Vulgar Tongues Read online

  Numero uno

  THE CONTENTS OF PUBLICATIONS such as The Pearl and Cythera’s Hymnal; Or, Flakes from the Foreskin (1870) also included limericks – a literary form which has always concentrated heavily on the scurrilous and the obscene, despite the efforts of the likes of Edward Lear (1812–88), many of whose verses were aimed at children. Another man who felt that clean limericks were the way to go was Langford Reed, whose family-friendly Complete Limerick Book (1924) managed only to confirm Arnold Bennett’s private opinion that ‘the best ones are entirely unprintable’. The armed forces would appear to have concurred with this sentiment, since many of the finest 20th-century limericks were products of the troops of both world wars, in whose rhymes all manner of men, women, animals and inanimate objects were sexually employed in ways that would tax the most extravagant imagination. Reed, however, boasted in his introduction that he had ‘examined several thousand Limericks’ and then excluded a large number of “Rabelaisian” examples’, which is the rough equivalent to a film censor declaring that Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is a wonderful film, especially now we have removed all of that nasty shooting at the end. This approach left Reed with inoffensive fare such as:

  There was an old man of Sheerness,

  Who invited two friends to play chess,

  But he’d lent all the pieces

  To one of his nieces,

  And had stupidly lost the address.

  Compare this with a limerick dated 1942–4, very likely of army origin:

  There was a young gaucho named Bruno

  Who said, ‘Screwing is one thing I do know.

  A woman is fine,

  And a sheep is divine,

  But a llama is Numero Uno.’

  Same rhyme scheme, different agenda.

  Looking at the solemn faces in formal portrait photographs of men in uniform just about to be shipped out to the horrors of the First or Second World Wars, it is easy to imagine the serious side of their natures. However, another, more irreverent side of them is revealed in the survival of bawdy verses such as these, many of which have retained their bite and their wit, while decades-old jokes from magazines like Punch or the New Yorker, if viewed today, sometimes fail to raise even the ghost of a smile.

  Thinking four-legged thoughts

  OF COURSE, THERE ARE MANY WAYS of suggesting sexual intercourse without using the handful of words which have been prosecuted for obscenity in past times. Ernest Hemingway famously had his hero Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) enquire directly after the act, ‘But did thee feel the earth move?’ although any attempt to use that particular phrase these days in such circumstances would probably not end well. Jordan is an American who has volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, yet at times his manner of speech suggests that he has been transplanted whole from the 17th century:

  I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.

  Other male novelists in America in Hemingway’s day, particularly crime writers, were taking a different approach. In Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (1934), one character complains that her unfaithful husband is ‘chasing everything that’s hot and hollow’, which is relatively explicit for the time. Perhaps even more so was the dialogue in the books of Ward Greene. In his novel Death in the Deep South (1934), whose action takes place in 1913, people say things like ‘She was hot pants for him’, and in Ride the Nightmare (Life & Loves of a Modern Mister Bluebeard) (1930), lines such as ‘It was more fun than plain poontang’ or ‘then she’ll be free to bang another guy, and before midnight I say she will’ are bandied about, while a character named Dick Cheney (sic) exclaims ‘There went a piece of hot stuff’.

  These are familiar slang expressions, still in use today, but caution must sometimes be used when reading US pre-war crime fiction, since the word shagging to American private detectives at that time meant following or putting a tail on someone, rather than its UK meaning, (‘Didn’t you know we had been shaggin’ you all night and morning?’ a man is asked in Lester Dent’s ultra-tough short story ‘Sail’, published in Black Mask, October 1936.)

  The cops in hard-boiled crime fiction have generally seen it all and done it all, like the weary, methodical police chief in Hillary Waugh’s superb 1952 procedural Last Seen Wearing, who asks a suspect, ‘When did you first get laid, Mildred? Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen?’ Waugh was a craftsman, whereas the various writers who toiled under the house name Hank Janson were probably thinking more of the deadline and the pay cheque than anything else. Even so, they had their way with an arresting image every so often, as in this description from the book This Hood for Hire (1960), of the convict Frank on his first day out of prison after a long sentence, eager for female company:

  I looked her over. Frank was looking her over, too. He had a kinda look in his eyes that worried me. A look I’d never seen in his eyes before he went to jail, the kinda look that showed clearly what he was thinking. And he was thinking four-legged thoughts.

  In the same year, Charles Williams summed up the aphrodisiac effects of wine on a character in his crime novel Aground, with the phrase ‘he was inclined to get pretty goaty and unbuttoned among the grapes’ That was the start of the sixties. By the close of that decade, things had gone way, way out, as the black private eye Superspade in B. B. Johnson’s novel Death of a Blue-Eyed Soul Brother (1970) would probably have been the first to tell you. Here he is casually glancing at the small ads in an underground paper:

  I opened the Free Press to the Personals. I was reading ‘Swinging AC-DC couple would like to meet inclined pairs for funsies. Fags and dykes need not apply. Send photographs with phone number,’

  Superspade was knowingly something of a caricature – indeed, the second part of his name employed a long-standing slang term for a black person, which by then was in use in counterculture circles. Chester Himes, however, for all that he had emigrated to Paris in 1953, brought an authentic whiff of Harlem street-life to his series of crime novels featuring detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones. Here, in the 1969 novel Blind Man with a Pistol, a black woman is telling a black man that he’s got no chance with another woman, because she’s interested only in white men:

  ‘You sniffing at the wrong tuft, Slick, baby,’ said a sly female voice from somewhere up above. ‘She like chalk.’

  Talking about Uganda

  BECAUSE THE USE IN CONVERSATION of the more graphic terms for the act can be problematic, there are all manner of slang ways of referring to sexual activity without causing great offence. In the mid-1980s British newspapers seized gleefully on the word bonking as a relatively family-friendly word for sex, safe even for headlines. ‘MRS CAKE THE BAKER’S WIFE DRIVES ’EM BONKERS’, shrieked the Daily Mirror in 1987, above a classic tabloid story about a housewife accused of annoying the neighbours by howling so much during sex. ‘My friends do call me Lassie because I make such a racket when I’m bonking,’ explained the lady in question. During Wimbledon fortnight that year, British journalists began referring to tennis player Boris Becker as ‘Bonking Boris’, because of his supposedly busy love-life. More recently, the name has been recycled and applied to London mayor Boris Johnson. It was of necessity very much a time of socially acceptable slang terms for sex. The rise of AIDS meant that the government had to find ways of encouraging people to use condoms, and one memorable television comedy sketch of that era featured a posh woman telling her boyfriend, ‘If you want rumpy-pumpy, it’s pop-it-in-a-bag time’.

  Private Eye magazine is responsible for one of the most enduring euphemisms for the sex act, discussing Uganda. So famous has this become during the past four decades that when a website was launched some time ago devoted to showing every cover of the magazine since its inception, it was named Ugandan Discussions. The phrase owes its origin to a story which appeared in the Grovel column of Private Eye No. 293, 9 March 1973, concerning a couple all
egedly having sex at a party while claiming to have been discussing the political situation in Uganda:

  As I was sipping my Campari on the ground floor I was informed by my charming hostess that I was missing out on a meaningful confrontation upstairs where a former cabinet colleague of President Obote was ‘talking about Uganda’.

  At several points further down the page the words ‘talking about Uganda’ in a highly compromising manner, talk-in and dialogue are used, but the surprise of reading the original article comes from the discovery that the word discussion is nowhere present.

  Private Eye also contributed in no small way to the spread of various Australian slang terms in the UK, many of them concerned with sex, drinking and drunkenly having sex, courtesy of the Barry McKenzie comic strip, which appeared in the magazine from 1964 to 1974. Written by Barry Humphries and drawn by Nicholas Garland, it depicted the exploits of an Aussie who comes to London. McKenzie would announce a visit to the lavatory by saying ‘I’m off to shake hands with the wife’s best friend’, or ‘point percy at the porcelain’, and remark of a sexual conquest that he was ‘up her like a rat up a drainpipe’. In the first of two cinema adaptations, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), his idea of a smooth chat-up line to an air hostess on the plane is to ask for ‘A Ned Kelly whiskey and a swift naughty in the dunny as soon as the No Smoking light goes out’, and he laments his own bad luck with the phrase ‘Jeez, if it was raining virgins I’d be washed down the gutter with a poofter’. All of which would presumably not have met with the approval of a journalist signing himself W.T.C., who wrote an article called ‘The Slang Evil’ for Melbourne newspaper The Age in 1923:

  The common parlance of our citizens evidences, sad be it to relate, that we Australians are travelling on a stream which, year by year, is being polluted by the alarming growth of the slang evil.

  Can you keep it up for a week?

  OFTEN, WORDS WHICH ARE NOT in themselves slang are combined together to make a slang phrase. For example, in the film This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Nigel Tufnel reveals the four-word title of the sensitive D-minor piano instrumental he has composed. Individually, none of the words involved would cause comment, and all could be found in any respectable dictionary. However, in many social situations, saying ‘Lick My Love Pump’ might prove problematic.

  The flexibility of the English language has allowed for a vast range of expression over the years, with a wide scope for double meanings, most of which are routinely ignored in the course of everyday life. (To choose an obvious example, shops labelled Family Butcher are not generally taken to be establishments that butcher families.) People accept everyday phrases and cliches at face value – for instance, wishing you lots of luck, without considering that such a commodity comes in two shades, good and bad. Similarly, Barack Obama’s much-praised campaign speeches during the 2009 US election called for ‘Change we can believe in’, yet change has no inherent merit. If your house burns down, that, too, is a change you can believe in – since the physical evidence is irrefutable – yet hardly one for the better, unless you are planning an insurance fraud.

  However, it is precisely this ability of English phrases to be taken in various ways that gave the UK’s soft-core sex film industry such enjoyment when titling their movies, often using ribald euphemisms for the sex act which might equally have come from the Two Ronnies. Innocuous everyday expressions were matched with lurid semi-nude artwork outside cinemas, soliciting an audience for the likes of Can You Keep It Up for a Week? (1974), Penelope Pulls It Off (1975), I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight! (1975), Girls Come First (1975) or Under the Doctor (1976),

  These were certainly suggestive, but not nearly as blatant as the names which the Los Angeles porn industry would use around 1990 for their parodies of current Hollywood blockbusters, when they gave the world such deathless epics as Edward Penishands and When Harry Ate Sally. The British titles were following more in a tradition stretching back to the golden days of the risque Donald McGill seaside postcard, and in particular the dying, post-war days of the music halls, which had turned to girly shows to bring in the crowds, with titles like We Couldn’t Wear Less and Strip, Strip, Hooray.

  Playing the crumpet voluntary

  THE SEVENTIES WERE SOMETHING of a golden age for double-entendre wordplay. Christopher Wood wrote a series of best-selling paperback originals under the pseudonym Timothy Lea, beginning with Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1971), four of which were adapted into films. His hero Timmy advances through each book, sleeping with a selection of women, many of whom seduce him, rather than the reverse. A wide variety of slang terms for various sex acts are used, frequently cockney in origin, others of which are clearly the product of the author’s inventive imagination. During the course of just one example in the series, Confessions of a Private Dick (1975), readers are treated to a formidable battery of sexual expressions, virtually all of them uttered with a knowing wink at the reader. Lustful desire is characterised as ‘Hey presto! Open season for furtling the furburger’ or ‘these girls are obviously parched as far as contact with the one-eyed trouser snake is concerned’, while intercourse itself is described by phrases like ‘percy is flying blind’ or talk of ‘giving her pussy a protein injection’. There’s oral sex for her (‘it is clear that the lady is desirous of a grumble mumble’), and also for him (‘Felicity is playing the crumpet voluntary on my hampton’). Exercising restraint at such times can be tricky, but as the narrator remarks, ‘I can usually keep the cream of the British Empire in check until the time comes to send them in to No Man’s Land’.

  Hampton, Lea’s most frequently used word for the male member, is venerable cockney rhyming slang (hampton wick, prick, immortalised in a 1970s television comedy sketch by the Carry On team in Tudor costume singing ‘The Day Good King Harry Got His Hampton Court’). Grumble is also cockney slang of a similarly direct kind (grumble and grunt, cunt).

  A sausage and doughnut situation

  THE OBJECT OF THE CONFESSIONS books was clearly to entertain, using the uncensored language of the average bloke down the pub. A decade later, such speech was taken to extremes for comic effect by the writers of the Viz magazine character Sid the Sexist, a Geordie would-be Lothario, whose idea of a smooth chat-up line was ‘Howay pet, me ait’ ye roond the back – a punch up the knickers’, or, when suggesting mutual oral sex, ‘I’ll binge on yer minge if ye smoke the white owl, eh?’ Sid’s utter failure to find any takers for such defiantly un-PC advances was, of course, a surprise only to himself.

  If Sid was clearly intent on raising the subject of sex at every opportunity, another Viz stalwart, Finbarr Saunders, managed to find a sea of double entendres in virtually every conversation he heard, prompting barely suppressed exclamations such as ‘Fnarr, fnarr’ and ‘Arf, arf’. Mind you, it is easy to see why. In a Christmas-themed story, when Mr Gimlet, a male ‘friend’ of Finbarr’s mother, says ‘I like a good hard shaft, don’t I, Mrs Saunders. My balls always take a proper hammering’, the accompanying pictures showed that he had just been given a present of a stainless steel golf putter.

  The grand culmination of Viz magazine’s explorations of the language of smut, lavatory humour and all-purpose swearing was the publication in 1998 of the book Roger’s Profanisaurus – a heroic undertaking which has grown in subsequent editions into a vast compendium of expressions of dubious parentage. It ranges from phrases relating to desire (‘She’s a bit of a snake charmer. I’m pitching a trouser tent right here and now’), oral sex (‘She knelt down in front of him and took him from flop to pop in three minutes flat’), masturbation both male (‘strangle Kojak’) and female (‘play the invisible banjo’), to full intercourse (‘a sausage and doughnut situation’).

  Of course, this kind of language might not be considered respectable in some quarters, yet the generally middle-class audiences who have listened in their millions to BBC Radio 4’s long-running comedy panel show I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue are also not averse to suggestive innuendo. Form
er chairman Humphrey Lyttelton was a supreme master at delivering lines about the supposed activities of non-existent scorer Samantha, such as her chance meeting with a nice gentleman at an ornithologists’ convention, when ‘she showed him her chough and he pulled out twelve finches’. All this was of course in the grand tradition of music hall performers such as Max Miller, all the way back to the likes of Marie Lloyd in the 19th century singing ‘I Sits among the Cabbages and Peas’.

  Me so horny

  ALONGSIDE SUGGESTIVE INNUENDO, there has also been a strand of outright graphic expressions for sex, in which any concept of romance has been left straggling miles behind, winded, and prematurely retired from the race. Here, for instance, is a policeman interrogating a suspect in John Brown’s crime novel The Chancer (1974):

  I’m not bluffing, moosh. She told me. She said you stuffed her on the front room carpet one o’clock this morning. She made a statement.

  Similarly, the prison writings of Black Power leader Eldridge Cleaver, published in 1969 under the title Soul on Ice, often treat sex as something more like assault than affection:

  When I off a nigger bitch, I close my eyes and concentrate real hard, and pretty soon I get to believing that I’m riding one of them bucking blondes. I tell you the truth, that’s the only way I can bust my nuts with a black bitch, to close my eyes and pretend that she is Jezebel.

  Cleaver later became a born-again Christian and Bible-quoting member of the Republican Party, but such upfront language eventually fed into the mainstream of rap culture. In 1989, Miami group the 2 Live Crew had a significant hit with their shy, retiring song ‘Me So Horny’ – whose title derived from a phrase uttered by a prostitute in the film Full Metal Jacket (1987) – proving that sexual slang from 18th-century England was alive and well and living in the Billboard charts. Strangely appropriate, perhaps, given that Kubrick’s film was shot in London’s Docklands, doubling unconvincingly for Vietnam.