E Is For...?
Really, is it that hard?
[This is not another unwritten book. Just overlooked. It appeared in 2008 which was foolish because that same year there was also something called the Chambers Slang Dictionary, which was, at that stage of research at least, GDoS without the cites. It was big and red (the publisher’s house style) and its near-2000 columns stood up proudly on the shelf. Other than GDoS itself in 2010 it was my last print dictionary. And its shadow totally obscured the slimmish vol. that held the E-xcerpt that follows: Getting Off at Gateshead, an A-Z of the ‘dirtiest words’ in English. That they were slang goes without saying. It was, in truth, an incredibly easy, not to mention enjoyable book to write. Monkey-like in its irrespressibility1. Just one problem: the title (not mine) referred to a little group of terms meaning ‘coitus interruptus’. My editor, whose confection it was, asked with admirable restraint why my manuscript seemed to have wholly failed to consider the phrase. Let us say there cannot be many books in which the title exists only as the basis of a shame-faced epilogue.]
E is for . . .
Erect. Or otherwise.
Four stiff standers,
Four dilly-danders,
Two lookers,
Two crookers,
And a wig-wag!
Well, the Opies2, and who is to gainsay their expertise as regards the nursery-rhyme, claim that this riddle is multinational, several millennia old and describes . . . a cow. If you say so. But as Mandy Rice-Davies said of Lord Denning (no, children, if you don’t know, look it up): they would say that, wouldn’t they. But if, as does your author, one basks in the polluted waters of a mind that, while perhaps not dirty, is linguistically attuned to shall we say the potential of a word, then it is hard not to spy that stiff, those standers, not to mention that naughty wig-wag, and . . . wonder.
No matter. The point is hard. Hardness. Prolonged rigidity. Surging. Thrusting. Rampant. Daddy has to put his boat in Mummy’s harbour and flabby doesn’t make it. The erect penis, still banned from most public and media display, even though it appears that we are considered as less needy of protection from the female genitals, has marked out its corner of the slang lexicon. The image, as suggested, is of hardness, though what goes up must come down (and may not get there in the first place) and if E is for the glories of erection, then, by extension (or perhaps diminution), it has also to include the miseries of impotence as well.
What you see is what you get, and the hardness is what erections are all about. Nonetheless when it comes to first recorded use, the image is of what the penis does, rather than how it looks or feels. And what it does is stand up straight and a stand has meant an erection since the early 17th century. Even older is the verb, to stand (erect) the earliest example of which can be found – like many such vintage versions of our lexicon – in the poems of the Scot David Lyndsay, in this case the Pleasant Satyre of Thrie Estaitis in 1540: ‘Fair Damessell, how pleiss ye me? / I haif na mair geir nor ye fie. / Swa lang as this may steir, or stand, / It fall be ay at your command.’ The standing ague, in which the ague points to the quivering, lust-engorged member, is an early synonym for sexual excitement. However, many of these earliest appearances – whether nouns or verbs – are so layered with double entendres, e.g. ‘She after a slight wooing, easily consented to accompany him that Night in a Truckle-bed under his own standing; in a short time after they were marryed’ of 1654 – it is hard to disentangle them. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar – though I’m not betting on it.
And although the over-riding image is one of hardness, when it comes to terminology, on a chronological basis hard must give place to stiff, which as stiff and stout is the first slang term for an erection that has been recorded. Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of Rabelais’ Gargantua & Pantagruel in 1653 introduced so many new terms to the language, included it in one of the many wonderfully inventive lists with which the original, and thus its translation is filled: ‘And some of the other women would give these names [...] my lusty live sausage, my crimson chitterlin, rump-splitter, shove-devil, down right to it, stiff and stout, in and to, at her again, my coney-borrow-ferret, wily-beguiley, my pretty rogue.’ It was another translation of Rabelais, published by Motteux in 1694, that gives a further synonym: the stiff deity (plus an accompanying term for the vagina: ‘her natural Christmas box.’). Given the physiology involved the image must certainly be even older, and while such language was rarely set down in print, we do have a ballad of 1650 explaining that ‘I am now stiff-standing / And Cupid with his dart hath me at his commanding.’ A century later an unmodified stiff did the job, with such later developments as stiffer, stiffy, the stiff lock (which rhymes on cock and means an erection on awakening), the stiff-stander or bit of stiff, and couple of phrases for becoming erect; crack a stiffie and sport a stiff.
Given slang’s propensity to annex the coarse and vulgar in our lives and offer a range of words and phrases to fit, it’s surprising that the link of hard to erection doesn’t seem to have come on stream till the mid-19th century. Indeed, hard itself is first recorded in 1890 (a hard bit is roughly contemporary), while hard-on, still the most widely used term today, is recorded thirty years earlier, with an example from a doggerel verse ‘A Roué’s Apology’: If I have said or done too much, / I humbly beg your pardon; / The magic of your thrilling touch / Has given me a hard-on.’ And a few lines later the subject of his lusts responds delightedly, ‘Bless me, you've a hard-on [...] Old Reuben’s head is bobbing high up to your vest.’ Hard remains a candidate but hard-on rules the linguistic roost. As well as an erection it can mean passionate, lustful feelings, an obsession – usually a hostile one – and thus aggressive feelings towards someone; and a bad temper, irrespective of its possessor’s gender. It can also be used as term of address, generally a sarcastic one and aimed at deflating someone’s high self-esteem; it can mean a despicable individual, a tough, aggressive person and in extended senses a a difficult task. To get a hard-on obviously began life as meaning to have an erection but it has been succeeded by meaning to draw a pistol or to desire someone, which usually takes the word for, as does the ‘opposite’ definition: to dislike someone intensely. A hard-up can also be an erection, which is therefore on the hard, while to give (a bit) of hard for a (bit of) soft is to have intercourse, from the male point of review; the woman’s experience is to give soft for hard.
With our stonker safely pitching a tent in our shorts so solid that a cat couldn’t scratch it, it’s time to look at some alternative descriptions. The bar, presumably of steel, is an erection and to have a bar on or to bar up to is become erect. Steel also underpins such terms as Bethlehem steel, from the great Pennsylvania steelworks, and Britannia metal, in standard English use an alloy of tin and regulus of antimony, resembling silver in appearance: as such it was less than dependable and the slang term has been used to describe anything fake. However those who associate it with the penis prefer to concentrate on the metal bit. Steel can mean a knife or gun – both themes that lie behind so many penis synonyms, and the pink steel is the erection. While the rocks are usually associated with the testicles, when you get rocks or someone gives you rocks, then John Thomas is duly springing to attention. After that, you do what you can: get your rocks off, pop, shoot or blow your rocks all imply ejaculation; to give someone big rocks to hold, on the other hand, is for a woman to make a date with a man when she has no intention of keeping it, and thus to trick a suitor in any way. The diamond, a form of rock, is yet another variation on hardness: diamonds are the testicles and the erect penis is the diamond cutter.
The penis is the bone, and a boner or bone-ache is an erection. To bounce one’s boner is to masturbate and a mad boner is a sex addict. And before moving on, let us take a brief diversion through the sexual boneyard: bone-eater, bone-gobbler, bone-hog, bone-stroker, and bone queen are all devotees of oral sex, the last alone being solely gay, as is the bone smuggler, in whose life the bone is contraband and its ‘hiding place’ the anus – he is often a transvestite. The bone phone is the penis while a bone-in-a-valley is a very thin individual. To give someone a bone, ride the bone, to bone down, and throw the bone to all mean to have sexual intercourse.3 To bury the bone does too, and when it is extended to bury one’s bone in the back garden or in the back yard, the intercourse turns anal. To bite the bone means to fellate (as does smoke or gnaw someone’s bone), but it also mean to be a loathesome, repellent person. Finally to knuckle the bone is to masturbate.
Given the identification of the penis with so many forms of gun, club, knife, bludgeon and much similar, it must be assumed that virtually any of those terms can, with such verbs as get or have, imply its erection, for instance to get a rod on. There are some, however, where the erection seems to pre-empt the penis, typically wood, which after all is rooted in solidity. To get (good) wood is to have a strong erection, to give or slip someone wood, is to have sexual intercourse as is put the wood to, to buff the wood is to masturbate. To catch wood is to get an erection and thus figuratively to become extremely excited; to give someone wood is to make them erect and to sport one’s wood is to wave the thing around. Morning wood is the erection that often, thanks to a desire to pee, accompanies one’s waking. Synonyms include morning pride (or pride of the morning) and pee- or piss- hard. Morning glory can also mean intercourse before getting up, as well as a junkie’s first injection of the day. Wood leads to woodie, which can also mean non-sexual excitement, and to juice one’s woody is to masturbate; a woodie is another thing one can sport, though one wonders as to the cause of so much exhibitionism. Woodrow, surely not memorializing the somewhat puritan US president Wilson, is just another play on wood and is usually found as slip (her) the woodrow. The wooden spoon in fact predates all these by some thirty years, but one must assume that it is the shape, as much than the rigidity, that produces the image. The broom-handle and clothes-prop are also made of wood, and also serve as erectile synonyms, as do the spike, the prong(-on) ,the jackhammer, panhandle and jackhandle, scope, stalk, bonk(-on), mast or flag, mountain, rajah, roger, the horse’s handbrake and the anteater, which refers specifically to roundheads rather than cavaliers. A final parade of less than deadly weapons gives pocket rocket, guided missile, truncheon, fixed bayonet and ten-hut! (i.e. stand to attention!).
As one might expect, rhyming slang has its part to play: For the most part these refer to horn, sexual excitement, and for which see under H. Such rhymes include Marquis of Lorne, mountains of Mourne, frog-spawn, popcorn and Sunday morn. In addition are the colleen bawn, an anglicized version of Irish cailín bán, the white or fair woman; Colleen Bawn was the heroine of the hit opera The Lily of Killarney first produced in February 1862. Horn also offers September morn, a term that appears to pay homage to an early 20th century scandal: ‘September Morn’ was the title of a painting by Paul Chabas of a young woman bathing nude, which was first exhibited at the 1912 Salon in Paris. Censors attempted to ban a reproduction of the picture from public exhibition in the US, a farcical effort, which led to the sale of more than 7 million reproductions – appearing on dolls, statues, umbrella handles, tattoos and many other places – and the assurance that Chabas need never work again. A full-blown stallone, paying homage to the self-image of the fading Hollywood hardman Sylvester Stallone (b.1946) rhymes with bone, and Yasser is an abbreviation of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, which rhymes with Australian crack a fat, to get a hard-on.
On the whole an erect penis is an erect penis wherever you find it, but there are a couple of ‘geographical’ links. One is the English sentry (presumably getting set up for a bit English guidance (B&D) or sex via the English method or non-penetrative rubbing between the closed thighs (known across the Atlantic, in honour one assumes of various extra-curricular practices at one of the Ivy League’s greatest universities, the Princeton rub).
And then we have the Irish, a group who, with the greatest respect, score less than elevated marks when it comes to the table of slang’s national sexual stereotypes: the Irish inch, for instance, is not a size of penis of which one might boast, nor is the Irish disease, which refers to the state of posssessing so diminutive a member. However, the miniature mickey must have some value, since the Irish or Paddy’s toothache are defined as an erection, as is the Irish toothpick (though there’s another cruel hint at something wanting). For herself to give a hot poultice for the Irish toothache is to have sexual intercourse. Other Irishisms include the Irish dip, sexual intercourse, as is Irish whist, an arse-about version of cards – stereotypical no doubt of the much-maligned Emerald Isle – where quite against usual practice the jack, i.e, the penis takes the ace, i.e. the vagina. The Irish fortune, the vagina (presumably in the context of prostitution), an Irish promotion or Irish wedding, masturbation, an Irish virgin, one who is a virgin and is likely to remain one and the Irish way heterosexual anal intercourse, seen as an acceptable form of contraception for Catholics otherwise forbiddden by an infallible pontiff to use artificial means. And to maintain the negative feel, the Irish horse and the Irish rise mean penises that will neither ‘run’ nor ‘stand up’.
Impotence. Oh the horror of it all, and oh, how slang revels in man’s inevitable fall. It’s a condition generally asssociated with the old, though stage fright – sexual nerves – can afflict anyone, young as well as aged. So let us first of all consider the flaccid penis, among the the earliest slang descriptions of which is predictably synonymous with the impotent old codger who owns it; the flapper. The flap-doodle, doodle-flap and floater are close, albeit later cousins. Just as old, maybe older, is the chitterling, seen on your local butcher’s slab as the small intestines of animals, especially pigs. The penile version has far less to offer: addressing one hapless ‘Tom Farthing’ a ballad of 1675 sneers: ‘Rivel’d up like Chitterlin, Thou’rt sometimes out and, sometimes in / And all thou dost’s not worth a pin.’ And even in 1686, when the assumption is that the act requires a little solidity, one cannot be too sure when the earl of Dorset writes in ‘A Faithful Catalogue of our most Eminent Ninnies’ how one unfortunate and possibly impotent fellow ‘by the help of an assisting thumb / Squeezes his chitterling into her bum.’ Three centuries later he would have had some help from the fluffer, that essential figure on any porno set, ready to urge an erection on the least willing of parts, or indeed the stunt cock, not some form of strap-on, but a person, capable of erectile magnificence on demand.
The penis may not be so able anymore, but it may not yet be a total write off. The semi-erection can be just that, a semi, a dobber, half a mongrel, a lazy lob, huby, or for Australians who appreciate that the name is that of a town half-way between Melbourne and Ballarat a Bacchus Marsh. But enough procrastination. Back to our sorry catalogue. Among other weedy specimens are dead meat, the hanging johnny, the lobcock (alhough at least this one is large), the dropping member and the porridge bird (a matter of consistency, one assumes, though maybe it’s something to do with the semen, to stir the porridge, after all, is to have sexual intercourse with a woman immediately after she has had sex with another man, especially used of the final man in a gang rape. To take a quick tour around the breakfast buffet, porridge also features as the blue-veined porridge gun, the penis, a member that can equally well appear as the blue-veined custard chucker, havana, junket pump, piccolo, root-on, yoghurt-gun, steak, or trumpet – all of which presume an erection. All those blue veins suggest a neat a link to Roquefort or Stilton, and thus to cheese and thence smegma and beyond, but the blue vein is probably no more than that which nature has provided the virile flesh. Nor, anyway, is it always that virile.
The names of those who have neither lead in their pencil nor ink in their pen are rarely compassionate. Dry-balls, a broken arrow (and his penis is one too), a bungler, who is sexually inadequate if not actually impotent, a dead pecker (perhaps playing deliberately on wood-pecker), a capon (a ‘castrated cock’), an apple-john (shrivelled and old), a flapper, a flat tyre, a softy, a stuffed eel-skin, a freak. He’s past it, yitten, topher, and plays as much part in sex as the cocky on the biscuit tin – Australia’s old tins of Arnott’s biscuits had a picture of a cockatoo, which was thus ‘on’ the tin but not ‘in’ it. To fumble is to indulge in sexual foreplay, and that’s the very best the fumbler can manage once he’s free of (i.e., has nothing to do with) fumbler’s hall, the vagina, although fumbler’s hall can also represent a metaphorical place where impotent men might be confined as punishment for their failings and in this case to be ‘free of’ it is to go there as often as he wants. The real problem would be to leave. He’s a bobtail (a horse or dog with its ‘tail’ cut short) and a dominie do-little (lit. a useless schoolmaster) and neither his dead rabbit nor his sleeping beauty can do anything but shoot blanks. And like the political mugwump, who withdraws his support from any group or organization, he has withdrawn his support from sex – or rather it has given up on him.4
This Monkey:
Peter and Iona, the great collectors of ‘The lore and language of schoolchildren’ with 264 citations in GDoS.
For some reason I omitted bone tout court. (However it crops up in many contexts throughout the book). Most uses are found since the 1980s, but there is an outlier from our ever-dependable potty-mouth Lord Rochester, offering, in 1680, ‘A health to Kate! [...] But the Devil take Hyde, / And the bishop beside / Who made her bone his bone.’ (I have tried, but I cannot escape that meaning).
Viagra was a decade old in 2008 but slang had overlooked it. Nor have things much improved. Such uninspiring terms as ‘vitamin V’, ‘the blue pill’, ‘blue bomber’ or ‘blue diamond’ are offered but are barely slang. The best may be slideandfill, playing with Viagra’s ‘proper’ name, Sildenafil. My beloved lexis should, nonetheless, hang its head in admitting that rhyming slang, surely a natural home, has completely passed it by. The Urban Dictionary (here) offers various combinations but whether any of them are used IRL is a whole other story.