Vulgar Tongues Read online

  In recent years, of course, it has become increasingly more difficult to offend people with sexual phrases – religion, rather than rutting, is a far more contentious subject. You can call your band Fuck Buttons and – nearly four decades after the Sex Pistols’ LP title Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) was prosecuted for obscenity – the music business and many other sections of society will not turn a hair. They have seen it all before.

  Today, as the wonders of the internet allow previously unsayable words and phrases to be googled in seconds, or spread around the English-speaking world, hitherto arcane or regional expressions for sex acts become common international currency. In a 1965 Daily Telegraph style feature about hair fashions, the writers used the phrase ‘short and curly like a Greek shepherd boy’s’, but anyone tapping that phrase into a computer search these days might find a wider range of subject matter than first intended. Your friendly electronic device will automatically seek out double meanings alongside innocent interpretations.

  Technology, too, now has a dirty mind.

  TWO

  THE OLDEST PROFESSION

  The Bawd if it be a woman, a Pander

  The Bawd, if a man, an Apple squire

  The whoore, a Commoditie

  The whoorehouse, a Trugging place

  Robert Greene, A Notable Discovery of Coosnage,

  Now daily practised by Sundry lewd persons, called

  Connie-catchers, and Crosse-biters (1591)

  Harlot, rare, notable harlot

  AMONG THE MANY SLANG TERMS for sex, there has always been a distinct group of terms devoted to the business conducted by those who sell their favours for money, their facilitators, and their places of work. Of course, in certain eras or circles, even to admit the existence of such things was to risk an attack of the vapours. After the wild years of the 1920s, once the Hollywood moguls became born-again virgins under the stern lash of censor Will H. Hays – who acquired much stronger powers in 1934 – any slight hint in their screenplays about the activities of ladies of the night was forbidden. As the writer Peter Fryer once pointed out, the ‘list of banned words, which might never be spoken in any motion picture, included cocotte, courtesan, eunuch, harlot, madam (for brothel-keeper), slut, tart, trollop, wench, whore, son-of-a-bitch, sex and sexual’.

  These were mere words that were being legislated against. Regardless of any picture content, it was enough of an offence if a fully dressed character in a drawing room even uttered one of them in conversation. This blushing attitude probably did not come easily to the film-makers, given the somewhat less-than-pure state of the private lives of numerous Hollywood actors, actresses, directors or writers at that time – but rules were rules, and money was money. In those days, if you spoke about John Ford, people generally thought of the Oscar-winning director who shot John Wayne westerns, not the English 17th-century playwright who wrote ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633) – a title seemingly custom-made to give Will H. Hays a coronary. Still less could you quote certain of the lines from that play; for example:

  Come, strumpet, famous whoore! were every drop

  Of blood that runs in thy adulterous veynes

  A life, this sword – dost see’t? – should in one blowe

  Confound them all. Harlot, rare, notable harlot,

  That with thy brazen face maintainst thy sinne,

  Was there no man in Parma to be bawd

  To your loose cunning whoredome else but I?

  Must your hot ytch and plurisie of lust,

  The heyday of your luxury, be fedd

  Up to a surfeite, and could none but I

  Be pickt out to be cloake to your close tricks,

  Your belly sports?

  In this short speech, replete with sexual insults, delivered by the nobleman Soranzo, Ford rounded up several of the classic names for prostitutes. Yet Annabella, Soranzo’s wife, at whom this tirade is directed, has not in fact been selling her body. She has, however, just become pregnant after sleeping with her own brother. Incest, eye-gougings, stabbings, a poisoning and a burning at the stake: here was a play to make the censors of Hollywood three centuries later keel over in apoplexy. At the time, though, in the England of Charles I, mere whoredom was far more of a matter-of-fact business, and the varied words describing it often just a part of everyday speech. There had been talk of brothels in King Lear (1607) and Much Ado about Nothing (1600), and indeed the various words for the business of prostitution were bandied around in all manner of public spheres over the next two centuries without raising too many eyebrows.

  One whore’s town

  IF THE POPULAR ASSUMPTION IS TRUE, and prostitution is genuinely the oldest profession – although that of hunter or warrior would very likely also be in the running for the title – then society has long needed names for those who follow it.

  In Old English, the name for such people was meretrix, deriving from the identical Latin word for one who earns money by prostitution. The term, although antiquated, has survived among those who would understand classical allusions – for instance, The Times, in only its second year of publication (1786), felt confident enough of its readers to offer the following item of highbrow gossip involving a work of art:

  How came the Venus Meretrix into the collection of a late Virtuoso Dowager? Not sure as object of admiration, much less a model!!

  Indeed, the word meretricious, which these days has acquired a wider meaning denoting something false and flashy, originally meant specifically that which was suggestive of prostitution.

  Another Old English word, hóre, gave us the term whore, which itself was originally written without the ‘w’ – for instance, as hore, hoor or hure – and the Wycliff Bible of 1380 speaks of the activities of horis. It had acquired the extra letter by the end of the 16th century, and certainly carries the modern spelling by the time of Shakespeare’s First Folio. Of course, in recent years, with the global popularity of rap music, the word has been shedding the ‘w’ and starting just with ‘h’ again, and is written and pronounced ho. As an unintended result, the street name for a prostitute in these circles has created a situation in which Father Christmas chuckling to himself runs the risk of appearing sex-obsessed, and the Devon coastal village, Westward Ho!, calls to mind an East Coast American pimp telling one of his stable to move to California. Such is life.

  The business of writing ho as a way of mirroring black urban speech is a relatively new development. Iceberg Slim – who has been a significant influence on key figures in the rap world, not least Ice Cube and Ice T, generally wrote the word straightforwardly as whore:

  Goddamnit, Mr Murray, I was no trick baby. My mother was no whore. She married a white man. Do I have to pin her marriage license on my chest?

  Given the freedom with which the word bitch is used in modern rap music as a blanket term for a woman – another trait also found in the 1960s writings of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver – it is worth noting that in 18th-century London, where whores were numerous, the former term was apparently a greater insult. The second edition of Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788) put it this way:

  BITCH. The most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than that of whore, as may be gathered from the regular Billingsgate or St Giles’s answer – ‘I may be a whore, but can’t be a bitch.’

  Unsurprisingly, the various editions of Grose’s dictionary are littered with terms describing prostitutes. There are the obvious inclusions, such as punk and moll, and then some names still in use today, but whose original 18th-century meaning time has softened: a drab Grose defines as ‘a nasty, sluttish whore’, while the posthumous 1811 edition has bat, meaning ‘a low whore: so called from moving out like bats in the dusk of the evening’. A hedge whore is simply ‘an itinerant harlot, who bilks the bagnios and bawdy houses, by disposing of her favours on the wayside, under a hedge’, also known, for obvious reasons, as a star gazer. Other terms have fallen out of use, such as calling a
whore a buttock or a hunter – indeed, the latter name would very likely surprise most readers of the school stories of Frank Richards (Fifty Shades of Greyfriars, anyone?).

  Soiled doves and Winchester geese

  IF CAPTAIN GROSE KNEW PLENTY of terms for whores, then he was merely following in a long English tradition. The word prostitute itself dates back only to the start of the 17th century, but the practitioners of this trade had been variously referred to prior to this by such names as soiled dove (1250), common woman (1362), putain (from the Anglo-Norman, 1425), cat (1535), punk (1575), hackney, because they hire themselves out (1579), streetwalker (1591), winchester goose, because the brothels in Bankside were licensed by the Bishops of Winchester (1598), or hell-moth, apparently a corruption of hell’s mouth (1602).

  The anonymous compiler of the Canting Crew dictionary (1699) threw in numerous words for this occupation, such as trull, curtezan (‘a gentile fine Miss or Quality Whore’), draggle-tail, madam van and baggage. As centuries passed, the latter name became something of an all-purpose term of affection – for instance, in Erle Stanley Gardner’s crime novels of the 1930s and 1940s, baggage is the nickname Perry Mason gives to his private secretary Della Street – but what strikes perhaps the most disturbingly modern note in the Canting Crew is the following:

  Crack. A whore.

  It has been a long journey from crack meaning whore to a time of crack whores, but nevertheless, some slang names would be instantly recognisable to the denizens of both worlds.

  The Happy Hooker

  ONE OF THE MOST FAMILIAR US slang names for a prostitute is hooker, a word also familiar to Elizabethan conny catchers and vagabones, but in those days it meant a thief who stole items such as clothes by means of hooked pole. In 19th-century Scotland, and early 20th-century America, if you asked for a hooker people would think you wanted a glass of whisky. However, in 1914 the word was listed in a short dictionary called A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang, published in Portland, Oregon, with the following definition:

  HOOKER, Noun. A prostitute.

  Yet if you search in the same dictionary for another of the most common US slang terms, its meaning has shifted with the passing of time:

  HUSTLER, Noun. A grafter; a pimp who steals betimes. The genteel thief is designated a ‘hustler’.

  Other words in that volume that did refer to prostitutes included dony (‘Current amongst pimps and free lovers chiefly. A female member of the demi-monde’), tommy (‘a prostitute’) and flap (‘an opprobrious epithet for loose women. Also employed to designate the female sex organ’). The first is very close to the traditional English cant word for whore, doxy, but the middle example might well have raised eyebrows on this side of the Atlantic, being the established nickname for a British soldier.

  As for the business of offering yourself in return for money, many 20th-century American blues and jazz musicians between the wars recorded songs which explored this theme, such as ‘She Done Sold It Out’ by the Memphis Jug Band (1934), or ‘Anybody Here Want to Try My Cabbage?’ by Maggie Jones (1924). A whore at that time in the US might also be known as a hanky-panky (‘Helen wasn’t no hanky-panky,’ says a character in Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest) or a chippie, ‘My God! What did I ever think of to put in with a chippy like you?’ asks someone in another landmark crime novel of that era, Raymond Chandler’s The High Window (1943). Also commemorated in the jazz recording ‘Chasin’ Chippies’ by Cootie Williams and His Rug Cutters (1938), the word was still current in post-war Harlem, seen here being used as the two detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones interrogate a pimp in the 1960 novel The Big Gold Dream:

  ‘I was watching out for my girls,’ Dummy replied.

  ‘Your girls?’

  ‘He’s got two chippie whores,’ Grave Digger explained, ‘He’s trying to teach them how to hustle.’

  Meanwhile, over in Scotland during the Swinging Sixties, such behaviour was allegedly not so common, according to the narrator of a crime novel by Jack Lang (Gordon Williams) called The Hard Case (1967):

  Hoors, as he called them, were filthy old bauchles [worthless people] lurching about in Clyde Street . . . ‘Hawking your mutton is what we say,’ he grinned. ‘It’s not a major Scottish industry. You’d have to be perverted to pay for it up here. This is the land of knee-tremblers and wee bastards,’

  Our worthy chairman has been running a knocking-shop

  WHILE STREET WALKERS WALKED THE STREETS, and star gazers and hedge whores plied their trade al fresco, a great many women operated out of their own homes, or in brothels. The latter word for a house of ill repute has been common English currency since the end of the 16th century, but is itself something of a misnomer. The full term, dating to the 1530s, was brothel-house, being a place where you might expect to find brothels, or prostitutes. For instance, in 1535, the word was used in this sense by John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who complained, ‘Why doeth a common brothel take no shame of hir abhomination?’ Two centuries earlier, a brothel was simply a loose-living, disreputable man. In Old English, the establishment itself was simply a house – its meaning surviving intact through the centuries so that James Dean’s character in East of Eden (1954) could remark contemptuously of his brothel-madam mother, ‘She lives over in Monterey, she’s got one of them houses.’ In Chaucer’s England, with the lingering influence of the Normans, the accepted term was the word bordel. To the Elizabethans, these were bawdy-houses, trugging-places, nunneries, leaping-houses or vaulting-houses – the last two being just the first in an ever-expanding list of names intended to conjure up the supposedly vigorous activities to be found within. Of these, perhaps the most durable has proved to be the deadpan expression knocking shop, which was known to the Victorians, and which is still regularly employed by the British tabloid press. In 2001, the Daily Star ran a story under the headline WHORE HOUSE HORROR, which said:

  Police are hunting the killers of a dad-of-six who plunged to his death from the window of a BROTHEL . . . He was inside the knocking shop in Middlesbrough, Teesside, when a gang of heavies burst in.

  Like the phrase bonking as a shorthand for sex, knocking shop was another of those expressions which could be reliably used to evoke something near the knuckle, without prompting a shoal of outraged readers’ letters of complaint. In 1973, a government sex scandal erupted featuring the call-girl Norma Levy, which led to the resignations of Air Force Minister Lord Lambton and Leader of the Lords Earl Jellicoe. The Daily Mirror reported that the two men were filmed in her Maida Vale flat via a hole drilled through a wall and the back of a wardrobe, while their conversations were recorded by means of ‘a bugged teddy bear on a chair by Norma’s bed. The bear had a microphone in its nose which was linked to a tape recorder.’ All of which was prime fodder for the Mirror’s Keith Waterhouse, who devoted all of his column to a satirical piece imagining the conversation between a cabinet minister and his wife, which ran through a fair few slang terms for such behaviour:

  . . . completely unknown to me, our worthy chairman has been running a knocking-shop. A knocking-shop, dear. A bordello. A brothel. A whorehouse. You may well ask what the world is coming to, old girl. I ask the same question myself. But what is more to the point, the P.M. is asking it too. Well, I mean to say, he can’t have one of his most respected ministers consorting with a Soho brass, can he? A brass, dear. A strumpet. Whore. Prostitute.

  Brass is cockney rhyming slang, usually given as brass nail, tail, although sometimes explained as brass flute, prostitute, or brass door, whore – although how many doors are completely made of brass?

  A meer Dog-hole

  BROTHELS, LIKE ANY OTHER KIND of accommodation, can obviously range in size and quality. At the lower end of the scale, you might find a seraglietto, which the New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (1699) defined as ‘a lowly, sorry Bawdy-house, a meer Dog-hole’. Others might be the last word in elegance, designed to attract a wealthy and titled clientele.

  Wh
en the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660 ushered in a new era of sexual permissiveness, it was not just the theatre that took advantage of the situation. In that same year, an anonymous serial publication appeared that attempted to list many of London’s prostitutes for the benefit of the well-heeled connoisseur. The presumed author and publisher was a man named John Garfield, and the title of his first issue employed a number of slang expressions:

  The Wandring Whore – A Dialogue Between Magdalena a Crafty Bawd, Julietta an Exquisite Whore, Francion a Lascivious Gallant, And Gusman a Pimping Hector. Discovering their diabolical Practises at the CHUCK OFFICE, With a LIST of all the Crafty Bawds, Common Whores, Decoys, Hectors, and Trappanners, and their usual Meetings.

  To decode this by means of the Canting Crew dictionary, we find that a hector is ‘a Vaporing, Swaggering Coward’, and a trapan ‘he that draws in or wheedles a Cull [fool] and Bites [cheats or robs] him’ (a pimp, in this context). Chuck, meanwhile, was an old term for a whore and also for a whoremonger – one who frequents whores – and so the chuck office was a brothel. A crafty bawd, of course, was a madam.

  Garfield’s publication listed the names of a variety of people involved in London’s prostitution trade at the time. Among the whores, there were ‘Mrs Osbridges scolding daughter’, ‘Betty Lemon in Checquer-ally neer Bunhill’, ‘Mrs Smith a Bricklayers wife in whitechappel’, and ‘Mrs Bulls daughters’. Those wanting crafty bawds could seek out ‘Mrs Eaton a Maiden-head-seller on the Ditch-side neer Hogsden’, ‘Mrs Pope in Petty France’, ‘Mrs Treely in Blomesbury’, or perhaps ‘Rachel War in Dog Yard’. As for trapanners, readers were advised to look out for a variety of upstanding citizens such as ‘George Paskins, a Kid-catcher, at the Crooked-billet at the Armitage’, ‘Pimp Howard’ – a certain clue in the name, perhaps – or even ‘Ralph Asbington alias Shitten-arse, Grocer’, who presumably adopted this trade once the public proved understandably reluctant to buy vegetables from him.