Masterpieces: A Postscript

Niche-issimo!

The whole thing about Wodehouse’s flitting from side to side of the Ditch no doubt showed his acuity as regarded selling his work, whether in short story or book form. As for the musicals, well, you went to Broadway and if you’re Wodehouse and could make words sing and dance, you palled up with the likes of Jerome Kern, the Gershwin Brothers and similar heavy hitters on the Great White Way, and none of them were about to set up shop in Denmark Street, London WC2. His longest-term collaborator, Guy Bolton, was indeed another Brit, but he too worked where the work (and the dosh) most usually was.

Hunky and indeed dory and what we can do but admire his flexibility. That annual £100K had to come from somewhere. But, and this is what I mean by the niche’s niche, have sympathy for the poor slang lexicographer. The Master, as I noted, is one of the great slang-whangers and is to be eviscerated accordingly by those (me) in the pursuit of citations of that lexis.

Fine. You open at page one and keep on reading and slicing free the tastier morsels till you hit whatever happens to be the end. Then pick up the next. For instance, I started today with Wodehouse’s Young Men in Spats, a collection of short stories thrown together in hard covers and published in the UK and US in 1936. I have so far read 24 of its 300 pages and found 27 entries, an excellent hit-rate (not forgetting another bunch that I do not need, having found them elsewhere for the 1930s - I look for one per major anglophone country per decade, and signal the geography by small flags - often in PGW himself).

‘One per country…’ The rub as ’twere, the shit-bespattered fan.

So we have these ingredients: the author is English (I sidestep British quite consciously; his lineage was rural aristocratic and far from any Celtic fringe). The world he creates and which will bring him his and his readers their greatest rewards is set in a version, however fantastical, of England. His starring characters are English too, and not just English but very often nobs and toffs.

But…

In time he would move, post World War II, to Long Island. But long before that he travelled to the States, specifically New York, lived and worked there. Is it surprising that a man so omnivorous of all sorts of language, with his hat tipped firmly towards slang, would start to include American neologisms in his texts. Sometimes these are voiced by Americans, often some variety of lowlife - criminals, police - but far from only them. The story I am reading now, ‘Fate’, stars one of the title’s spat-girt young men: Freddie Widgeon, who as I have noted, is surnamed with a slang synonym for fuckwit. But like many such (e.g. his pal Bertie Wooster), Freddie is rich, personable, preux as Wodehouse has it and means ‘valiant’, and although the story is told by a fellow (English) member of the Drones, when we find him he is neither in his London club nor poodle-faking with dowagers in some sun-kissed country mansion. Instead he is in New York City.

So here we are, and I so far have found 27 items of slang to cite. From all over (obsessed with) to tool (to drive, to run off). Among them baloney (a sausage but here an idiot), palooka (another one), cluck (a third), hot dog! (an expression of excitement), hot potato (an admirable person), pie-faced (how the idiot looks) and sugar daddy (who, so often his fate, is caught in a love nest). All these, on the basis of earlier examples and no sign of UK use, are US-made. He also offers gargoyle (an unattractive person), haul up one’s slacks (to opine vigorously), and upholstery (clothing). They appear to be his coinages. They may, though I don’t know and have yet to research, be something he found in America too.

My question is how and indeed whether to cite these Americanisms under Wodehouse’s name. He, of course, is unassailably English, part of his US popularity was based on just that, so the go-to mark is a small union flag. But what if the character he has created and whose speech uses the word(s) is equally American? Can I usefully label the cited use ‘UK’, for instance for palooka or baloney (above), if it is used placed between the lips of an American girl and in a story at that moment taking place on Manhattan in a 69th Street walk-up. Yet, again, this is the fruit of Wodehouse’s creativity. These people are not ‘real’ septics, they have no agency beyond what the fiction grants. But on another hand… I find myself going round and round and in truth, no solution leaves me wholly happy. Cowardly as ever, I hope that I shall find a more concrete proof of UK adoption, i.e. an English author using the term, but placing his plot in London and with nary a sherman in sight.

Let me stop there. These are real questions and Wodehouse, with his real and conjured wandering, poses them continually. I am trying, remember, to show the way slang terms evolve, how they start in country A and, in some cases, move on to countries B, C and even D. This is part of what lexicography terms ‘historical principles’ (though that is more date-tied than geographic) and that is how GDoS is meant to work. Maybe, and I know I have decried this, even the Master is using his new-found transatlantic slang to spread authenticity with a layer of sugar daddies and palookas. There is another word too: showing off. Few of his inter-war readers would have had the means to visit New York. Or, and this would gain him unargued citation, is he demonstrating the extent to which this American slang, none coined more than 20 years earlier, has crossed the ocean to be appropriated by one of the most English of writers?

All suggestions gratefully received. If the great Peter Gilliver of the OED reads this, please note that while waving, I am also fending off the possibility of drowning. And if any reader didn’t know what niche might mean, I trust they will now.