything of a supposedly ‘lewd’ nature. The study of slang meant little to Webster, and his pioneering American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) dismissed it in one short sentence: ‘low vulgar unmeaning language’, which suggests a prudish bias, since such words can mean a great deal, regardless of how they might offend certain listeners.

  The first real attempt in the US to round up the many singular coinages of the nation came in 1848 with the publ ication of John R. Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms, which contain
ed a great deal of valuable material, but like Webster, showed little fondness for slang as it was slung. As Bartlett said in his introduction:

  A careful perusal of nearly all the English glossaries has enabled me to select what appeared to be the most desirable to embrace, and what to avoid, in an American book of a similar kind. Cant words, except such as are in general use, the terms used at gaming-houses, purely technical words, and those only known to certain trades, obscene and blasphemous words, have been discarded.

  Of course, genuine American slang was coming into play at this time – it just was not usually considered respectable enough to merit inclusion in the dictionaries of a nation which often insisted upon rooster instead of the plain English word cock, and where mention of the word leg in some circles was considered indecent. The 19th-century American writer Richard Meade Bache objected to this tendency in his book Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech (1868), noting that he had ‘heard a lady direct a waiter to bring her the trotter of a chicken’. As he put it:

  It is a shame that excellent words, which are a part of our language, and which have served our ancestors for hundreds of years, should be driven out of familiar use by prurient imaginations. Cock and Hen are generic names, distinguishing the male and the female of all kinds of birds; but The Cock and The Hen are the distinctive appellations of the barn-door fowls. Why then should we substitute rooster for cock?

  Admirable sentiments, yet in the same book he issued a stern warning against slang, which, he claimed, ‘pervades too much of the conversation even of the refined’. Considering the many complaints from British commentators in the 20th century that Hollywood and the record companies were teaching the youth of this country ever-increasing amounts of US slang, it is a mark of how much attitudes changed since the days when Bache offered the following tortuously worded cautionary tale: