Masterpieces

The Slang of P.G. Wodehouse

[Around 1982, writing my very first slang dictionary, the relatively tiny Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, the entirety of which could fit, with room to swing multiple cats (the nine- not one-tailed version) within my current letter ‘S’, I read a good chunk of the works of P.G. Wodehouse. As I did with all sources I noted the fact by inserting his surname next to the relevant headwords, but this was unscientific and should not be confused with serious research let alone full-on citation. Nonetheless, when I started GDoS I inserted the pertinent titles in the Bibliography. And promptly forgot about them. Thanks to the then embryonic poetry maven Jeremy Noel-Tod (someflowerssoon.substack.com), a good proportion of the titles were eventually read and eviscerated for GDoS (he was also responsible for gutting Joyce’s Ulysses; respect! is the least of it) But many were not, and many had never even been pulled from their shelf. Thus, this last few days, dragging myself away from explorations of bro-speak, N.Z. womens’ prisons and Covent Garden working girls c. 1780, I have returned to the list. Starting with the school stories (British public schools that is, and modelled on Wodehouse’s own alma mater, Dulwich) and if nothing else I hope to cover (some of) my omissions from that forty-years gone scraping of the argotic surface. Meanwhile, around 2012, I added, shamefaced and belatedly, Wodehouse’s name to my series of ‘Heroes of Slang’. Here the piece is again, somewhat expanded and, I hope, improved.]

The Master

This is the thirteenth Hero of Slang. I find it almost inconceivable that Wodehouse has taken so long to appear. Maybe it’s guilt: I had a collection once, then sold it at auction (the pleasure of watching two dealers battle it out for Ukridge, 1st in d.w., was vast, and reasonably remunerative).  The proceeds went to found a new collection – of slang dictionaries – but in a better world I would have kept the Master too.

Some may query the ‘Master’¹. Consciously or otherwise Wodehouse blotted the auctorial copybook badly when he fell into the hands of the German invaders of France during World War II, agreed to make some ill-considered ‘comical’ broadcasts to the his US fans; Britain did not laugh and one cannot overlook his alleged collaboration. My own verdict is foolish and not fiendish, but I am also of the school that puts the artist to one side and the art to another. Otherwise the strictures upon one’s reading would resemble those ostentatiously woken individuals who scan the supermarket shelves and prefer starvation, since nothing on sale is sufficiently pure in ideological heart. The reality was that for a while in the UK he was what modernity terms ‘cancelled’ and chose, post-war, to live in the States. But the backstory is surely that like a rock superstar Wodehouse found large fame and larger fortune at a small age and thereafter disembarked  from the world as most of his fellow-creatures experienced it.² This too was not something for which he would be forgiven and his foolishness offered meat and drink to Britain’s smug and self-righteous. It was not ill luck that postponed the knighthood that so many inferiors achieved so much sooner, and meant that he had to be near his deathbed before the establishment finally, and for some still reluctantly annulled its verdict.

For the reader Wodehouse remains best-known for his characters – Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Aunts Dahlia and Agatha, Ukridge, Lord Emsworth, Mr Mulliner, The Oldest Member  – and his intricate plotting, but the linguophile can bask with equal enthusiasm in his other contribution: to slang. In his hundred-plus books he tosses in British slang (blithering, like billy-o, priceless), American slang (bimbo, simoleons, yegg); fossilized slang from the depths of his Edwardian childhood and youth (oojah-cum-spiff, rannygazoo, soup-and-fish) and both criminal and common slang galore. The school stories share some of the vocabulary of Kipling’s Stalky & Co., but if Mike and in time Psmith disappear, the schoolboy words still crop up in what passes for Bertie’s adult life.

Some terms he seems to have cornered – certainly no-one else seems to use them in quite his way – if not actually coined: trickle and biff, both meaning to go somewhere (though he uses biff in the ‘hit’ sense too), gumboil (an obnoxious individual), browsing and sluicing (eating and drinking), loony-doctor (a mental health professional) or stymie, from his beloved golf and meaning a frustrating situation. Even the dramatis personae chip in, notably the Eggs, Beans and Crumpets (all synonymous with ‘chaps’) of the Drones Club. Cyril ‘Barmy’ (i.e. crazy) Fotheringay-Phipps (pronounced ‘Fungee Fipps’), Freddie Widgeon (widgeon meaning a sucker since the 17^th century), George ‘Boko’ (i.e. ‘nose’) Fittleworth, and the club’s richest member, Alexander ‘Oofy’ Prosser, whose name combines two ripe specimens of defunct Edwardiana: oofy, rich (from German/Yiddish. auf tische and referring to money lying ‘on the table’), and prosser, an idle sponger (though did Wodehouse know its earlier meaning: ‘pimp’? the etymology is unknown but might come from prose, to spout on). This in turn gave the once celebrated Prossers’ Avenue in London’s Gaiety Theatre, the theatre bar where the more raffish elements of society were wont to promenade and touch their wealthier acquaintance.

Like the books themselves – most set in some ’twixt-the-Wars Neverland – Wodehouse’s slang has no hard-and-fast chronology. The 1890s stuff appears without jarring in a 1970 novel. The hard-boiled Americanisms pop up amid the cucumber sandwiches on some country-house terrace. Browsing and sluicing  ranny-gazoo and ooh-jah-cum-spiff are blithely intermingled with bump off, chucker-out and four-flusher and such careless (happy not lazy) cross-fertilization merely ups the humorous ante.

For while few writers have been more loving of slang, and so wondrously productive in their use of it none, or at least none of Wodehouse’s calibre, have been so unworried by the need to confine their language by date. If today’s linguistic pinailleurs go rootling through such as Downton Abbey or Bridgerton in search of anachronisms they have never targeted Bertie and his pals. Jeeves, if he uses it and I don’t think he does other perhaps than between scare quotes - another way, perhaps, of emphasising the counterpoint between himself and Bertie - would doubtless be as pitch-perfect in slang as in all else. That said, Bertie’s slang must jar with Jeeves as would an ill-chosen hat or tie, vulgarity usually being the leitmotif of Bertie’s (lack of) taste, but in this case he lets it go.

As regards slang, Wodehouse too seems to have escaped scot free.³ Do we, in any case, pay heed to complaints? Not me, I must admit. Slang, especially slang of a century and more ago, is very likely held in the mouth for some time before it hits the page. So a few years here or there doesn’t really matter and as I must have made clear before now: the recording of a ‘first use’ is wholly mutable and subject to the endless revisions that follow research (itself never so potentially productive of such ever-older ‘first’ uses as since the Internet came to town).

A further thought: slang is and indeed has been for many centuries, used to confer authenticity. Never more so than in the various shades of crime writing. Whether it be the jargon of the police department or the hard-boiled lexis of pulp fiction, authors have perused these in-house vocabularies to show that they knew of what they wrote and their creations spoke. Many almost certainly retreated to the dictionary to elicit their knowing terms. The best ones insert it seamlessly. Dickens, for instance, very likely read (e.g. for Oliver Twist [1838] where Fagin, Sykes, the Dodger and other flash coves use some 145 apposite bits of cant) a contemporary slang dictionary, which would have most likely been the sports journo Pierce Egan’s revised version of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (first edition 1785, revised and expanded by Egan in 1823). He might also have enjoyed the option of newer material found in John Camden Hotten’s work of 1859 and beyond. So too did his one-time rival, even mentor William Harrison Ainsworth (who cheerfully announced the fact), but we only need to sample a few pages of each to see who knew best how to handle the material.

I am far from comprehensive when it comes to citing the canon, but with 2540 slang terms and counting, Wodehouse undoubtedly knew and exploited his counter-language. Yet does ‘his’ slang actually work to define its users? I think not. (Perhaps, in any case, ‘authenticity’ is not the word for which we search. After all, Orwell, in his 1946 defence of Wodehouse, noted that his one undeniable sin was portraying the British arisocracy ‘as much nicer people than they are’.) These are not documentaries. Perhaps there is an element of autobiography in his earliest work, the school stories written when his own education was not that long finished and he was celebrating a world that he had unashamedly loved, but beyond that? It is, I suggest, yet another example of Wodehouse having fun. Yes, Jeeves offers impeccably standard English to contrast with Bertie’s impressively slangy lexis but Wodehouse has other ways of defining their characters. The same goes for Psmith, Ukridge or Gussie Fink-Nottle; nor are Bobbie Wickham or Stiffy Byng given an extra dimension to their inextinguishable espièglerie (while Madeline Bassett, away with the fairies, remained a slang-free zone). Language matters, but it is not all. In any case Wodehouse, in permitting his aristocratic cast so inventive a slang vocabulary, is hardly bending to slang’s reality. There really is very little upper-class slang, that language of the terraces rather than the terrace.

That Wodehouse is so gloriously careless of chronology and indeed geography when it comes to the slang he loves to insert and we love to meet, means however much he offers, it cannot be used in that ‘authorizing’ way. Is it presumption to suggest that it is there in such profusion simply because he loves the sound of this unbridled lexicon of wild and wonderful synonymity.⁴

We can still assess the themes he favours. It is hard to single out one aspect of Wodehouse’s slang, but one is common to all but his least appetising characters: drink and its effects, those staples of the slang lexicon for half a millenium. As he put it in The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) ‘It was my uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought’ and Uncle George is no Jimmy Woodser, as Australia terms its solitary boozers. Alcohol fuels all sorts of outrageous escapades; Jeeves’ famed morning-after concoctions only exist in the context of the night before. Thus, and this is not an exhaustive list (see GDoS for 98 hits to date), we find these synonyms for ‘drunk’: above par, blighted, boiled, breezy,  cheerio, cock-eyed,  dippy, dizzy, fogged, foggy, fried,  gay,  goofy, groggy, jugged, lathered, lit up like a Christmas tree, loopy, mouldy, non compos, oiled (up), pickled,  pie-eyed, polluted, potty, rattled, rocky, rotten, rum, rummy, sloppy, snootered, soppy, sozzled, steamed up, stiff, stuffed,  submerged, tight (as an owl), warm, well-oiled, whiffled, woozled and woozy. There are none for ‘sober’ but that is as much down to slang’s priorities as the author’s and the few terms that are thus defined in GDoS refer to character and not consumption.

If drink is a major player in slang, then, crime aside, one thing will always leave it reeling: sex and the giblets with which it is performed. If there is an absence from Wodehouse’s slang it is the same absence that yawns – though who would cavil – within the books: there is no sex. Terry Pratchett, who some advocate as modernity’s Wodehouse, has nearly done the same trick: there is inference in Pratchett but certainly no intercourse though there is much Carry On-level earthiness. Wodehouse, his work a good deal older and with a style and fictional world established in a far less overtly sexualised society, lets no-one off the leash. To steal from Richard Usborne’s Wodehouse at Work (1961), the only thing a Wodehouse girl would be doing in a Wodehouse chap’s bedroom would be making him an apple-pie bed. There are girls a-plenty but most, unlike the fellows, are bright or failing that determined and they rarely suffer slang’s labelling. We have chickadee, dame, dish, donah and popsie. And someone, and do we not draw in the breath, is well-stacked.⁵ Bertie would have a simile for the appearance of what seems so egregious a term. But no matter. By slang’s standards we’re talking hearts and flowers.

Oof!

1. A title also accorded to Henry James, though I have yet to feel any need to subject his work to the counter-linguistic scalpel.

2. Through the 1920s and 1930s he was making in excess of £100,000 per year. A sum that now boasts, taking the mid-point of 1930, a purchasing power of over £8 million. The turnover might have flagged, but by 2000, 25 years posthumous, he had sold some 100 million books in more than 20 languages.

3. No pun intended here, but my sincere apologies to the peerless Ben Schott (https://www.benschott.com/wodehouse), whose two tales of Jeeves and Bertie transcend mere pastiche and might have been penned by PGW himself. I know they are here somewhere, but somewhere is still unsorted. I will bet (and his website offers a couple of short pieces that suggest I am right) that his slang selection is as wide-ranging and uncaged as any original.

4. I would suggest another notable impulsion: Wodehouse’s growing importance in and involvement with America, specifically New York and its showbiz. By the time he started his regular visiting, then writing for the slick magazines (getting up to $10,000 a pop) and setting books in the States, not to mention standing high in the list of Broadway lyricists, US slang, driven by popular culture, was well established as the great fount of the anglophone non-standard vocabulary. Slang, he would have noticed, played a major part in the work of many best-selling humourists. Was he not just that too. The effect, of course, being PGW, was that the slang of one country inevitably intermixed with that of the other. This, presumably, didn’t bother its literary employer; it should not trouble us.

5. ‘His companion was a well-stacked young featherweight, who could be none other than the Phyllis Mills’ Jeeves in the Offing (1960). I sense that he picked it up in America.