Max Décharné - Vulgar Tongues: An Alternative History of English Slang

MAX DCHARN

VULGAR TONGUES

An Alternative History of English Slang

MAX DCHARN is an author, songwriter and musician. He has recorded numerous albums and singles, and eight John Peel Sessions as the singer with The Flaming Stars. A regular contributor to Mojo magazine since 1998, his books include Hardboiled Hollywood, Kings Road, the jive-talk dictionary Straight From The Fridge, Dad, and A Rocket in my Pocket, a history of rockabilly music (Serpents Tail 2010).

MAX DCHARN

VULGAR TONGUES

An Alternative History of English Slang

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Serpents Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

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Copyright 2016 by Max Dcharn

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

eISBN 978 1 84765 941 5

To Captain Francis Grose (17311791), whose books sent me down this path thirty-five years ago, and to my father John (19322011), who knew an appropriate slang word for most situations, good and bad.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful to Rebecca Gray, my editor at Serpents Tail who first suggested that I write a history of English slang after hearing me on the radio in 2010 talking about the works of Captain Francis Grose for all her sound advice, good humour and support along the way.

Heartfelt thanks as always to my good friend and literary agent Caroline Montgomery at Rupert Crew Ltd, for reading and providing insightful comments on each chapter as the book progressed, and for much else besides, and also to Fen Oswin and Doreen Montgomery from Rupert Crew for all their help through the years.

Many thanks also to Pete Ayrton, Anna-Marie Fitzgerald, Cecily Gayford, Ruth Petrie, Hannah Westland, Penny Daniel and all the other lovely people at Serpents Tail its a real pleasure to work with you.

I am indebted to the staff at the Westminster Reference Library, the Guildhall Library and the British Library, and commend those who work in public libraries up and down the country at a time when many local councils seem bent on destroying these institutions. I would also like to thank all those behind that vast and invaluable work of scholarship, the Oxford English Dictionary.

A raised glass and a tip of the hat for help and inspiration to Mark & Karen Rubenstein, Gary Valentine, Sarah Martin, Ann Scanlon, Cathi Unsworth, Michael Meekin, Paul Willetts, Travis Elborough, Clive Phillips, Martin Stiles, Janet Dickinson, Frank Key, Mike Jay, David Yates, Tom Nancollas, John Williams, Richard Dacre, Randall Eiger and Andrea Jutson. A very special thank you to Margaret and Geoffrey, Derek and Fiona, and Jamie and Eleanor.

Finally, the most thanks and all my love to Katja, without whom there would simply have been no book at all.

INTRODUCTION

THE MARK OF A DECADENT MIND

Slang, n.

a. The special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable character; language of a low and vulgar type.

b. The special vocabulary or phraseology of a particular calling or profession; the cant or jargon of a certain class or period.

c. Language of a highly colloquial type, considered as below the level of standard educated speech, and consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense.

Oxford English Dictionary

If I say, Come, lass, I am using familiar English; if I address her as Dear girl, I am using ordinary Standard English; and if I say, Come, sweet maid, I am using Literary English. If, however, I allude to the girl as a dame or a Jane, I am employing slang; if as a moll, I am employing cant; if as but perhaps I had better not particularize the vulgarisms for girl or woman.

Eric Partridge, Here, There and Everywhere (1950)

FOR CENTURIES AFTER THE NORMAN CONQUEST, the majority of the rich, the powerful and the learned in England were curiously reluctant to speak English. Latin and French held sway, both in conversation and in written documents or the printed word. It was considered courtly, polite and cultured.

For the great mass of common people, however, English was the sole option a forthright, earthy language which did not shrink from calling a spade a spade, or anything else for that matter. There was a street in Oxford in the 13th century named Gropecuntlane, and another in London called Gropecontelane; a variant spelling but the same meaning. In fact, this street name appeared in towns across the country in medieval times, often denoting the presence of a brothel. Not for nothing was the everyday speech of the common people known as the vulgar tongue.

Times changed, literacy rates improved, newspapers blossomed and by the 18th century, many words and phrases which had previously been standard English began to be considered improper or, in some cases, obscene. This may have cut some ice in polite and well-heeled circles, but the common people had their own modes of speech, and just as the former group attempted to raise written and spoken English to new heights of elegance and correctness, the latter took an inventive and instinctive delight in the development of slang.

The word slang acquired its current meaning only during the reign of George III. Back in the 1500s, it was the name for a type of cannon, and from 1610 it could also refer to a narrow strip of land. When Dr Johnson was compiling his Dictionary of the English Language in the mid-18th century, a long-established and rich underworld language could be found all around him in areas like Covent Garden and St Giles. However, if you look up the word Slang in the Dictionary, the only entry Johnson provides is this quotation from the Bible:

SLANG. The preterite of sling.

David slang a stone, and smote the Philistine.

I. Sam. xvii

Yet if you search in the same dictionary for the word cant, his fourth entry under this heading is as follows:

CANT

4. Barbarous jargon.

The affectation of some late authors, to introduce and multiply cant words, is the most ruinous corruption in any language.

Swift

Such talk was associated in the main with thieves, beggars and those on the margins of society. It was known as flash language, cant or pedlars French, and often looked down on the common fate of slang through the ages. Yet within twenty years of the publication of Johnsons dictionary, a character in Hugh Kellys play School for Wives (1773) was given the line: There is a language which we sometimes talk in, calld Slang, and this eventually became the main term for all variants of insider speech.

Tracing the threads over several centuries and across international borders, Vulgar Tongues is the story of how the English language of Shakespeares day fragmented and twisted into all kinds of shapes, as people like pickpockets, beggars, sailors, musicians, gangsters, whores, politicians, gypsies, soldiers, gays and lesbians, policemen, rappers, cockneys, biker gangs and circus folk seized the Kings or Queens English by the throat and took it to places it would probably regret in the morning.