[Sometimes the book is written, published too, but through some mismanagement, for instance publishing it simultaneously with one’s own latest slang dictionary, it sinks beneath the waves. Thus my Getting off at Gateshead (2008), a study of the great ‘dirty words’ and their coevals. A ‘left-handed lexicon’ as I termed it. Given the reception accorded my recent substack on ‘Party Animals’ - who’d have thought yesteryear’s potty-mouthed Jewish mamas would get you all going - here’s a little more of…well, a not wholly dissimilar ballpark.]
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Like Shakespearian humans, some words are born dirty, others become so and some have their dirtiness thrust upon them. Let us then consider the dirty words, seemingly first recorded in a letter of 1807 where in a case of affray (the defendant allegedly threw cabbages, cold water and dirty potatoes at a neighbour) it was claimed that ‘the prosecutrix had been as lavish with her dirty words, as they were of the dirty potatoes’. But this is not any old dirt, but dirty as in disease, and not just disease, but venereal disease, specifically gonorrhoea and syphilis, literally the ‘diseases of Venus’, the goddess of love, but also, in this case, of rotting bubos, oozing pus, aching joints, abbreviated noses and male acts of urination reminiscent of an attempt to dispose of an entire warehouse of razor-blades via the never-so-narrow confines of the penis.
What’s so remarkable, however, is that if we take our slang sources seriously, none of these nasty diseases seem to originate in the UK nor US. Of course our hapless fellow countrymen and women, often in the course of their professional lives, have suffered them, and been forced to face a range of what, prior to antibiotics were less than pleasant, nor indeed especially efficient ‘cures’. But like the plague, imported by some filthy foreign cabal of death-ridden rats, doubtless borne in the tiniest of boats, venereal disease was strictly an import.
Which, though I’m loathe to harp on our cross-Channel neighbours without whom, remember, we would lack that vital component of sexual fulfillment, the capote anglaise, brings us yet again to the French. It’s so useful to have an all-purpose national enemy – even if they have been our ostensible allies since 1815. (Or do I mean 2016?) But the truth will out, and there are more terms for VD evoking France than of any other variety. French chilblains (referring to the swellings that accompany syphilis), French goods, French gout, the French crown (properly known as corona Veneris, the ring of spots that appear around one’s forehead), the French cannibal (whose favourite dish is the genitals), a French loaf, French marbles (from morbilles, small blisters), French measles, French mole (it ‘burrows’ into the flesh), French morbus (Latin morbus meaning sickness), the French pig, usually the syphilitic pustule or bubo (Latin bubo, a swelling in the groin) which can also be a poulain (from the synonymous French – its parallel meaning is of a horse under three years and may therefore link to horse, below) or a marble, plus French pox, and the French razor. All these are primarily syphilis – the first form of venereal disease to appear on these shores – and flourished in 17th century; thus a French welcome, a dose of syphilis. Frenchified means diseased, though on a more positive note it refers to sexually adept woman, and learn French or take French lessons mean to contract a venereal disease. (To tell a French joke, however, means to stimulate the anus with one’s tongue). To be piled for French velvet is to be suffering a venereal disease.
Finally, a blow with a French faggot-stick or cowl-staff, meaning the loss of one’s nose through syphilis; thus those who are thus marked out have been knocked with French faggot-stick. A faggot-stick is one used for lighting a fire – and thus a pun (see below); a cowl-staff was a pole or staff used to carry burdens, supported on the shoulders of two bearers; thus the popular punishment for a pussy-whipped husband who was abused either verbally or even physically by his wife, riding the cowl-staff, to be sat on a pole and carried in derision about the streets.
Yet it may be – historically that is rather than simply nationalistically - that we are abusing the French unfairly. Another version is a blow with a Naples cowl staff and it is equally possible that the world’s dripping johnnies originated there rather than in France. Still, give a dog a bad name . . .
Nonetheless we find the adjective Italian, already seen as a synonym for anything ‘dirty’ or ‘foreign’, meaning simply syphilitic in the late 16th century, some decades prior to anything French entering the picture; and Italian tricks are hetero- or homosexual anal intercourse, possibly productive of health problems. Thus the 17th century riddle commencing ‘I’ve two holes in my Belly and none in my Bum / Yet me, with much pleasure, Italians do thrum...’ (thrum, lit. play upon, meaning to have intercourse).The rest of Italy appears immune, and it is the Naples canker or scab that describe syphilis, as do the Neapolitan favour, bone-ache, button, court and disease, as well as the Neapolitan running-nag, scab and scurf. A simple Neapolitan, therefore, is one who has syphilis, though it too can mean the disease. Another term is scabbado, a ‘Spanished’ version of SE scab and the Spanish, England’s primary national enemy during the 16C–17C turn out to be equally pustulant; thus Spanish buttons, syphilitic sores, and the Spanish gout, pip, pox or needle, all rendering the disease itself.
Other ‘national terms’ include Scottish fleas which, while the Scots are often associated with bodily invaders, refer yet again to syphilis. So to do the Scotch and indeed Welsh fiddle. More recent is African toothache. Then comes go under the South Pole, a 16th century phrase for suffering from syphilis or venereal disease, based from the belief that those who went on long sea voyages suffered from fevers, underpinned by the image of the genitals being in the ‘southern’ part of the body. Last of the ‘foreigners’ was the famed Saigon Rose, much mentioned, if not actually contracted by Vietnam-era grunts, a form of super-VD, what others might term a bullhead clap, from which no recovery was even dreamed.
But for all the careful attribution to ‘abroad’ of the problems faced by those who, having taken a turn in Cupid’s alley and beaten Cupid’s anvil (and the vagina also claims Cupid’s cloister, cupboard, feast, furrow, hotel, and warehouse as its nicknames; Cupid’s kettledrums are the female breasts) have ended up with a touch of Cupid’s itch, it just ain’t necessarily so. A whole new set of terms evolved, these still geographical, but now much closer to home, focusing on London’s centres of prostitution. (Such centres doubtless exist country-wide, but as ever, slang remains a very metropolitan construct). Covent Garden was the first among these. The Covent Garden ague (ague, any form of acute or violent fever, usually involving shaking; synonyms included bone-ache, -ague and bone-breaker) or gout (a term used as much as a euphemism as a conscious synonym) were VD, one obtained them from a Covent Garden lady or nun, a whore, who may well have worked for a Covent Garden abbess, a madam in, logically, a Covent Garden nunnery, a brothel. The name can be abbreviated to Garden, thus Garden gout, in this case the fruit of liaison with a Garden goddess. It was also possible to break one's shins against Covent Garden rails although break shins (from the Russian tradition of beating the shins of those who refuse to pay their debts) meant to borrow money, especially during an emergency, when one is forced to run from person to person in the hope of a loan. Drury Lane represents the eastern border of Covent Garden, it too provides a variety of ague. Further west, and chronologically slightly later, lies Piccadilly (so named from the piccadills or ruffs once manufactured there). The early 18th century saw the arrival of the Piccadily cramp, in this case carried by a Piccadilly daisy or, from around 1900, commando (the term commando being widely popularized during the contemporary Boer War) a term that lasted until the Street Offences act of 1959 saw the girls thrown off their beats and into the small-ads and phonebox fliers. Piccadilly weepers were not, however, remorseful clubmen, bemoaning their aching parts, they were the long side-whiskers worn without the then usual beard, which gained a temporary fashion from the mid-late 19th century.
Given the usual hypocrisies, the great whoring centre of London of the years prior to the 18th century, featuring such brothels as the intriguingly named Hollands Leaguer, was placed deliberately beyond the city walls and indeed on the other side of the river in Southwark, for many years the only part of London to be developed ‘across the water’. This area, modern Bankside, was owned by the Bishops of Winchester, who were thus the largest brothel-owners in the country. This gave the Winchester goose or pigeon and lay at the root of a popular 17th century proverb, referring to a well-known whore: ‘No Goose bit so sore as Bess Broughton’s’. It was perhaps not coincidental that nearby Battersea, equally transpontine, gives the term Battersea’d, meaning to have one’s penis treated for venereal disease, in this case using the hopefully curative herbs that grew in the area’s market-gardens. Clapham is also south of the river and occurs in the punning haddums, a term that means had ’em (i.e. the pox) and is found in the phrase been at had ’em and come home by Clapham.
Even more specific was the late 18th century’s blue boar, another name for a venereal bubo. This took its name from the notorious Blue Boar tavern in London, sited on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road; this area, long since destroyed by moralistic town-planners who replaced it by New Oxford Street and later Centre Point (which if nothing else is phallic), lay next to the rookery or criminal slum of St Giles, named for the adjacent church. St Giles itself has no venereal connections but it did give St Giles’ Greek, a synonym for criminal slang, and St Giles’ breed, criminals as a class. The Blue Boar was extended to the blue boy and blue board, presumably variant pronunciations. (Still blue, prostitutes at one stage were forced to wear blue gowns and known generically as such: whether this had any bearing on their potential as disease carriers is unknown). Geography provides a couple of final terms and both for a change outside the metrpolis: the Barnwell ague came from Barnwell near Cambridge, ‘a place of resort for characters of bad report’ as B.H. Hall put it in his College Words (1856). The university had long recognised the problem, and had issued a decree in 1675: ‘Hereafter no scholar whatsoever [...] upon any pretence whatsoever, shall go into any house of bad report in Barnewell, on pain [...] of being expelled from the university’; it would appear that many young men remained undeterred, to their cost. A Tetbury portion (doing little for the image of the town of Tetbury in Gloucestershire) was sexual intercourse that is followed by a dose of venereal disease, or as Grose put it in 1788, ‘A **** [cunt] and a clap.’
All this geography remains, however, very much in the past. If one were to select any terms that remain definitive of venereal disease, they must be these two: the pox and the clap. Pox is no more than an abbreviated spelling of the standard English pocks, the eruptive pustules on the skin that are a sign of syphilis. The pox does exist in SE, but there it means smallpox; in addition syphilis was also called the great or grand pox, to distinguish it from ‘lesser’ venereal diseases. Pox gives a number of compounds: the specialist pox doctor who works in the pox hospital, a which in turn specialises in sexually transmitted diseases, and deals with those who are pox-eaten or poxed up. The unpleasantness of syphilis rendered pox! pox take —! or the pox on –! a useful curse from the mid-16th century. Pox can also be used as a substitute for fuck, hell and so on in such interrogative phrases who the pox, how the pox, etc. Further exclamations of annoyance and irritation.are what a pox! and with a pox! The 17th-18th century horse-pox was considered an especially vicious strain. While pox itself is perhaps less common than once it was, it has become the root of a number of rhyming slang terms. They include: band in the box, royal, Surrey, Whitehaven or Tilbury docks, boots or shoes and socks, collie knox, cardboard box, coachman on the box, goldilocks, crab on the rocks, jack in the box, and johnny rocks. However the Tilbury version was not linked to Francis Grose’s use of dock, but to the chopping a dog’s (or bitch’s tail): ‘Docking: a punishment inflicted by sailors on the prostitutes who have infected them with the venereal disease, it consists in cutting off all their clothes, petticoat, shift and all, close to their stays, and then turning them out into the street’. This surely descended from the once annual raid by apprentices (too poor to join the gentry as customers) on local brothels: beating, stripping and throwing onto the street the girls who worked within.
There are also a number of real-life individuals, safely dead, who would probably not have relished their ‘honour’: John Knox, the Scottish Calvinist theologian, the Catholic clergyman Ronald Knox (1888–1957) and the comedians and members of music-hall’s Crazy Gang Nervo and Knox (Jimmy Nervo [1890–1975] and Teddy Knox [1896–1974].) Syphilis, or rather siff, offers lover’s tiff, bang and biff and Wills’ Whiff, otherwise encountered as a small cigar. One last specimen of rhyming slang is Australia’s bumblebee, VD.
Alongside the pox, the clap and a return to the unfortunate French, although on a linguistic rather than a patriotic basis. The word comes from Old French clapoir, a venereal bubo; thus the late 16th century clapoire or clapier, a place of debauchery and the illness one can contract there. Cotgrave, in his Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (1611) defines clapier as a rabbits’ nest as well as a name for ‘old time Baudie houses’; it was thus a pun on SE coney, a rabbit as well as its slang equivalent – a man might catch the disease from the diseased vaginal cony of a whoring cony who was working in a clapoir. Clap too has its compounds; the clap-clinic, one that specializes in venereal diseases, also known as a clap-shack and the clap-trap, a less than complimentary, if all too predictable slang synonym for the vagina (as well as a brothel). Thus the transitive verb to clap means to infect with venereal disease, clappy (but perhaps not happy-clappy) to be suffering from venereal diseas and a clapster a regular sufferer and, logically, a promiscuous man. Clap has its rhymes too: handicap and horse and trap.
There are many other names. Cock-rot offers no illusions, a cold, as in I’ve got a bit of a cold, tries to; so do the new consumption (although consumption – TB – was hardly an easy option for 17th century sufferers) et-caetera, which can also mean intercourse or the vagina; noli me tangere (‘don’t touch me’) another genteel Latinism. Crinkum can be found, between the 17th 19th centuries, as crinkums, grincam, grincom, grincome, grincum, grinkcome, grinkham, and grinkum: they all suggest the sense of twisting pain that accompanies the disease. Back amongst the euphemisms is gentleman's disease (16th century) and its modern successor the gentleman’s complaint (both brought home from the gentleman’s pleasure-garden – the vagina). The costermongers’ kertever cartzo comes from Lingua franca (a form of showbiz Italian) and means literally ‘bad cock’. Modern America offers the blackly humorous gift that keeps on giving. Other names include Australia’s the jack (thus one is jacked up), nag (like the standard English an undeniable term of abuse), nap, scrud and yook (a 19th century use which long predates modern yuck, even if both tend to the disgusting).
Syphilis has its own sub-group: big Charlie, boogie-woogie, the bots (usually a disease of horses caused by infestation of botfly larvae in the digestive tract, or the pip, ‘a disease of poultry and other birds, characterized by the secretion of a thick mucus in the mouth and throat, often with the formation of a white scale on the tip of the tongue’ (OED). There is the resignedly affectionate old dog (who ‘bites’ the sufferer) or old joe, old rail (or old ral, old rall, rall, all from dialect rail, to stagger, to reel – the development of the disease gradually impairs mobility). Gambling informs big casino (gonorrhoea being little casino and both referring to card games), deuce (i.e. the 2 and thus the lowest or least lucky card or dice throw) while a full hand (poker’s ‘full house’ – one pair plus three of a kind) means a simultaneous dose of both syphilis and gonorrhoea (or an infestation of both head and body lice).
A number of terms relate to the symptoms that accompanied one’s encounter with Venus’ curse. The actual swelling or ulcer was the bube or shanker, pig, flankard (from the hunting jargon for a wound in a deer’s flank or side), pintle-blossom (from pintle, the penis) or blue balls. It can also be a botch, which works as non-venereal sores too, thus this from Deuteuronomy 28:27 ‘The Lord will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed.’ Don’t ever say we didn’t warn you. The dumb watch is another term; it seems obscure but uses SE watch, a sentinel to suggest that the silent bubo is now keeping watch on any further sexual misadventures. The diseased genitals were a dirty barrel while flyblown, as well as meaning a woman who is no longer a virgin, is also one who may be diseased. One who has just got it was a fresh cow. The dropping member is the flaccid penis, rendered ineffective through disease. To break one’s boltsprit is for one’s nose to rot away as a result of syphilis (the bolt- or bowsprit being a large spar extending from the stem of a vessel).
It can be the itch or itching but VD is usually known as a source of unpleasant discharges such as glue (a dirty prostitute is glue-necked), the whites, the yellows, the sauce and the stick (i.e., stickiness). Gleat, from Old French glette, slime, filth or purulent matter has meant urethritis since the late 17th century and in modern Australia it is a venereal infection in the rectum. Ireland’s brophys, are a nickname for the supposed insects, relations of body lice or crabs, which allegedly carry the disease. The dripper has been used since the late 17th century to describe both the disease and the discharge and the term can also apply to an allegedly diseased woman; more recent are drip and dripsy. A running, in the sense of oozing, horse is presumably not be caught. Standard English token means a sign, in this case of a disease, and to tip someone the token was to pass it on.
Above all, if the slang has checked with its GP, VD burns. Burn means to infect someone else, and to burn one’s tail or poker means to get a dose. The 18th century Navy offered its own joke: to be sent out a sacrifice and come home a burnt offering, i.e. to be sent off to fight, but to return carrying venereal disease. The burner, otherwise a cheat or swindler, is VD itself, and to be warm, hot, sunburned, or peppered is to suffer (to pepper or spice someone else is to infect them, while pepper-proof means healthy). Although scald seems to offer the same image, it comes from 16th century dialect scald, scabbed, afflicted with the ‘scall’ (any scaly or scabby disease of the skin, esp. of the scalp; dry scall was psoriasis, humid or moist scall was eczema). Pestle seems less obvious, but stems from Francis Beaumont’s play The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c.1607); knight of the burning pestle is a synonym, as well as meaning the apothecary who offers a cure. A more recent version is to be one of the knights. As Ned Ward wrote in 1699 ‘The Doctor undertook to extinguish [...] all Venereal Fires that had unhappily taken hold of the Instruments of Generation’ and fire is a logical candidate for inclusion; a frigate on fire is a diseased whore, triple-punning on frigate, frig and fire. A fireplug is one who is suffering from a venereal disease, a flame is the disease and flaming, diseased. Glimmer and glim both originally referred to fire, they too were enrolled to describe the ‘hot’ disease (knap the glim was to catch it). The mid-18th century sufferer was hot-tailed or had their tail on fire. They could also be high, usually of a prostitute, and borrowing from the ‘high’ of rotten meat. A syphilitic prostitute might also be a barber, a term that plays on the role of a barber as a primitive surgeon (who might treat syphilis), the red-striped, bloody and phallic barber’s pole and the fact that his shaving water/her vagina is ‘hot’. She might also be a queer mort, literally a bad girl or ‘a dirty Drab, a jilting Wench, a Pockey jade’ (B.E. c.1698). A last and laboured pun comes with in for the plate: in horse-racing jargon: horses that qualify for the plate (the main race) have first won the heat.
If all that is not enough, a selection of terms for the sufferers: One can be between the two Ws (i.e., wind and water), get a knob, take a leak (that holed penis), or load up, cop a packet (the original World War I packet being the ‘packet’ of gauze and lint that comprised the First Field Dressing that would be applied to a wound and its initial slang use meant a wound) or be placket-stung (the placket being officially the slit at the top of an apron or petticoat, facilitating dressing and undressing and thus enslanged as the vagina). One might be shot, either in the tail (in which one might also harbour a maggot), or betwixt wind and water (a nautical term for that part of a ship’s side that is sometimes above water and sometimes submerged, in which part a shot is particularly dangerous.) And Australia’s all-pupose –o, usually found in such as milko or garbo works just as well for sypho, a syphilitic.
Today’s clap clinic had its predecessors, although their ‘cures’ were debatable. Among the most widely found was the cornelian or Mother Cornelius’ tub: this was the sweating tub that formed the basis of the cure. There may have been an actual Mother Cornelius, whether a nurse or a procuress; however one must note the masculine ‘Cornelius’ in the ‘Water Poet’ John Taylor’s ‘Travels to Bohemia’ (1620): ‘Or had Cornelius but this tub, to drench / His clients that had practis’d too much French’ (i.e., venereal disease). This has been seen as a possible reference to the physician Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1496-1535) a leading advocate of hot baths for medicinal purposes. A further etymology may lie in ‘the wood of Cornus mascula, celebrated for its hardness and toughness, whence it was anciently in request for javelins, arrows, etc.’ (OED) – such a hard, dense wood would have been necessary to withstand the heavy salt brine used in ‘pickling’ patients; also known as cornel-wood, there may be one more pun – on cornel, cornuted and the cuckold. Another name for the ‘tub’ was the powdering tub, a novel use for its standard version, a pickling tub in which the flesh of dead animals was pickled or ‘powdered’, it was also the nickname for a specific lock or quarantine hospital near Kingsland, London. Another such hospital was Job’s ward or dock, the venereal disease ward at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, in which one was laid up. (By the 19th century victims were known as dock-shankers, from the same medical ‘dock’ in which they were berthed and standard English chancre, a venereal ulcer.) The use of Job suggests that VD patients suffered as much as did the biblical figure. The treatment gives sal, a clipping of SE salivation and thus to be in a high sal, undergoing treatment for syphilis. To play a game at loll-tongue was to have one’s saliva checked for traces of syphilis.
The doctors who worked in such clinics were nimgimmers – sadly the etymology thereof remains elusive. Those who took the cure were also known as yeomen of the vinegar bottle, a reference to the use of vinegar as a ‘cure’ for the disease; as well as internal or external use some doctors suggested that the mercury used in the treatment of syphilis should first be boiled in vinegar. The use of mercury gives blue butter, coloured by the substance on which it was based.
More recently, but still prior to penicillin are a couple of phrases – ride the silver steed and take the bayonet course, both of which refer to the course of injections of bismuth subcarbonate and neoarsphenamine for venereal disease that was continued weekly over a period of years. To bumfuck is to massage the prostate as a way of diagnosing and treating gonorrhoea. Finally, even in the 1950s, there is the snakebite remedy, the post-coital washing of the genitals in potassium permanganate, supposedly a prophylactic against venereal disease.