I have written a slang thesaurus but I had no need to look for many of Roget’s original categories. More Roger, he of Viz magazine’s Profanisaurus. Slang’s preoccupations are all concrete. No abstracts. Caring, sharing, selflessness and compassion: sweet fuck all. Their omission is not an oversight. Slang is not interested. If slang professes a philosophy then it has to be deduced from what it chooses to leave out. If it can boast a single abstract concept, it is doubt, with which it mocks and undermines every vestige of true belief.
I have written or spoken variations on this theme as long as I have been working in the field. I have, pretty much, believed it. When you are overwhelmed by the lengthy synonymies - for sex, drugs, and the wide-spectrum self-indulgences, whether positive or negative, that I conveniently characterise as ‘rock n roll’ - that dominate the counter-language, this is perhaps excusable.1
Yet I do wonder. Fortunately, thanks to the digital form of GDoS, I can try for an answer. Placing other current preoccupations - Dr Simes’ MS of the lexis of (gay) sex and sexuality, the embryonic efforts of P.G. Wodehouse c. 1900, and who could forget the demands of French bureaucracy - to one side, I concocted a small search:
The search in all cases looked for ‘meaning’, i.e. what I tag as ‘def[inition]’. The words that comprise the terms’ appearance here depending quite completely on what I had written down when attempting to offer the most pertinent explanation. The point is to be neutral but accurate.2 One does not step forward, let alone wave.3
If my small list misses a few, then such is my defining. I’m just not used to associating ‘my’ words and phrases with such emotionally upbeat meanings. If this brings a frustrating sense of absence, so be it. It is, after all, my point.
Let us start at care: I find fifty-six verb uses, but such is a snare and a delusion (as I would assume from slang). The problem with care is that its best friend is not, and thus it emerges in thirty-five GDoS uses, and alongside a good many others (usually not give a…) which play some variation on the basic cry of ‘fuck you!’ As for care as a noun and allied caring, like love, it’s nul points for Anglophonia and frankly, what else did we expect.
Compassion is about as unimpressive. Along with compasionate it has three brief walk-ons and my opera-glass shows that two of them are prefaced by ‘lacking in’ and the third references its use by confidence tricksters, usually working the street, who claiming injury and often displaying some gruesome wholly counterfeit wound (once known as a scaldrum, ir presumably looked like a nasty burn or a jigger, which otherwise meant a thingumijig) as proof to the ‘compassionate’ sucker.
On to share. Well share has its possibilities…my search offers eighty-three hits. (Though sharing comes up but once, as in chum, to share a cell in prison). As for the rest, the kind of sharing I was hoping for, an empathetic division of emotional burdens, well, you’ve been been doing this for forty-plus years, Mr S, and if you haven’t learned… Slang’s sharing is division of the spoils, an end, a corner, a piece (of the action), a whack. The oof or ooftish is hopefully ‘on the table’ (thus its origin in Yiddish auf tisch which means exactly that) and we all want our cut.
Let us forget kind. Of course you get the hits, but other than a marijuana synonym, the uses all indicate ‘variety’ or ‘type’. Kindness manages half a dozen. There is t.l.c. which means tender loving care and as such must qualify. As does break which primarily means a piece of luck, bad or good and the latter, meaning kindness and fair treatment, is what we’re after. As for charity fuck and the charity case who receives it, the calculus is up to the beholder. Like stereotyped charity, the fuck is seemingly ‘cold’, and the citations have their thumbs down. Cochum, from Yiddish kochum, wisdom, takes us back to suckerdom. It should be positive, but when it moves from signifying sense and knowledge to denoting kindness, the latter is only flourished as a means to a venal end. As ever, the confidence trickster knows the efficacy of a kindly word. Soft soap and the verb to soap up which also implies soothing chat (but ultimately and duplicitously is out to ingratiate) are much the same.
Our best bet here is kindly. It emerges in the defintions of old bean, ‘a kindly old chap’, cut bene whids, to speak kindly (bene) words, straight, among whose many definitions is ‘kindly’, sweet Willie, a kind man but wait, only when he’s angling to persuade a naive girl to attach herself to his ‘string’ of prostitutes, titivate, to treat kindly but only in M. Manchon’s 1920 French-English dictionary of British slang which makes one murmur ‘mishearing’, have a toby on, to feel kindly or friendly (from Mr Punch’s dog Toby, who was traditionally ‘real’ and thus spared the grand guignol), and finally toff, where what most might feel an over-generous class analysis offers the phrase you’re a toff, you’re very kind, thank you very much.4
So what else do we have. Sympathy and sympathetic, both of which find an origin in ‘feeling with’ in Greek.
Shall we start with sympathy? Good stuff first. Connie Eble’s sadly defunct lists of US campus slang have hullo! as an expression of agreement and sympathy in 1998. The soft spot is a feeling of kindness and sympathy but that is definition one and its successor means weakness. Stiff luck is literally bad luck but used as an exclamation or a comment implies unfairness and the sympathy it elicits. Then, slightly off-topic, we have the US hobo’s Vermont charity, sympathy but nothing else, e.g. food or money. Frustratingly this seems to have eluded DARE, and we must asume some kind of parsimony on behalf of the state authorities. Such empty promsies include what UK tramps termed the downy earwig, a sympathetic (but no more) clergyman, a fluffy, a girl who will listen yo your sob-story, but that said, the available citations are far from keen and the fluffy is exactly the soulmate you want to avoid. Finally doppess, a word that may link to Yiddish tipesh, a fool, but is absent from the Yiddish dictionaries, and seems to have evolved in New York City.
Sympathy is a big thing in slang. But not as a headword, with or without a sympathetic explanation of its own. It lives only among the definitions and its prevailing role is to be a signpost to generosity, understood or otherwise. Sometimes you give because you feel sympathetic, sometimes manipulating that same sympathetic (foolish?) heart is just the first step to serious depredation.
The beggar, whatever their speciality, was a maunder and the verb meant to beg (the pair bag 337 synonyns); thus maunder on the fly, to beg in the streets; maundering, begging, prone to begging; maundering tools, items used to enhance one’s begging image and thus gain more sympathy and alms.
Trickery was open to all, but often had at least a form of professionalism.5 There was the amuser, who of course didn’t but who threw dust (sometimes snuff or pepper) in a victim’s eyes and then ran off; a companion then appeared and, while ostensibly offering sympathy, picked the victim’s pockets. There was Mother Piteous, who did no more than state that since she deserved your sympathy she hoped that you’d believe her. Her schtick might well have been improved by a chorus of King’s motts who were children used by beggars to elicit sympathy and thus money; such children are borrowed from their actual parents. Still female, the mush-worker was a woman, often a prostitute who obtains money from men by playing on their sympathy, giving them a ‘sob story’. (She was not to be confused with the mush-faker, who mended brollies, aka mushrooms.) Women also went for the high-heel (game) whereby a female beggar builds up one shoe to appear crippled, thus eliciting the usual sympathy and alms.
This last was variously the sob act (or tear-and-sob act) a pretence of emotion, an appeal to someone’s sympathies; its practitioner a sob-raiser or sob specialist, one who plays on the public’s emotion to elicit sympathy for a cause; the sob-raiser was also as the story that they tell (see cite 1934). Sob stuff is the distressing facts, stories etc, often used to obtain sympathy and ideally money too.
The main gig was about health, or supposed lack of it. The crank cuffin (a ‘sick fellow’) was a tramp who poses as a sufferer from a sympathy-inducing illness. A fake bandager a beggar who poses as a cripple (well-covered by just such dressings) to elicit sympathy. The ghost claimed to be suffering tuberculosis. Throwing a fit always pulled them in: to trail the wing (mimicking birdland) is to seek sympathy, to pull a wingding was to simulate a spasm or mental relapse to draw sympathy from others, the performer of such spurious ‘fits’ was a wing-ding artist. In one specific sense circus was also a fake fit or seizure, performed in the hope of obtaining an injection of narcotics from a sympathetic doctor. A variation on the health theme was the bereavement lurk, its appeal being that announcing the recent death of one’s wife should have been a guaranteed money-spinner (so too might be the dead lurk: robbing the house when the family were at church). Among other hopefully lucrative and pity-based lurks (Hotten’s definition: ‘a sham, swindle, or representation of feigned distress’) was the accident lurk (more fake injury), the shake lurk (a narrowly escaped shipwreck) and the glim lurk (one’s house has burnt down), while the performer of any such trickery was a lurk-man or -merchant.
Sometimes the burden of one’s fanny (seemingly on the pattern of bollocks, rubbish, but in this case playing on fanny: arse), any form of story (probably mendacious) designed to elicit money or sympathy, was pleading unadorned poverty. Playing the ex-soldier was always popular. You sported a campaign coat which had originally been a genuine military coat and then in civilian tailoring a style of coat that resembled one; as worn by a beggar, such a coat was supposed to render him an old soldier, his tattered, battered uniform a lure for passing alms. Rags and the exposed (and filthy) flesh they revealed, underpinned the role of shivering jemmy. The Caribbean brought poor-me-one, a miserable-looking person, desperate for sympathy.
There is also a small, but aggressive subset wherein slang gives its users the means to state: I don’t care! Or maybe ‘Sympathy is not a word in my dictionary’ and I have tried to show that it is not. Phrases include hard cheese!, hard cheddar! and hard fodder!, and with food still aforethought, stiff… and tough bikkies! and tough apples! stiff shit! stiff turps! (perhaps where turps means alcohol?) and stiff cheese!6 Less restrained are tough shit! (or shitski!), tough tits/titties! and suffer in your jocks! an Australian version of eat shit and die!, and let me conclude with perhaps the harshest of such dismissals: my ass bleeds!
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This is a rough taxonomy of slang’s favourite obsessions (the number invariably increase, the topics are much the same):
Crime and Criminals 5012; Drink, Drinks, Drinking and Drunks 4589; Drugs 3976; Money 3342; Women (almost invariably considered negatively or at best sexually) 2968; Fools and Foolish 2403; Men (of various descriptions, not invariably, but often self-aggrandizing) 2183; Sexual Intercourse 1903; Penis (plus Testicles and Foreskin): 1775; Homosexuals/-ity 1512; Vagina 1203; Prostitute/-ion 1185; Policeman / Policing 1034; Masturbate/-ion 945; Die, Death, Dead 831; Beat or Hit 728; Mad 776; Anus or Buttocks 775; Terms of Racial or National abuse: 570 (+ derivations = c. 1000); Defecate/-ion & Urinate/-ion 540; Kill or Murder 521; Oral Sex 430; Anal Sex 368; Promiscuous / Promiscuity 347; Lesbian 280, Unattractive 279; Fat 247; Vomiting 219; VD 65.
My predecessor Eric Partridge, doubtless looking back to Samuel Johnson, found this no hindrance. He said, at times unguardedly, what he found. He would have been over seventy when he wrote his admiring, even lip-smacking entry for mini- (as in skirt and to me at best a colloquialism); the French, who presumably or at least out loud, no longer ‘zank evurn for leetle gurls’ (in Gigi, 1958, lyricist Alan Jay Lerner dated the ‘gurls’ as ‘five, or six, or seven’ ) use the term vieux pervers.
That, if required and the juste mots are on offer, can be achieved with the selection of citations. There are stories to be told but you have to read between the lines.
NB Orwell on Wodehouse who he felt presented ‘the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are.’ Whether this was Orwell the Etonian, and thus cognisant of the ‘real thing’ (though of course he was a scholar) vs Wodehouse of Dulwich, and in public school hierarchy the aspirant, I do not know. ‘The Master’ claimed that he wrote of UK nobs because his American readership would know of nothing else. I have always given the phrase a backdrop of classic Brit tramp (species ‘gentleman of the road’), forehead properly knuckled, into whose grubby palm a (gloved) hand has just pressed a Rhodes scholar (five bob) or better yet a thick ’un (a quid or sov).
In terms of repurposed food, cheese makes a reasonably good showing in slang. But its consistency is more mysterious. Neither cheddar nor Mont d’or have any special claims. So hard cheese? My sense is that what we have is not a comestible but chiz, which in turn comes from chisel, to cheat (itself a pun on ‘take a slice off’), and is defined as ‘something unpleasant, unfair, disappointing’. The chronology doesn’t quite work for chiz, but is quite satisfactory for chisel.
I always liked "sympathy is in the dictionary between shit and syphilis."
I'll be using the term Vermont charity a lot more often...
🙂Holy Shite!
Another 'bob & kneel' gag from Old Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer_