Vulgar Tongues Page 6

  In the writer’s hearing, not long since, a very respectable man, who has some pretension to education, inasmuch as he is a publisher, found no better expression to describe the position of an influential person in a certain business, than to say, that he was at the top of the heap.’

  Perhaps not surprisingly, the golden age of American slang lexicons would come later.

  Say it again, Sam

  AFTER THE TRAILBLAZING WORK of slang dictionary compilers from Tudor times up until the end of the 18th century, the pattern was set, since which time it may have occasionally seemed that there were few remaining low-life hangouts, gin-joints and thieves’ dens across the widening English-speaking world where the underclass felt safe from lexicographical observation.

  As such collections proliferated at an increasing rate throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, much valuable work was done – not least by John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley in their vast, seven-volume work of the 1890s, Slang and Its Analogues. However, an unfortunate trend also developed, in which some dictionary compilers with a regional or nationalist bias attempted to claim wholesale chunks of the English language for their own particular ends. In some cases, this was purely because the lexicographer in question comprehensively noted down everything remotely slang-oriented in the speech of a particular place, regardless of the phrase’s history. This occurred in the 1988 Australian slang work The Dinkum Dictionary – later reissued and enlarged as The Penguin Book of Australian Slang – whose author wrote, ‘I had no difficulty in deciding whether or not to include sayings that are not strictly Australian in origin – I simply included them all.’ The result of this policy is that, although Australian slang has given the world an extremely large number of inventive and original coinages, those words are lined up here alongside numerous others such as chatterbox (talkative, English, 1770s) or broken-hearted, which occurs in Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the Bible (To heal the broken harted, Luke iv, 18). The inclusion of words which although used in that country are no more a product of it than any other random English word such as wardrobe or shoe would seem to be counterproductive.

  Of course, to an extent most slang dictionaries lay claim to words which are common to other groups or locations, but occasionally assertions are made, seemingly based upon nothing more than the desire of the author to rewrite history. One example of this was the publication in 2007 of a widely mocked book entitled How The Irish Invented Slang by Daniel Cassidy, the late American writer, in which he attributed the origins of such musical and counterculture words as jazz and dig to Gaelic words which might, after a long night on the sauce, sound a tiny bit similar if spoken by someone gargling with a mouthful of marbles. Here again, the very legitimate story of the many Irish slang coinages is submerged and obscured by the unsustainable assertions lined up alongside them.

  Nation shall speak slang unto nation

  INCREASINGLY, AS THE 18TH CENTURY gave way to the 19th, there was no longer just the slang of the British Isles and all its variants, but also colonial and post-colonial adaptations, and the myriad specialist argots of the armed forces, criminals, actors, students, musicians, schoolchildren, tradespeople and others. The language fragmented and fed back into itself as time passed, so that a cant word known in Sydney or San Francisco might also be used in Liverpool, and vice versa (often with each community taking the word to be a local coinage).

  It was ever more a question of who you were, as well as where you were, that determined your slang usage – as it remains to this day. Rappers imitate other rappers, and computer geek speaks to computer geek, regardless of location.

  ONE

  THE BEAST WITH TWO BACKS

  LONG DISMISSED AS A MYTH, it now appears that there really are at least fifty Eskimo words for snow. Whatever the case, the English language unquestionably has hundreds, probably thousands, for sex. Each generation naturally likes to think that they have come up with their own, yet for every genuinely new coinage there are others which have been doing service for years, or are simply new variations on old themes.

  People have always sat around with their friends telling obscene jokes or risqué stories; whether on a girls’ night out, among a group of lads on the way to the football, or a selection of club-going gentlemen breaking out the port and cigars after dinner. In the high days of Playboy magazine back in the 1960s – when its literary contributors included the likes of Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov and Ian Fleming, and most of the adverts were for top-grade whisky, jet-set holidays and expensive tailoring – they also found space in each issue for a page of bawdy after-dinner jokes.

  If time machines existed, and it was possible to drop in on an 18th-century Covent Garden hostelry and listen to the late-night conversations, without doubt you would hear the widest variety of slang and plain English terms for sexual activities. Everyday speech in those days was seldom preserved, so what has survived of how our ancestors spoke when they talked about sex is of necessity gathered from private letters, and scandalous, suppressed or clandestine writings of the time – a fragmentary record, but valuable nevertheless. As with many subjects, the most surprising thing is how many of these words are still in regular use today, employed by many people who may have no sense how venerable some of these terms might be.

  Only my roll of honour, darling

  AS CENSORSHIP OF THE WRITTEN WORD has diminished considerably on both sides of the Atlantic, the boundary between high art and low life has become ever more blurred, and an incredibly varied range of written representations of the sex act have been set before the public. Consider the following examples:

  ‘Are there any shots left in that gun?’ she asked, ‘or did you shoot them all with Mary?’ I told her I had an unlimited supply of ammunition, and she said that was good because she wanted a good screwing.

  I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all . . .

  We fucked – That glorious word expresses it all. Slowly, till urged by spermatic wants, that inner sovereignty or force, within my balls, hurrying to ejaculate itself; quicker and quicker went my thrusts, her buttocks responded, her cunt gripped . . .

  ‘Oh Jock, what was that you made me touch?’ To avoid being coarse at such a time I replied, ‘Only my roll of honour, darling.’ ‘Good grief,’ she retorted, ‘It felt like a roll of wallpaper.’

  And then my body, like a cathedral, broke out into ringing. The hunchback in the belfry had jumped and was swinging madly on the rope.

  A few of these words and phrases would still cause the average newspaper editor to start reaching for the asterisks, despite the fact that they would be hard pressed to encounter a reader who did not understand them – indeed, the whole business of printing f*** becomes somewhat futile if your audience cannot mentally fill in the gaps. As to the respective origins and literary merits of these particular excerpts: quote number one is from a pulp paperback called The New Sexual Underground – The Real Book about Hippie Love-Ins, Group Sex Parties, Nude Happenings, Wife Swaps! (1967); quote two is from Ulysses by James Joyce (1922); quote three is from the vast and anonymous Victorian sex diary of a wealthy gentleman, My Secret Life (1882); quote four is from a letter written by a Scottish soldier to Mayfair magazine (December 1974); and quote five is from the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which won the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, 2002.

  I untrussed and got ready for the plunge

  DESPITE THE FACT THAT SLANG WORDS with sexual connotations occur in the everyday speech of much of the population, those governing society have repeatedly attempted to shield their citizens from exposure to them. This attitude was exemplified by the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial at the Old Bailey in October and November of 1960, at which learned barristers, cultural critics and distinguished novelists were called upon to debate the literary merits of a book which used basic English slang terms such as fuck and cunt. Defence witness Richard Hoggart ar
gued that ‘these are common words. If you work on a building site, as I have done, you will hear them frequently.’ In fact, said Hoggart, ‘they seem to be used very freely indeed, far more freely than many of us know. Fifty yards from this Court this morning, I heard a man say fuck three times as I passed him. He was talking to himself, and he said, “fuck her, fuck her, fuck her”. He must have been angry’.

  Another trial witness, Sarah Jones, classics mistress at Keighley Grammar School, was asked by Gerald Gardiner, QC, for the defence, about the reading habits of the girls she taught:

  Q: ‘Is there a great deal of literature available to them now on sexual matters?’

  A: ‘Yes, and there are technical works, and what you might call “dirty” literature.’

  Q: ‘How far do girls understand the four-lettered words?’

  A: ‘I have inquired of a number of girls after they have left school, and most of them have been acquainted with them since about 10 years of age.’

  The idea that most people would be shocked by such things is a flimsy construction usually put forward by moralists with an axe to grind, but the general public seem to be made of sterner stuff. Indeed, as Anthony Burgess once pointed out: ‘it only needed Kenneth Tynan to say “fuck” on television in the Sixties for decent girls to glory in the language of bargees’. Burgess, of course, added a fair few slang expressions to the language during that decade with the publication of his breakthrough novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962). It was written in a hybrid language of his own called nadsat – a blend of cockney rhyming slang, Slavic borrowings and made-up phrases – in which breasts were groodies, something good was korrorshow, and intercourse was plunging (‘real good horrorshow groodies they were that then exhibited their pink glassies, O my brothers, while I untrussed and got ready for the plunge’). It is a measure of how much freer from censorship the written word in the UK was than on the cinema screen that A Clockwork Orange had to wait until the following decade before it was filmed – although there were proposals in the mid-1960s to make a version in conjunction with Mick Jagger, The Beatles, Andy Warhol and others. Whether this would have proved to be horrorshow in its newer or more traditional meaning is hard to say.

  To jape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy

  THE MOST COMMON OF THOSE EXPRESSIONS that the press call four-letter words have a venerable history. Such terms were originally standard English, but from the late 18th century to the mid-20th were usually excluded from mainstream dictionaries, reclassified as vulgar slang and best avoided in polite society. However, during their years of censorship, they could nevertheless be found in expensive, works printed privately for the well-heeled collector, and eventually in under-the-counter pulp novels aimed at the one-handed trade, high-minded literature of the trailblazing sort and any number of magazines offering pornography of varying strengths and persuasions.

  In England a thousand years ago the word play did service as a general term for sexual intercourse, and was regularly employed in this context up until the 17th century. Other terms which came into use during that span of time were to couple, felter, melt, gender and converse, but at some time during the 1500s our old friend fuck made its first documented appearances – for example, in the works of the appropriately named Scottish courtier Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, who, in 1568, composed the line ‘Ay fukkand lyke ane furious Fornicatour’. Yet initially, fuck was just one word among many for this activity.

  Back in the 14th century, Chaucer referred to the basic act itself as swiving, which was still in regular use 300 years later, such as in Robert Fletcher’s 1656 translation of Martial’s Epigrams (‘I can swive four times in a night’). Indeed, half a century before Fletcher’s book appeared, Shakespeare’s contemporary, John Florio, in his pioneering volume A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious and Exact Dictionarie In Italian and English (1598), translated fottere, the Italian word for having sexual intercourse, as ‘to jape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy’. Florio, born in London to an English mother and a Tuscan father, taught Italian at Oxford University for a while. His dictionary was aimed largely at the titled and the wealthy – hardly a clandestine publication – yet this frank attitude to terms for sexual activity is reflected throughout Florio’s English definitions. Presumably, he felt that such expressions might prove useful to his readers when visiting Italy. Hence, in addition to such normal phrases as giorno di festa, ‘a holyday’, or prodotti, ‘the fruites or gaines of any mans labour’, he included bardascia, ‘a buggering boy’, catanace, ‘an herb used of witches to provoke love and lust’, and valle de acheronte, ‘a womans privie parts or gheare. Also hell.’

  The urge to equip the adventurous traveller with a variety of expressions to cope with any potentially erotic situation continues to this day. In the 1990s, I bought a basic phrase book before visiting Japan. In addition to the usual chapters devoted to shopping, dining and hotel life, it also contained a short section entitled ‘Chatting Someone Up’, which moved on the same page from innocuous gambits such as the Japanese for you have such beautiful eyes swiftly on to we have to be careful about AIDS. This admirable urge to provide for all eventualities pales, however, beside that heroic work of Messieurs Richard and Quétin, English and French Dialogues (1876), whose concept of the likely linguistic needs of Victorian gentlemen visiting France envisaged circumstances in which it would be necessary to say I believe I shall go mad with pleasure, the abomination has reached its height and that perennial tourists’ favourite, after so many misfortunes, it only remains for me to die.

  Yet for all the supposed delights of travel, some will always yearn for the familiar comforts of home. Such was the case of George III’s third son, Prince William (later William IV), who wrote to his brother from Hanover on 23 July 1784, of being ‘in this damnable country, smoaking, playing at twopenny whist and wearing great thick boots. Oh, for England and the pretty girls of Westminster; at least to such as would not clap or pox me every time I fucked.’

  A little thatch’d house is my principal joy

  SINCE THE INVENTION OF THE PRINTING PRESS, there has always been a market for publications which have ventured where the easily offended fear to tread. The English song and poem collection Merry Drollery (1661), for example, made the following play on the similarity between the word conny or coney (rabbit), and cunny (vagina) – indeed, the latter word was also written as cony or conney in the 16th century:

  My Mistris is a Conny fine,

  She’s of the softest skin,

  And if you please to open her,

  The best part lies within,

  And in her Conny-barrow may

  Two Tumblers and a Ferrit play, Fa, la, la.

  If the common people of the 17th century were singing ribald songs, the aristocracy were frequently a match for them. Leading the charge was the dashing figure of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, poet, war hero and favourite of King Charles II, who offered this four-line verse about a daughter of the king’s physician:

  Her father gave her dildoes six,

  Her mother made ’em up a score,

  But she loves nought but living pricks

  And swears by God she’ll frig no more.

  This may not have been as shocking to a 17th-century Londoner as it at first seems – indeed, Shakespeare himself had included talk of dildos in The Winter’s Tale (1610/11), as did Ben Jonson in The Alchemist (1610) – and during his lifetime, most of Rochester’s work was circulated only privately among friends. Similarly, throughout the following century, clandestine publications continued to print the kind of material which utilised the fullest range of current English words. The Merry-Thought, Or the Glass Window and Bog-House Miscellany (1731) collected together scurrilous rhymes originally written on lavatory walls and scratched into window panes, while the Gentleman’s Bottle-Companion (1768) gave an authentic flavour of the bar-room ballads current in Dr Johnson’s London. Among the many examples in the latter publication – all of which seem to centre on whori
ng, drinking or a combination of the two – can be found a song called ‘The Stiff-Standing Member’, part of which reads as follows:

  A member more humble you cannot employ;

  In a little thatch’d house is my principal joy,

  Which with raptures I enter, but quit with concern,

  And unless I can stand, naught avails my return.

  The verses in some other collections might sound to our ears more like the products of the last couple of decades rather than those of a society which passed away a century or more ago. This is especially the case with a publication called The Rakish Rhymer, Or Fancy Man’s Own Songster and Reciter (1864), much of which was derived from then-current bawdy music-hall songs. In one ballad, ‘Among the Leaves So Green, O’, the male narrator employs slang words such as gash, screw and twat, claims to be pretty fairly hung, and speaks of making his lover korney-hot. Of course, there undoubtedly were examples of morally upright, repressed or puritanical people in Victorian times – as there tend to be in any age – but they were unlikely to be frequenting the halls of a Saturday night, singing along to songs like these.

  There were gentlemen of that time whose preferred reading ran more to exclusive magazines such as The Pearl (1879–80), in whose stories fictional men encountered somewhat worldlier women than those usually found in Dickens. ‘We awoke,’ says one breathless narrator, ‘to find Sophie, Polly, Emily, and Louisa all rolling on the floor in the delights of gamahuching [oral sex].’ (The last word is first recorded in a clandestine publication from 1788 called Venus School Mistress, a flagellation volume credited to one R. Birch, and deriving from the French word gamahucher). The Pearl also ran a serial story called Lady Pokingham – Or, They All Do It, in which a gentleman comments, ‘Her pussey was all wet with spendings’. For a very long time the word pussy served respectable society as a name for a cat, while at the same time conveying quite another meaning to many people. Today, however, even a naïve guest at the most dignified of vicarage tea parties would be unlikely to imagine that the Russian protest group Pussy Riot had named themselves after an uprising of four-legged household pets.