Stories of Slang
Sailors Beware
[My book The Stories of Slang was published in 2017. Something of a counter-linguistic stew, but as flavoursome as I could make it, it toured slang-world and brought home a number of trophies. This chapter dealt with the slang of the sea and of sailors. Their wonderfully named food too.]
Given slang’s hard-wired identification with all things urban, it’s paradoxical, at least at first glance, how much the sea has come to register on its coinages. But there it is, and not just by chance.
The best incubators for slang are nailed down and shut tight. Inward looking and forced together willy-nilly. What John Camden Hotten termed ‘the congregating together of people […] the result of crowding, and excitement, and artificial life.’ The old slang collector-cum-purveyor of S&M porn was thinking cities but they’re not exclusive. An external threat may help. War is the obvious one, ’14-’18 produced a vast increase in the slang vocabulary,1 but there are alternatives. Worlds that are similarly closed and which generate their own languages. Among them is that of the sea, which naturally means ships and they in turn mean sailors. The influence of the sea on slang is thus worth more than just a glance.2
This is not navy slang – properly known (if not that often) as altumal, and possibly from Latin’s altum mare, the deep sea – which is a whole other thing, but the crossover from the watery world to the innately citified one of the counter-language. We must, sadly, sidestep such onboard characterizations as jemmy ducks, who looked after the poultry, jack dusty, the stores assistant (the ‘dust’ being flour) and jack nastyface, the cook’s number two. Gone too must be Jimmy Round, a Frenchman (from je me rends, I surrender, and attributed to the Napoleonic Wars).
There are, for starters, the words that mean sailor. There are 23 jacks in slang which probably makes it the biggest creator of homonyms in the lexis but only one counts here: the one that abbreviates jack tar, which refers to the old habit of smearing your breeches with that sticky, liquid-repellent substance in a primitive effort at waterproofing. (It also comes as jackie, john and jackshite.) The image also gave tarpaulin (plus tar- and tarry-breeks or tarry-jacket), which implied a man who had quite literally got his hands dirty learning the job and hadn’t merely got there through connections.
Breeks began as white and his jacket as blue and thus the bluejacket; he roamed the sea, which gave lagger and lag-cull (both from lag, water) and was thus piscine: the scaly fish (who was tough), the otter and the sea-crab (which may have reflected a well-known ballad featuring the crab, a chamberpot, and the suggestion that one had best look within before squatting). He went shoeless which gave flatfoot, obsessively washed down the decks, thus swab and swab-jockey, and allegedly spat to excess, thus gob (from gob, a clot of slimy substance). He often fought the French but still borrowed their matelot, though spelled it matlow. As Village People fans will recall, the sailor is a popular gay sex-object and usually twinned with something one might eat. Known as sea-food he was also a blueberry pie, lobster pot, sea pussy and, specifying his penis, a piece of salt water taffy (the UK’s rock).
The sea itself tends to rhyming slang: housmaid’s knee, coffee and tea, River Lea, plus the briny, and the jokily miniaturizingpuddle, pond and ditch. Sailors, meanwhile, opt for oggin (which in terms of sailing, oneflogs). The oggin, as a selection of its many literary appearances makes clear, is large, deep, wet, and while a necessary given for the naval personnel who coined the term, seems to suggest greater duty than pleasure. Safe on land the lubber may extol it, the sailor merely falls in and does not invariably emerge. One thing unites them: ignorance of its origins. The etymology of the word, that is.
One belief is that sailors, universally unable to pronounce ‘ocean’, called it ‘oggin’. This is a calumny and may surely be dismissed. Wilfred Granville, in his 1949 collection of Sea Slang suggests an abbreviation of hogwash, which started off life meaning brewery swill, which was fed to the pigs, and thence bad beer or wine (and indeed tea) and in time, and figuratively, nonsense. The OED, as of 2004, rejects this but a link remains, however tenuous one might feel it. Hogwash can mean drink; one of the slang terms for the sea is the drink. A noggin is a drink (and before that a small drinking vessel). Oxford’s suggestion, therefore, is of a play on noggin, altered to oggin by metanalysis (the same phenomenon that once saw words such as nangry, and nanger, not to mention the Sansrkit nāraṅga which via Arabic naranj and Italian narancia, gives English orange).
Which is where, absent alternative theories, it must be left. All that remains is a song. The tune will be self-evident:
If the skipper fell into the oggin,
If the skipper fell into the sea,
If the skipper fell into the oggin,
He’d get sod-all lifebelt from me.
But enough with water. Let us turn to alcohol. Not especially as drunk by jack ashore, a compound that has illumined all manner of self indulgence ever since its appearance around 1860, but in slang’s cheerful borrowing of seaborne imagery to denote that happy state wherein one is all at sea.
There is the basic: drunk as a sailor, or as a Gosport fiddler, which pays tribute to the Royal Navy base. The wind plays its role: breezy, a few sheets in the wind, a sheet in the wind’s eye, hulled between wind and water, in the wind, under the wind, listing to starboard, shaking cloth in the wind, shot between (or betwixt) wind and water, three sheets before the breeze, three sheets in the wind, three sheets over and three sheets spread. Sheets, by the way, are not as might seem logical sails, but ropes. The term comes from Old English scéat, a corner, and thence the corner of a sail and ultimately the rope that secures that corner. The unsecured sheet, blowing in the wind, weaves in the air like the drunk swaying down a road. Meanwhile hull means to drift with no sails spread.
The terms can be neutral, even optimistic: aboard (of the grog), afloat, all sails set, well under way and under full sail. They can, logically enough, note the pervasive dampness of both liquor and the sea: damp, awash, capsized, decks-awash, drenched, floating, under the tide, half the bay over or over the bay or dam, over the plimsoll (line), that physical line that denotes the limit of safe loading, slewed, soaked, submerged, torpedoed, waterlogged,and wrecked. The popular half seas over maybe suit the list, but there are suggestions that Dutch op-zee zober, ‘foreign strong beer’ is the actual root.
Other nautical origins can be found in such as block and block, castaway, foggy, round the horn, top-shackled, taking in cargo, needing a reef taken in, Lloyd's List (i.e. pissed), steamed up, stoked, bungs up, waving a flag of defiance and the punning tight as a clam's (or crab’s, fish’s or oyster’s) arse. Grog, always a naval staple with its roots in SE grogram, ‘a coarse fabric of silk, of mohair and wool, or of these mixed with silk’ (OED) and the coat of such stuff as worn by Admiral Vernon, known as ‘Old Grog’ from his having ordered the navy’s rum to be diluted with water, gives groggified.
Finally, a bunch of admirals, taken from a mid-17th century lexicon of drinking, The Eighth Liberal Science. Admiral of the blue, a publican or innkeeper (his traditional blue apron); admiral of the red, a heavy drinker (as well as the colour of wine, the term may also refer to the drunkard’s red nose) and admiral of the narrow seas (playing on narrow seas, the British Channel or Irish Sea) a drunkard who vomits over his neighbour at table. In 1796 Francis Grose noted an expanded version: vice-admiral (of the narrow seas) ‘A drunken man that pisses under the table into his companions’ shoes.’
The girls came off the streets of London after the Street Offences Act of 1959 and their disappearance has done nothing for slang coinage. The Ratcliff Highway, London Docklands’ homegrown Sodom and Gomorrah, whose taverns and tarts saw for as many seafarers as ever did the ocean, has long since fallen silent. The ubiquitous ho may be accurate, albeit bereft of a few letters, but it hardly sets the juices flowing. It was not always thus and the sea, given jack’s recreational partialities, played its part. All too aware of her dubious allure he called her a land pirate (usually a highwayman) but that didn’t hold him back. Not for nothing are ships invariably ‘she’.
There are the basic ships: the schooner, the pinnace, the privateer and the land carrack. All these are relatively lightweight in terms of tonnage and punnage too (the larger battleship is invariably old, plain and dismissed as unalluring): light, as in unable to keep her heels on the ground, is an old term for a ‘loose woman’. The tilt-boat, playing with tilt as in falling over, sustains the idea. Then we meet the light frigate, double-punning both on her ‘sailing’ the streets and on the term frig, from Latin fricare, to rub and meaning both to have sex and to jerk off, oneself or a client. The frigate comes in two flavours; the frigate well-rigged, who is neatly, fashionably dressed, and the frigate on fire, a specimen of hot stuff who is suffering some form of STD. Best, though rarely avoided, she can also be a fireship.
Setting aside rhyming slang’s boat and oar, barge, which suggests a certain embonpoint, and scupper, into which one tosses unwanted waste (thus linking to the use of crud, muck, scum and slime for semen), we find hooker, undoubtedly one of prostitution’s leading synonyms and productive of a variety of back-stories. Popular etymology suggests the denizens of Corlear’s Hook, known as The Hook, a red-light area on the New York City waterfront. There is also the city’s use of hooker, a tug that cruised to pick up incoming schooners off Sandy Hook and the sailor’s affectionate nickname, hooker, for any vessel. The link to Corlear’s Hook is sanctified by Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1859), which defines hooker as ‘a resident of The Hook, i.e. a strumpet, a sailor’s trull’. On the other hand the memoirs of the ex-madam Nell Kimball stated: ‘The moniker hooker came about in the Civil War...General Joe Hooker, a handsome figure of a man, was a real quif-hunter, and he spent a lot of time in the houses of the redlight district, so that people began to call the district Hooker’s Division.’ Sounds good? Yes, but the term is thirty years older. In the end, like much slang, the origin is probably a tweak of standard English, in this case hook, to catch, to lure, to entice, but with strong reinforcement from both the New York City location and the sailor’s nickname.
But monetary exchange is not mandatory. Looking back at some of the sea-based novels produced around 1800, focused on what was still an unreformed Navy, the punning on naval jargon reaches near Carry On proportions.
The components of the ship herself, or the old bitch as she is sometimes termed, are a ready source. The cathead, for instance, is officially a protruding spar that keeps the anchor away from the superstructure. There are two: one per side. The bow, we know, is the front of the ship and the stern its antithesis. The Post Captain, or, the Wooden Walls Well Manned, written in 1805 and as such the first of these works, gives us dialogues such as these; ‘Faith, Hurricane, our lady passenger is a fine girl. She has a good pair of cat-heads!’ ‘Yes, sir, she is nice and bluff about the bows.’ (Though her stern goes unremarked.)
Later we also find this: the Captain is speaking to the 1st Lieutenant, about to go below to sleep with his wife (women, ‘legitimate’ or otherwise, being far from invisible onboard in this era): ‘Mr Hurricane...bear a hand and get your anchor a cock-bill. ‘ ‘It already hangs by the stopper. My shank-painter is let go; and I have roused up a good range of cable on deck.’ ‘Then let go the anchor’. How the knowledgeable must have sniggered. Not only the anchor, which phallically dangles, there is the bobstay, ‘a rope which holds the bowsprit to the stem’. Captain Grose (of the militia not the navy), writing 20 years earlier, has noted that the word had been grabbed by slang to denote ‘the frenum of a man’s yard’. Now it is the Captain’s turn for connubial pleasures: ‘Come, Cassandra [...] let us descend and turn in. If I don’t ease my laniard I shall carry away my bob-stay.’
Moving beyond specifics there is a good deal more. In literary terms sailors were one of first occupational groups to be attributed a distinctive speech-style. Smollett’s Roderick Random offers Lieut. Tom Bowling, described as ‘a scoundrel of a seaman […] who has deserted and turned thief’. This is backed up lexically, and Bowling offers such as rigg’d, for dressed, shake cloth in the wind, for hurry up and don’t lag astern you dog.’ Slang owes the sea a good deal.
Other terms include these: to be adrift, loose and turned adrift, all mean to be discharged from work; to bring your arse to anchor, sit down; bring someone to their bearings, to bring them to their senses; cant a slug into your bread room, have a drink; fin, an arm; pump ship, to urinate; smash, mashed potatoes as originally served alongside a leg of mutton; floating academy, the prison hulks; nip-cheese, a miser wasfirst of all a ship’s purser; deadlights, the eyes; shipshape, keelhaul.
Nor by any means is it all sex, though splice, to marry, is of course based on seaborne imagery. And toplights are brought down from the masthead to stand for human eyes. Jonathan, for an American vessel, usually refers to any United States native (though originally a New Englander) and fits in the taxonomy of John Bull, Lewis Frog and the rest. (Its opposite number limejuicer, thence limey, appears c. 1850) Crappo, from crapaud, a toad, is a Frenchman (substituting for the usual frog which during the Napoleonic wars still seemed to refer primarily to the Dutch). The galoot, which is seen as echt ‘Wild West’ and meaning an awkward fool, began life afloat and meant a marine (the awkwardness implicit in his being ultimately a lubberly soldier). The etymology is lost but there are suggestion of the intensifier ker-, and Scots loot, a lout. The deliberate mispronunciation ossifer seems also to have originated on board. Lubber seems to come from old French lobeor, a swindler or parasite and of course leads to land-lubber, a landsman or incompetent sailor. The clumsiness implicit in the nautical use implies a further link to lob, a country bumpkin.
Some parts are more versatile than others. The buttocks can be the beam-ends, the fantail, the keel, the poop or the stern. Certain bits of kit are popular. Beyond the literary double entendres above, anchor ranges wide, Setting aside anchor and chain, like ball and chain a wife, the noun means variously a pick-axe; a reprieve or temporary suspension of a sentence; brakes and thus drop, put on or slam on the anchors; a stickpin; thus anchor and prop, a stickpin with a safety catch that anchors it to the tie; one’s home, one’s address; a younger relation or other small child who ‘holds one back’ from social life. In phrases, to bring oneself to an anchor was to sit down; to drag one’s anchor, to go slowly or to idle, though the simple drop anchor means to defecate. To swallow the anchor means both to stop doing something and to give oneself up to the police. Meanwhile to drop anchor in bum bay refers to that portion of Churchill’s epitome that was neither rum nor the lash.
Let us conclude with food. Here we do step on board, but some things are just too tasty to miss. Sailor’s food irresistible? Only lexically.
Rations came down to two words: biscuits and beef (though any meat that could be salted, e.g. pork, served muster; all might have to endure multiple Atlantic crossings before the barrel was finally opened and the meat, after soaking, consumed). The first were of tooth-snapping solidity, the second was salted and not to be confused with what modern America terms corned beef (from the corns of salt used in its curing) and reaches its acme when paired with a bagel. The first were known as hard tack, the second as salt junk. The hard was self-evident; tack comes either from another piece of self description, standard English tack, a quality of binding or solidity (and is thus linked to tacky, sticky), or from the pleasingly nautical tackle, which in this context is generic for food. Bread, which would be brown (and not only because of its inevitable population of weevils) was tommy or soft tommy (soft that is in comparison to the biscuits), which was a poor pun on Tommy Brown. If you soaked your hard tack in water and baked it with fat and molasses, it became dandyfunk, daddyfunk or dunderfunk and may represent a mixture of dandy, a sloop, and funk, a stench, though the link is unexplained. Salt junk (plus old or tough junk), which was dried and salted beef or pork, played on the nautical jargon junk, old or second-rate cable or rope and possibly nodded to standard junk, a lump or chunk. The old rope imagery lead naturally to a sailor staple: rope-yarn stew, from rope-yarn, properly used for twisting up into ropes. Alongside this was twice-laid, literally describing rope made from a selection of the best yarns of old rope, this dish was made of the salt-fish left from yesterday's dinner, and beaten up with potatoes or yams.
In time – such packaging was launched in 1847 – salt was replaced by tins. The meat, no longer stowed in casks down in the hold where the ship’s rats had been able to take first helpings, now came pre-packed and blessed with a new name: canned willie (the US army, similarly provisioned, called it corned bill). Why willie? The obvious, coarse etymology doesn’t stand up: that willie doesn’t come on stream till the 1960s and this was established by the late 19th century. Canned willie remains mysterious. And, memoirs suggest, inedible.
It might, of course, have been eponymous: perhaps there was a hapless, anecdote-laden Willie. There certainly was a Sweet Fanny Adams, which does not only mean the landsman’s dismissive ‘nothing’ but to sailors denoted tinned mutton. The blackly humorous nickname was based on the brutal murder and dismemberment of eight-year-old Fanny Adams, at Alton, Hampshire, on 24 August 1867; the murderer, one Frederick Baker, was hanged at Winchester on Christmas Eve and 5,000 spectators watched the execution. There was also a real-life Harriet Lane, borrowed by the USN to mean chopped, tinned meat. In this case the reference was to Harriet Lane, the victim and wife of the murderer Henry Wainwright, executed 1875; coincidentally the USS Harriet Lane, launched 1857, was commanded by one Jonathan Wainwright, who was killed on board her during the US Civil War; the ship, however, was named for the niece of President James Buchanan. (The modern Navy offers a single anthropomorphism: baby’s head, a steak and kidney pudding, in which the smooth pastry rises like a shiny infant head.)
It will not be surprising to find that the solution was stew. Lots of stew in various guises and with names to match. Aside from those already cited were those that, within context, were self-explanatory: choke-dog and dog’s body leading the way. Hishee-hashee presumably went back to hash, itself meaning stew and rooted in French haché, chopped. Sea-pie suggested fish, but not to initiates. As defined in Smyth’sSailor's Word-book (1867) it was a dish of meat and vegetables, etc. boiled together, with a crust of paste, or ‘in layers between crusts, the number of which denominate it a two or three decker’. It was still being served in 1940s Borstals, as witnessed by a young Brendan Behan who recounted the bad boys’ aphorism: ‘Sea pie today, see fugh-all tomorrow’. It might also be called blanket stew, which applied to all stews that came with a pastry crust.
There was more. The unappetisingly named slumgullion or slum was defined by the slang collector as ‘mean fish offal or other refuse,’ and even more gruesome,’ the watery refuse, mixed with blood and oil, which drains from blubber,’ but even sailors were not expected to consume that. Loblolly can be traced to the 16th century: it was a thick gruel, choked down by peasants as wells as sailors, and sometimes doubled as a simple medicine. The word may be no more than echoic; the sound of the thick gruel bubbling in a pot, alternatively, or maybe additionally, it reflects a dialect term lob, to bubble while boiling, especially of a thick substance like porridge and the Devonian lolly, broth, soup or other food boiled in a pot. On shore the word has also meant a country bumpkin, a weakling, and in the US, a mudhole and a fat child. The loblolly boy was a junior crew-member, irrespective of weight, who ran errands for his seniors.
Burgoo and skillygalee, are the equivalents of Scotland’s porridge and Ireland’s stirabout: in all cases oatmeal boiled in water. The former sailor and novelist Captain Marryat called it ‘very wholesome’. More enterprising cooks threw in meat and veg. The literary publican Ned Ward, in 1704, cited it along with red herring and dried whiting as the Dutchman’s favourite food and once picked up by landsmen in Kentucky, burgoo became the basis of 19th century ‘burgoo feasts’; British soldiers used it as a synonym for porridge. The roots lie in Arabic burgul, cooked, parched and cracked wheat. As for skillygalee, it defeats the etymologists, and reached a greater fame as the echt-workhouse/prison sludge, skilly, often paired with toke, i.e. bread. It was this that no doubt induced poor Oliver to make his celebrated request. Jack London described it as ‘a fluid concoction of three quarts of oatmeal stirred into three buckets and a half of hot water’, while a tramp told Orwell that it was ‘A can o’ hot water wid some bloody oatmeal at de bottom.’ Lob-dominion – ‘two buckets of water and an old shoe’ – was equally tasteless, and equally disinclined to confess to an origin.
Some of these probably tasted good, or at least they masked the basic ingredients, where lack of flavour was balanced only by a garnish of unwanted species of insect life. One definitely didn’t. This was soup-and-bouilli, thus characterised by William Clark Russell in his lexicon of Sailors’ Language (1883): ‘Soup-and-bouilli […] taking it all round, is the most disgusting of the provisions served out to the merchant sailor. I have known many a strong stomach, made food-proof by years of pork eaten with molasses, and biscuit alive with worms, to be utterly capsised by the mere smell of soup-and-bouilli. Jack calls it “soap and bullion, one onion to a gallon of water,” and this fairly expresses the character of the nauseous compound.’ It is, however, the same bouilli that graces the traditional French kitchen, pieces of beef being simmered with vegetables to create a savoury stock, and that which lies behind bully beef, itself a variation on canned willie. More palatable – surely – was pillau, made of salt beef, fowl, rice, and onions, all cooked together. Indeed it sounds almost too good for the tars, and may have been officers only. It comes, just as does that featured in your local Taj Mahal, from Persian pulaw and Hindi pulāv, a dish of rice and meat.
There were relatively few sweets. To steal from Russell again, ‘ “Duff” means a large lump of flour and grease boiled in a bag; “doughboys” - pronounced “doboys” the o broad - are the same flour and grease in small lumps. Dough jehovahs are a Yankee pudding, and worthy of the people who first taught the British sailor to eat pork with treacle.’ The cowboy’s dough god, a form of bread baked over an open fire (and thus kin to Australia’s damper) can’t be that dissimilar. Boiled (or Drowned) Baby, a favourite of Patrick O’Brian’s fictional seafarers Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, was one of a number of suet-based stodges.
Someone, of course, had to cook these savoury messes. The cook was the slushy, a name that came from his perk, the selling of slush, the refuse fat from boiled meat. The name, if not the job, has been picked up in Australian shearing camps; sometimes it means his assistant. The original slush fund was what he made from his enterprise. If he was not slushy, then he had another occupational title; drainings.
Like a small child, forcing down the vegetables to reach the chips, let us save the best till last. The best: so they do say, even if not often at the time. This is lobscouse, best known this side of the North Sea as scouse and as such generic for native Liverpudlians and their dialect. The cultural commentator Jonathan Meades explains that ‘Lobscouse is labskaus in the Baltic, specifically in Schleswig Holstein, Lubeck, Hamburg, southern Denmark. It is beef and potato hash, the beef sometimes salted/corned. Unvinegared beetroot is sometimes added. It's often served with a matjes herring and a fried egg.’ In his series Magnetic North he watched it being prepared: it looked like thick pink slurry but allegedly tasted just fine. The modern recipe seems somewhat more generous than the sailors’ version, though that boasted salt meat, biscuits, potatoes, onions, and spices and must have been a good deal tastier than the usual mush.
The naming tradition has continued. An online list of ‘Navy Scran’ (from Scottish scran, ‘food, provisions, victuals, esp. inferior or scrappy food’) notes these. Adam and Eve on a raft, eggs on toast, which has been used since the late 19th century in US short-order caffs; the addition of ‘and wreck ’em’, turns the eggs scrambled. There is hammy cheesy eggy topsides, a seaboard special, which may be a product of Far East pidgin; and there are such dubious delicacies as labrador’s arsehole (‘Sausage Roll – look at one end on and imagine’), bollocks in blood (‘meatballs in tomato sauce’) or Satan’s suppositories, (‘Kidney Beans in Red Hot Chilli Con Carne sauce’). All are undoubtedly slangy, and such as shit on a raft (‘kidneys on toast’) are echoed elsewhere in America’s shit on a shingle (chipped beef on toast, usually found in prisons or messhalls) but they they are best left on board, even if it may be that former matlows bring them into civvy street.
No one, other than fiction’s Popeye the Sailor-man, seemed to eat spinach.
My sense is that the current Ukraine-Russia struggle, set foul for the forseeable future, may well generate its own vocabulary. It is to be hoped that native speakers are already making lists.
I have written elsewhere on the gay slang Polari, with its origins in the trade pidgin ‘lingua franca’ and its adoption and development via the theatre and thence the wider gay world. [NB the authoritative text is Paul Baker Fabulosa! (rev. edn 2020)] As far as show business is concerned, the link, as generally accepted, is that of the sea. It would seem that sailors, who naturally picked up ‘Lingua Franca’ on their trips abroad, brought it home and thence to their on-shore jobs: typically working as pedlars, and joining travelling fairs and circuses. The link between sailors and the stage was certainly established by the 19th century, and can still be seen in a variety of backstage terminology; sailors, with their skills at climbing to precarious heights were much in demand. Not for nothing are such terms as rigging and flying common to both professions. More general, and typical of the geographical/occupational progression is a term like palaver: to chatter, to gossip and thence, as a noun, a noisy fuss. Ultimately taken from the Portuguese palabra: speech, or talk, the term was used by Portuguese traders on West Coast of Africa, where it was picked up by British sailors, incorporated into their jargon and thence rendered part of the Polari used on the mainland. From there, as with a number of slang or jargon terms, polari or otherwise, it made its way into colloquial English.