Rub-a-dub-dub means a pub in rhyming slang, or certainly so in Australia, where it can be abbreviated as rubby or, lengthier, as rubbidy. Like a percentage of the type it stems from ascertainable origins, in this case the nursery rhyme ‘Rub-a-Dub-Dub’ which, if the original version of 1798 is correct, describes the voyeuristic indulgence of three small tradesmen: the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, in their espial of ‘three maids in a tub’. How this came about is unproven, but prevailing wisdom suggests some squalid sideshow at a small-town fair. Given such a context one notes rub-a-dub as an act of intercourse, but that was a 20th century coinage as is rub (one) off, to masturbate. By 1830 it was the poujadist threesome who had entered the tub, the maids have fallen prey to Puritanism or perhaps some more lucrative employment, possibly that slang staple, the pliant, multitasking maidservant, e.g. the Scotch warming pan. The tradesmen remained however ‘knaves all three’ though no professional defalcation is specified. Meanwhile tub, since slang is all-embracing, has various uses. The obvious and oldest is a boat, and it runs to a number of other vehicles plus a variety of containers such as a pulpit, a beer glass and a sanitary bucket; but while we are here, other counterlinguistic tubs include the vagina and a prostitute.
The candlestick maker, like the loin inspector (meat-packing), the take-off girl (confectionary) and the bottom waxer (shoemaking), not to mention a whole dictionary of terms dependant on the employment of the horse, has pretty much vanished, victim, like so many job titles, of onrushing technology. (Candlesticks are presumably still created, but the quotidian centrality of the task that brought their artisan to the rhyme has surely disappeared). We note his files, but slang’s file is a pickpocket or allied villain, nothing overtly sexual.
The candlestick itself - in slang glim-stick (its glim or light) or mutton-holder (the mutton fat used to make candles) - gets a look-in: as the vagina it embraces the phallic candle, and since we know that ‘all the nice girls love a candle’ this takes us to candle-basher, a spinster though candle-eater is apparently a Russian (are we thinking poverty?) and candle-shop a Catholic church (the parishioners are of course Roman Candles, which as a rhyme gives us sandals, though the unrhymed phrase is another take on the penis and, assuming religious conformity, an Italian). The definition of candlesticks as small, bad or unringable bells defeats me; all campanological advice gratefully received – my only thought is that perhaps one cannot get a good note by striking a candlestick? The Trafalgar Square fountains were also known as the candlesticks , while so too is the mucus from a running nose: in both cases we are seeing the drip of running wax. Wax itself having signified semen or vaginal secretions and as a verb, like many that also mean kill, beat or defeat, also stands for having sex. Finally candle and sconce, another rhyme, means ponce, and to candle, punning on burn up, is to annoy. But no makers.
The butcher and baker fare better. The former claims 20 definitions in slang: including the gentleman of grease and knight of the cleaver and steel. The latter 13, among them burn-crust and the excruciatingly punning master of the rolls. Even setting aside the former’s preoccupation with and slang’s enthusiastic pursuit of every aspect of meat (and indeed poultry) which among so much else pairs the two in the crafty butcher, that gay catcher, who ‘likes his meat round the back’, there are plenty of uses. Butcher itself is the penis (likewise butcher knife and yes, ‘if they’re old enough to bleed they’re old enough to butcher’ and indeed old enough to sit at the table then old enough to eat, presumably as in fellation), a second-rate barber and by extension any form of bungler. That this is unfair to the often skilled meat mechanic is irrelevant: slang doesn’t do nuance. To butcher a young woman or man is to deflower them (prior to which both might qualify as maids). He stands for the king, in cards. He is also a surgeon, whose operating theatre is a butcher shop, which also stands for a prison’s execution shed and for both a wedding ceremony (presumably herself goes under the knife or chopper though she may, since slang cannot resist a pun, be dripping for it like a butcher’s daughter) and, back to ‘raw meat’, the vagina. Still in prison, the word means chief warder. Elsewhere it is a glass of stout (‘a cant name for strong beer’ said Dr Johnson), playing on the name for such dark beers as Guinness and on the butcher’s traditional dimensions.
Butcherly compounds give us the butcher’s canary, a blowfly (linked, surely, to the dunny budgie, an outsize insect that hangs around Australia’s flaming furies), the butcher’s cart or wagon, an ambulance, the butcher’s dog, a married man who like the well-behaved canine can ‘lie by the beef without touching it’ (there may be parallels with the swaggie’s dog, though he, whose scraps are violent rather than meaty, is ‘all prick and ribs’). To be fit as a butcher’s dog is desirable, whether of man or woman. Be warned when it comes to the butcher’s boy, one of slang’s snares and delusion. One must stop at butch as in lesbian and thus find a gay man who enjoys sex with lesbians. No such problems with the simply Australian rhyming slang butcher’s hoof, a male homosexual or poof.
A butcher’s horse, which refers to the rider, who is no good, and a butcher’s picnic, any rumbustious occasion. Butcher’s meat is bought on credit, since it remains, at least theoretically, the butcher’s property until paid for, while butcher’s mourning, worn at the races rather than the graveside, was a curly-brimmed white beaver hat with a black band. Butcher’s plums, at which the knee jerks with thoughts of prairie and other non-aquatic varieties of oyster, is no more than chunks of meat, displayed on the counter.
To go in like a butcher’s cat: to attack hard; to talk to the butcher not the block, which emulates such preferences as that for the engineer over the oily rag. We should also note Australia’s butcher, a glass of beer (various sizes have been specified) which sems to be a version of German becher, a beaker or form of lidded drinking vessel and America’s butcher, who sold sweets, fruit, soft drinks and the like, typically in a cinema or on a railway train. The butcher’s hook, of course, rhymes: on look and works as noun and verb. One the whole the viewer has one, but the butcher’s may equally well be copped, grabbed and taken.
The word, at least by James Greenwood, the disciple of ur-sociologist Henry Mayhew, was used as a semi-euphemism for damn! (‘Butcher him!’) And as an substitute, in the form of butchering, for bloody (‘a butchering sight too fast’). The Polari expert Paul Baker might be able to tell us why butchers meant noon within gay circles. I admit defeat.
Thence, and finally, to the baker. He is an idler (he loafs), an electric chair (you bake) and the academic grade of B. To be knock-kneed is ranked as a classic occupational affliction: thus baker-kneed or -legged means knock-kneed and since knock-knees signify, say some, a lack of masculinity, effeminate. The baker’s dozen rhymes to make cousin (baker’s yeast means priest) and, allegedly dating from the laws of Edward I, the number 13, supposedly the self-defensive response of bakers fearful of being accused of short measure. To give a baker’s dozen, however, is one of slang’s 373 synonyms for administering a thrashing. To be christened by a baker is to have a freckled face (the dark spots suggest those of brown flour). Finally, and those of gentle mien should back off now, bakery goods, equating the flesh with an oven, are the buttocks or anus (thus to bake it being to hold off defecation); flying baker is menstruation (the flag signifying B is ‘red’) and a muffin baker is the source of constipation: hardened, intractable excrement. This too rhymes, on quaker, which, from the image of brown-ness, draws together the traditionally sepia-swathed sect and the stools which are ‘long and thin, hard and “wears brown”.’
Well, that was a remarkable journey. Thank you!
Marvellous. Thank you. I have so many of your books to read now. Where do you suggest I start? Or I should just proceed serendipitously, perhaps?