CONSULTING ROGET under the heading Prospective Affections, Evelyn Waugh’s Major Ludovic finds: ‘Cowardice, pusillanimity, poltroonery, dastardness, abject fear, funk, dunghillcock, coistril, nidget, Bob Acres, Jerry Sneak.’ Looking up coistril in the dictionary he finds ‘a groom, knave, base fellow’ and the quotation ‘the swarming rabble of our coistrell curates’. This phrase, once found, is too good not to use, but how does one use it? Applying it to a recent military intake, he is at once suspected of madness by his second-in-command. It is just a suspicion. People who use a thesaurus to find the mot thoroughly juste are probably mad to begin with, but thesauro-mania leads to taking off in a word balloon, the hawser holding the gasbag to hard reality severed.
Jonathon Green’s compilation provokes a more dangerous kind of madness than Roget’s. Under Disorder he gives us ‘Chinese fire drill, dog’s dinner, grunge, Horlicks (UK upperclass use), pig’s ear, pit, (right) two-and-eight (rhy, sl. = state), scrounge, schmutz, what the cat brought in’. These slang terms never had much of a hold on reality. When Carl Sandburg called slang ‘a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work’ he was being exemplarily inept. Slang shirks rather than works, encapsulates bloodymindedness, avoids exact denotation, is a kind of vague poetry quickly outdated, the voice of whingeing subversiveness. Nobody knows the etymology of slang, but it suggests sling, the throwing of a noise or a far-fetched metaphor into the air, like muck off a shovel. It rolls up its sleeves and spits on its hands, casts dirt to justify leaning on its shovel, waits for the tea-break.
Nobody doubts that we need slang dictionaries, chiefly to find out the meaning of what is already demoded. On one of my rare visits to London a year or so ago I saw on a hoarding ‘Milk Delivers Bottle’. I did not know the meaning of the term. I had known bottle in ‘bottle and glass’, signifying arse, but this was clearly something different. When it had got into the slang glossaries with the Milk Marketing Board’s usage that usage was already old-hat. An actor of the Royal Shakespeare Company told me that he was glad to see I was still wanking, which I took, offended, to mean masturbating but he meant being lazy, meaning not being lazy. One cannot keep up with slang, especially the slang of the young, which is designed to be unintelligible to adults and, once decoded, has passed into history, or, since today’s young reject history, has turned into vapour or unspeak. Still, one accepts Partridge’s great dictionary as a record of the various ephemeral modes in which underdogs, public schoolboys, prostitutes, thieves and obstetricians have affirmed group solidarity or, overwhelmingly, the put-upon have responded to being put upon. It is social more than lexical history, affirming the need to debase or distort the language of the establishment to the end of denying the establishment’s values. Slang changes with bewildering swiftness, but it is always recognisable as slang.
Do we need a thesaurus of it? Green has already done good work as a slang lexicographer, holding fast to the delimitation put forward by J.Y.T. Greig in 1938: ‘The chief stimuli of slang are sex, money and intoxicating liquor’ (to which we must now add drugs). His aim in this compilation is, using the Roget taxonomy, to show us how to slangify more general concepts, though Greig’s categories predominate. There are a great number of slang terms for the genitalia, the sexual act, sexual perversion or inversion or permissible variation, for booze and for money. Thus, to drink is to ‘bend one’s elbow, booze, - it up, chug, chug-a-lug, crack a bottle, - tube (Aus.), di the bill, - the snoot, farm gargle, get a load on, get a snootful, get an edge on, - one’s nose painted, - one going, hit the booze, - the bottle, - the jug, - the sauce, hoist one, inhale (a snort), irrigate the tonsils, knock (one) back, lush, - it around, - it up, oil the tonsils, put one/a few back’ and so on. The question is, having being introduced to this plethora, what does one do with it? If one is a novelist, one must be grateful for the chance to give the look of authenticity to low-life dialogue, but there is the problem of verifying location, trade, period. Register is a very delicate consideration in the eomployment of slang, and Green can give us no help there.
A subcategory unknown to Roget is television. Who calls a television set a custard and jelly (rhyming slang for telly) or a Nervo and Knox (box)? We can guess, though I still have to have this confirmed, that the idiot-board (cue board) and the idiot girl (cue-board operator) belong to the studios, as do Acton Hilton (BBC rehearsal studios) and the mug-book (casting directory). But to whom is a religious programme a God-slot and a director a lenser or megger? Since we cannot define everything, let’s put the whole lot on to the page or into the air in the form of a Rabelaisian catalogue. ‘He kicked him up the blot or brown-eye or cornhole or dirt chute or gazoo or dinger or elephant and castle or heinie or kab ebis or labonza’ and so on for a whole page. Or ‘He fondled her apples, bazoomas, brace and bits, BSHs, cats and kitties, charlies, cupcakes, gazunkas, norks, pumps or wallopies’ for at least a column.
The disposition of derisive or cynical low-life terms into the Roget format does at least show how little slang is capable of dealing with faith, hope and charity. A religious person is a bible-banger, biblepuncher or Holy Joe. A church is a Godbox and Christ has H. as a middle initial. There is little hope anywhere. To be in love is to be stuck on, go for, have a thing for or eyes for or one’s nose open for the beloved. Something beautiful is cutesie or a dreamboat or a corker, daisy, dish, eyeful, hot stuff, looker, nifty, peach, pip, spanker, stunner, sweeties. To learn slang thus is to learn a limitation of the nobler faculties. The whole book proposes modes of dehumanisation, though with no sinister intent. If we want to translate the elevated or the merely neutral into the colourful animalistic, here is how to do it. The question is whether we want to do it.
For slang derives directly from a situation; it cannot be frigidly applied from without. You have to be pretty far gone in homosexual public lavatory soliciting to know about having kidney trouble, or, when one has failed to hide one’s homosexuality, to speak of wearing a cut-glass veil. We are, most of us, on the outside, watching other people’s bunch punch or daisy-chain or gang-bang or group grope or sloppy seconds (a girl moving from one partner to the next). There is altogether too much of the voyeur or the how-quaint slummer in such a compilation. However we use its terms, we shall always be using them in inverted commas.
This is not to denounce slang itself: far from it. It is good to know how much of it there is and to be able to admire its variety. I did not previously know that Australians with too many sexual partners speak of climbing trees to get away from it, or getting more arse than a toilet seat, or having more pricks than a second-hand dartboard or being so busy they have to put a man on to help. Knowing this kind of thing – and Green admits to compiling his thesaurus for those who are curious or logophiliac – is a very marginal accomplishment, like being able to fart ‘Annie Laurie’ through a keyhole. Either we learn slang in situation contexts, as many of us did in the armed forces, or we look it up, if the dictionary comes out quickly enough, when its use, in speech or journalism, hinders communication.
There are one or two marginal lessons that Green teaches, and one of them is the great truth that standard English has still to provide us with acceptable terms for the organs and processes of generation and excretion. There are so many slang expressions for the penis – steak, trumpet, blow stick, cannon, cherry splitter, dagger, nimrod, joy prong, mouse mutton, IBM (itty bitty meat for a small penis) – that the catalogue looks like a search for a word that ought to exist but does not. The same is true of the female pudendum – fern, ha’-penny, hide, jelly roll, moneymaker, ruby-fruit, you know where (very tame), cuffs and collars (pubic hair the same colour as head hair). The Latinate terms smell of Lysol, but the slang words are so facetious that they continue to attach a sniggering kind of shame to parts which, though private, need a sober public nomenclature. Similarly there is a whole range of sexual activity which can either be named by translating Krafft-Ebing or handed over to the slangmongers. There is nothing in between. The sexual revolution has succeeded only in making general currency out of a secret mint.
Green’s glossary of the so-called drug culture is horrifyingly fascinating. He teaches us that olly is speed (Oliver Reed), Tuinal is a Christmas tree, an ab is an abscess caused by injecting, cotton is a cloth through which heroin is sucked into a syringe, and to shoot gravy, fire up, or jack off is to pump a mixture of blood and heroin into one’s arm. Much, much more. His thesaurus is an index of what is going on in the world, and the rich underworld vocabularies are an earnest of the continuation of crime, prostitution and various kinds of slaughter. But the great truth is less the forms of slang than the need for it. Humanity is unregenerable and hates the language of conformity, since conformity has a whiff of the inhuman about it. Green has at least shown us, though without exact definition or historical placing, the range of slang in English. In effect, he makes a general statement: there is a lot of this kind of thing around. But to amass slang in a void is a useless activity. It is better to look meanings up, and Mr Green’s admirable Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, along with the recently edited Partridge, is the place to do it. A treasury of slang has to be fairy gold.
Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 1986
Review of The Slang Thesaurus by Jonathon Green
(London: Elm Tree Books, 1986)