[It is election day in the UK and I should be reflecting the fact. But democracy and its alternatives have never disturbed slang to any great extent. There are a few terms that touch on politicians — beardie-weirdie, hack, Mr Clean, ward-heeler and wire-puller — though no simple job description. There are flavours too: hardshell, mossy-back, righthander for conservatives; bolshie, commie, leftie and red for progressives. As for vote and voter, there is the mugwump (who may tip either way) and the plumper (the vote that is plumped down). But nothing else. There are, slang enjoying assment as much as description, a good number of terms that indicate powerful individuals, some 286, but voting may not have entered the picture; there are also 179 for corruption and the corrupt, again a phenomenon that needs no ballot-boxes.
Instead, I offer a small disquisiton on sight, or rather the eye, as found in slang. If nothing else, it may take your mind from the results which as I type remain at least nine hours distant before they start emerging on our screens.]
The senses (traditionally five, more have ben added) do not bulk over-large in slang. Poets like them and prate accordingly; slang, seen as being of a harder edge, prefers less subtlety. Compared to the vast lists pertaining to matters sexual, those of sight, taste, sound, smell and touch are under-represented. In terms of simple definitions the mouth (177 plus 39 tongues and 25 lips) tops the list (fittingly, one might say in slang’s noisy world) and is followed by the nose (101, plus 43 for smell), the eyes (99) the hand and fingers (69) and the ears (9). But slang moves beyond mere A=B to the wider world of C: the images such terms can produce. In the world of the figurative, the two or quite possibly one-eyed person rules. The eyes have it. So let us look at the baby’s cries, the domelights, the onions and the winkers, and if you’re ready, would you try to read the top line…
V…A…G… Very good. Slang has its idées fixes and as ever, first on the list is, shall we say, physique. The eye is the vagina being similarly shaped, surrounded by hair, and in the mood, able to ‘water’. It is, indeed, the eye that weeps most when pleased. In prison it is the anus, known to the Irish as the eye of the arse, and elsewhere as the back-eye, blind eye, dead-eye, red eye, and roundeye. The itchy eye is a haemorrhoid but an eye doctor is not, as one might assume, a proctologist, but one who bowls from the pavilion end (thus cricket; baseball fans might prefer the synonymous play for the other team). Thanks to the distinctive logo, it refers in hard-boiled land to Pinkerton’s Detective Agency (logo: an open eye, motto ‘we never sleep’), and is the root of private eye. It can be a warning and a look-out. And a television.
The dismissives in your eye and, to make a neat pair, in your other eye, both suggest the speaker’s lack of faith in what they hear. The echt-example of such dubiety is all my eye and Betty Martin, which means nonsense. The phrase extends the simple all my eye, but Betty Martin herself continues to be a source of controversy. Partridge suspects that she was a late 18th century London character and that no record of her exists other than this catchphrase. Fellow-lexicographers Jon Bee (1823) and Hotten (1860) refer to the alleged Latin prayer, Ora pro mihi, beate Martine, ‘pray for me blessed Martin’ i.e. St Martin of Tours, the patron saint of publicans and reformed drunkards. It has yet to be found in any version of the liturgy, but the canonical version is accompanied by an anecdote featuring Jack Tar, entering a foreign, thus Catholic, church and hearing the Latin words. Writing in 1914, Dr L.A. Waddell suggests another Latinism, O mihi Britomartis (‘O bring help to me, Britomartis’), referring to the tutelary goddess of Crete. We had better give space too to the idea, proposed in Charles Lee’s Memoirs (1805), that there had once been ‘an abandoned woman called Grace’, who, in the late 18th century, married a Mr Martin. She became notorious as Betty Martin, and all my eye was apparently among her favourite phrases.’ (See also straws, grasping at.) Not for the first time, the Oxford etymologist Anatoly Liberman gives the best scholarly round-up (here) but concludes thus: ‘Most probably, (all) my eye and Betty Martin is a piece of eighteenth-century slang going back to some anecdote, now lost, unless Betty Martin was added gratuitously to my eye. When there is no evidence, there can be no etymology. Origin unknown. Alas!’
All my eye, unadorned and first recorded in Vanbrugh and Cibber’s play The Provok’d Husband of 1728, has other companions beyond the mysterious Betty. All are found during the 19th century. There is another unknown: Tommy, Betty’s relation perhaps but no surname is offered; my grandmother is undoubtedly part of the family, and closest of all, my elbow (which, in another negative phrase, is that solid joint from which one fails to know one’s arse or ass).
Among the best-known eye terms is another proper name: kelly’s eye, used for ‘number one’, or figuratively ‘the best’. The OED’s first use is in World War I, where British soldiers seem to have originated it when playing ‘house’, the older name of what is now called ‘bingo’. (There is a whole numerology available here. Enjoy). But nothing more substantial.
As is too often the case in slang (see Betty above but many more) the proper name is merely a tease. Slang is parsimonious enough with its provable etymologies, one might think an actual name might help, but if there was a Kelly, he or she is as lost as the anecdote which one assumes provided the term. Wikipedia, another straw-grasper, brings in Australia’s wild colonial boy, Ned Kelly, whose homemade iron helmet offered him a slot for vision. The similarity to a ‘1’ would be slightly more feasible were the slot vertical rather than horizontal.
The references to nonsense and drunkenness bring in eyewash, which in its original military use meant anything, e.g. washing the eyes, that is done for effect rather than for any practical purpose. In slang it means both humbug and cheap liquor, which when illicitly distilled is eyewater. (Larry Dugan’s eye water, immortalising a once celebrated Dublin shoe-black, was merely blacking.) This, among other things can be taken as an eye-opener, the first drink (or drug) of the day; as well as a not necessarily unpleasant surprise, an attractive woman and, I can only apologise, the penis. (The eye-lifter, in Australian gambling, was a heavy bet). The drink, at least, can be followed by the toast here’s mud in your eye, the etymology of which is moot, but may have some bearing on mud-kicking racehorses or the trenches of World War I. An excess of alcohol leads to one’s eyes being set at eight in the morning, so drunk that they stare in different directions, or to one’s eyes being opened, which indicates the drunkard’s wild, unfocused stare. In all cases the eyes – bloodshot and sunken – will resemble another fine military coinage pissholes in the snow (which excavation can also be in a snowbank, or resemble two burnt holes in a blanket). Fans of Mike Hodges’ 1971 movie Get Carter will recognise the locus classicus, as delivered by Michael Caine to Ian Hendry.
Sometimes an eye is only an eye, or at least offers a connection with viewing. Thus tears, logically enough, are eyedrops. Problems can be noted as one big eye-ache, an irritation and if worse a regular eye-bunger, or setback. The eyelid movies are daydreams or any fantasies enjoyed with the eyes closed, often as stimulated by a hallucinogenic drug. To stare is to eyefuck or to eyeshoot; to cut one’s eyes is to glance suspiciously or look furtively; in the jailhouse eye-trouble is a propensity (real or imagined) for staring at other prisoners or at warders, usually in challenging manner and often the start of a fight. Got your eye full? is another challenge, often suffixed by ‘Wanna picture?’ Violence may again ensue. A later synonym, ‘Who you screwin’? sidesteps screw as fuck (with), in the sense of aggression, and stems from the verb’s use to mean stare, and suggests the screwed-up eyes involved.
Down to a single ‘l’ an eyeful is a pretty girl, who knocks your eyes out and to whom one gives the eye (or eyeball or eye-roll), puts the eye on and for whom one has long or raw eyes. In possession of, perhaps, a nice pair of eyes (gaze lower, gents) she is considered eye-popping but eyes that are more literally popping give one eyes like cod’s bollocks. (For those who wonder, no, fish do not have humanoid, external testes, only internal ones. This is slang, not ichthyology.) The equation of a glassy eye with a cold, disdainful stare calls up the cod, or any other fish, gazing frigid and baleful from the fishmonger’s slab. Eyeglass weather is foggy weather, in which one cannot see clearly and thus requires an eyeglass for magnification. Staring presumably underpins the phrase tossed in the direction of an unknown passer-by: there you go with your eye out. (A catch-phrase numbered among those that Charles Mackay noted in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841. Other once-popular cries included ‘Has your mother sold her mangle?’ ‘What a shocking bad hat!’ and ‘Hookey walker!’)
Eye offers the second part of a number of compounds. They include puss-eye, an albino, who was stereotypically linked to short sight, kid’s-eye, a 19th century Scots term for a fivepenny piece, the birdseye wipe, a silk handkerchief with such a pattern and much sported by Victorian prize-fighters and costermongers, eye limpet, an artifical eye, beefsteak eye, a black eye upon which a curative lump of meat had been placed (New Zealand prisons use steak pie, a mix of rhyme and gastronomy.) Other black eyes include eye jammy, which suggests that it has been jammed up), a blinker, a bunger, a goog (Australian for ‘egg’), a mouse, an eye or peeper in mourning, a shiner and, stereotypes again, the Irishman’s or Botany Bay coat of arms (aka colonial livery), terms for ‘a bloody nose and a black eye’.
Scatter-eye and squeench-eye both denote one who squints. Last, and least accessible, the Jew’s eye, that which is valued or desirable. The possible root is Italian gioie or French joaille, both a jewel or, given the prevailing stereotype, the medieval practice of extorting money from the Jewish community on pain of threatened torture, which may or may not have involved blinding.
There is much more (I see such phrases as dip one’s eye, do in the eye, have eyes for, make four eyes, put the eye on… and all, nearly 30 more, can be found at eye in GDoS. But ‘enough’ and ‘good thing’ and similar pieties will have to do.
To conclude let us turn to that sure and certain help Captain Grose, anatomist of the vulgar tongue, who was less fettered than am I when it came to defining. In 1788 he notes I’ll knock out your eight eyes and explains it as ‘a common Billingsgate threat from one fish nymph to another: every woman, according to the naturalists of that society, having eight eyes, viz. two seeing eyes, two bub-eyes, a bell-eye, two popes-eyes, and a ***-eye’. The puns on bubby and belly are obvious, the pope’s eye is the lymphatic gland in a leg of mutton, regarded as a delicacy; here presumably the urinal and anal orifices; the censored term has only one destination: despite a mere trio of asterisks it is presumably, and to bring us full circle, a reference to the vagina, the (mis-spelt) cun-eye.
Is there no evidence for "private eye" coming from "private i" as in private investigator? Maybe it's a backronym, and they weren't called private investigators then...