[‘It’s all honey and turd with them’ says the chronicler of marriage’s swings and roundabouts. We’ve had the turd (see Unwritten Books # 2: The S-Word) and here, as much as slang will permit, is the honey.]
If slang has stories, then they are not to be found on those shelves marked ‘romance’. Slang likes its four-letters words, but l-o-v-e does not qualify and when Cupid enters the picture then if there is a ‘story’ on offer its definition is rarely more than the one that is a synonym for ‘hoax’ or ‘trick’ or even ‘lie’. The truth is simple: if we are seeking hearts and flowers, we are foolishly misguided, for slang has no words for love.
The first thing we need to take on board is that while slang undoubtedly boasts the widest-ever ranging vocabulary when it comes to sex and the bits and pieces that we need to accomplish it, love, that much fetishised emotion, doesn’t come into the picture. Yes, the lexis does offer the odd, dare I suggest grudging acknowledgment: there is love as a noun, but that’s far from emotional, and defined as any person or thing that is pleasant or attractive, e.g. it’s a real love. There is love as in love of a… which is a term of praise kindred to duck, as in ‘duck of …’ and tends to apply to small children or else items of clothing: hats, dresses, although Walter, the narrator of that multi-volumed piece of Victorian porn My Secret Life, recalls how, on holiday, his hosts offered to ‘get me a love of an Italian boy to bugger.’
But of the thirty-plus compounds that attend it, love has quietly but comprehensively replaced itself by sex. And almost as enthusiastically in slang’s denomination of those pink and wobbly hills and valleys that fall under the definition ‘genitals’ as by its listing of ‘making’.
Whether this was conscious and/or deliberate I cannot say and slang is a repository, not an agent. Slang is addicted and has never shown the slightest desire to seek out a cure. Other than the whole humans implied in love muffin and love machine, it’s all down to those bits and bobs. There are the penises; the love truncheon, warrior, pump (notably in Spinal Tap’s epochal ‘Lick My Love Pump’), hammer, staff, stick, steak, bone, dart, gun and muscle. (Not mention corporal love, which fleshy non-com ‘stands to attention’). There are the vaginas: the love box, canal, flesh, glove (otherwise a condom), hole, cabinet and shack (another rock n roller, by the B-52s but the term was around since the 1920s when in 1923 the Belleville News Democrat (IL) of 22 May informed its readers that ‘Citizens Burn “Love Shack” / Enraged over the discovery of two white women and a negro man in a two-room house [...] citizens [...] set fire to the house.’ A whole other definition of ‘roaring Twenties’?
Love hillocks are the female breasts as are love apples (which can otherwise be testicles), love button the clitoris, love-lips the labia, love grenades or spuds the testicles, love juice or custard, semen, love rug the pubic hair and on it goes. Love handles (the idea being that one can hold on to them during sex) represent the excess flesh around a portly stomach that may be seen in a kinder light by those who appreciate the Rubenesque figure. There is the love bug, which in this context stands for VD rather than VW, as in Disney’s twee Herbie. There is a moment’s possibility in love affair, but inspection reveals that this is drug slang, and refers to a shot of heroin and cocaine mixed (affair itself has meant both sets of genitals since the 18th century), and the love letter, showcasing slang’s usual cynicism, is in fact a stone, as thrown maliciously at a human target.
Love’s lexis is not all sexual. The love drug, plain and simple, is MDMA or Ecstasy, love weed marijuana and pure love LSD. Love curls were a hairstyle in which the hair is cut short and worn low over the forehead, love-pot a drunkard. And for the love of Mike! (which love-object can also be Heaven! holy Buddha! Jupiter! Michael Angelo! Moses! Pete (and Alf)! Peter the hermit! and Polly Simpkins!) is an exclamation of exasperation or surprise.
One can expand the search, but can one render the definitions more affectionate? No. Love and kisses, rhyming on ‘the missus’ at least suggests a tinge of harmony, but love and marriage is merely a carriage, while other rhymes offer love and hate (weight), God-love-her (one’s mother) and light of love (a prison governor), and never forget that this last, when un-rhymed, means a whore.
Last chance: definitions containing ‘love’, and excluding those that include ‘affair’. Slang resists moderation and passion, even obsession are the rule. There’s the passionate lover who goes at the beloved hot and heavy like a tailor’s goose. The goose being the iron used to perfect a fresh-sewn garment, a reference that not for the first time has one wondering about the back-story of a folk song, in this case ‘dashing away with the smoothing iron’. (In another rhyme, this same goose, named for the curved neck and here renamed a weasel, is what is popped to buy drinks in the City Road’s Eagle pub). Alternatively he may be a bone-setter, the force of his affections threatening to break the loved one’s limbs, though there may be a pun on bone, the penis, too.
But tender passion (on stream from 1752)? Not much improvement here. Slang’s list for ‘being in love’ includes such as doing one’s balls on, bughouse, busted on, collared on, dead set on, daffy, dippy, dotty, doughy, dropping one’s ovaries (a camp gay term, at least in South Africa), fall for, have it for, hung up on, gone a million, nuts on, potty, snowed over, soft, spoons on, stuck on, going turtles on (‘turtle dove’ = love), whipped, whooped, wrapped (i.e. rapt) and yar. Is it just me, or do others also fail to see much in the way of hearts and flowers? Half of them, after all, are synonyms for ‘mad’ (good enough for Plato’s Socrates, good enough for slang) and there are a few fools too. One that is not is sugar on, but that ushers in a whole new selection: what one might term ‘sweet talk’, a term that, as far as the love-making sense goes, seems to have appeared as recently as 1945, as part of a slang glossary aimed at jazz fans and entitled Hepcats’ Jive Talk.
It’s a diabetics’ nightmare. The obvious candidates are sugar and sweet and both enlisted as terms of endearment, but they are not alone. The equation of the loved one and the toothsome treat, one who is ‘good enough to eat’, is venerable. ‘Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue’ declares the Song of Solomon around 200 BCE and the pattern has continued. Honey, with its combinations honeychild, honey-chops, honey-dip, honey-baby, honey-pot and honey-bun all arrive in the early 20th century, as does crumpet. The equation seems unquenchable and endearments include honey-bunch, honey-bunny (used to grim effect in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction), honeybugs, honeypie and honey-cunt. Like sugar there are less appetizing senses, notably the ironic: a honey of a mess is problematical; while honey can denote various bodily fluids, whether sexual or excretory – the latter best known in honey cart, used in various forms of public transport to describe a container for what an earlier world, equally euphemistic, termed gold (a substance that was removed by the gold-finder, otherwise known matily as Tom Turdman). The rival images combine in the 18th century’s it’s all honey or all turd with them said of those whose relationship fluctuates violently between amity and enmity.
Sweetie, sweetie-pops, sweetycakes, sweetie-pie, sweet pea and sweet potato pie are other modernisms. Sweetmeat is ambivalent: it can be a lover or a mistress but it can be, with knowing cynicism, an underage prostitute. Cake has been popular in the States for a century; lollipop has been common since 1850.
Tart is perhaps the most interesting. Now seen as a pejorative, other than in Australia and Liverpool where it remains neutral, it began life positively. The Slang Dictionary of 1859 explained; ‘Tart, a term of approval applied by the London lower orders to a young woman for whom some affection is felt. The expression is not generally employed by the young men, unless the female is in ‘her best,’ with a coloured gown, red or blue shawl, and plenty of ribbons in her bonnet — in fact, made pretty all over, like the jam tarts in the swell bakers’ shops.’ (Beware, however, of compound tarts: rhyming slang is pervasive and the raspberry, strawberry, cherry and treacle varieties all mean farting). When tart turned nasty is hard to nail down, though by 1889 the Portsmouth Evening News of 30 May could report that ‘a Court of Law has decided it is libellous to call a girl a “tart”.’
Moving on to the physically attractive, it’s definitely more of the same. A pretty girl can be jam, crumb, biscuit, pie, bun, raspberry, peach (and the intensified peacherino) and cupcake. Cheesecake, a pin-up, appeared around 1930 (its male counterpart beefcake is slightly younger).
Other expressions of affection or approval include dishy, tasty, fruity, scrumptious, flavour, slice and yummy. Endearments have included a banana, a basket of oranges (a reference apparently to glittering nuggets of gold as well as fruit), one who is the jammiest of the jam or the real raspberry jam, a bun, butter, a cutesie-pie, a dixie cup, a creamie, a pancake, a pastry, and even a penn’orth o’ treacle.
Sometimes sweet turns sickly and endearment turns to abuse. Such terms include pieface, muffin, fruitcake, jellybean, jellyhead, all of which suggest a certain ‘softness’, and social doughnut hole, in other words a human ‘nothing’ (the US military use donut hole for a female volunteer worker with the US Red Cross though the reference here is to hole: vagina, not an empty head).
Those seeking solace in a bit of rom, with or without com, may be cheered to find that while slang’s words for womanizer (alley-cat, belswagger, chicken-butcher, jelly roller, lusty lawrence, poodle-faker...) number 131, those for ‘lover’ rack up 20 more. Even in sneering slang cads and bounders are seemingly vanquished, in theory if nowhere else, by lurve.
Given slang’s default position – that sneer – goo-gooer is probably the mot juste. That and pash, sweet daddy and daddy-one, main man, duck, goodie, momma, boopsie, heart and last heartbeat. The blues, all nudge-nudge and somewhat transparent double entendre went for biscuit rollers, coffee grinders and ash-haulers, which last comes from haul someone’s ashes, where ashes meant ass, in its vagina definition. Bessie Smith celebrated those adept in the sexual side of eating: ‘He’s a deep-sea diver / with a stroke that can’t go wrong, / He can touch bottom, and his wind holds out so long.’ Lemons, an acid relief in a world of sugar, were of course, always up for squeezing.
There was the carpet knight who is also found as a carpet-champion, carpet lover, carpet-monger, carpet squire and carpet warrior. In all cases he preferred the boudoir where the only war was between the sexes over the supposedly harsher environs of the real-life battlefield. Like the smoodger (from smoodge, to kiss and cuddle), there is the squeeze who can be elevated to main squeeze. The panorama garbled paramour, and pully-hawley reverse engineered play at pully-hawley, another of those terms for intercourse that emphasised the sheer physicality of the act. A torch was carried and refers to lost or unrequited love: the ‘light of love’ is still burning, even if it is unreciprocated. The flamer, variously an admirer, lover or promiscuous woman, ‘burnt brightly’. As for men, the missionary man was no more enterprising than his position of choice, and what a girl needed was a natural-born man. What she probably got was Jody, otherwise Joe the Grinder (Sancho to Spanish speakers) who moved in when hubby or boyfriend had to be elsewhere, especially in wartime.
Names for the womanizer, the punning cock of the game, seem to advocate not especially procrastinated rape (a plot device that was once advised as a guarantor of fictional best-sellerdom.) It’s up and at her all the way: the mutton-, hair- or fleece monger, the rump- and whisker-splitter, the bum-fighter (who is not a sodomite: bum works for the vagina as well) and quim-sticker, the buttonhole-worker, gulley-raker and tuft-hunter (more usually discovered sucking up to a tuft, i.e. toff, from the distinguishing golden tassel on his university mortar-board), a leg- or linen-lifter. There is the smock-soldier and feather-bed soldier, the parlor python and the lounge lizard, the meathound (a carnivore only in the figurative sense) and the jazzhound (where jazz means intercourse, not music), the dasher, the masher and the pieman and crumpet-man and the he-whore (who may be donkey-dicked). In no case is there a sense of critique: this was slang-man’s go-to position. No namby-pamby gender equality here.
It is hard, slang being what it is, to decide where to limit the list of what the lexis at least, defines as ‘promiscuous’ women. If one believes slang, most, even all women, other than those sidelined as mothers, nags or hags (and even mother is more likely to be a brothel-keeper), are seen as being up for it, and if in truth hope is ever-vanquished by experience, slang has no intention of telling. The line between a professional and an enthusiastic amateur is opaque : context helps a little, but not invariably. Those who slang tells us enjoy more pricks than a second hand dartboard (not to mention a pin-cushion) may or may not opt for an income. There are 1000+ prostitutes to 170 promiscuous women, and 44 who are labelled as both, but there is no system of checks. Whore is too random an insult to be very much believed. For our purposes let us forget them all. Instead, let us consider the mistress.
The point (the beauty?) of the mistress is that she is not the wife. Thus the backstreet wife (her male equivalent being, when he’s not a sodomite, a backdoor man), the left-handed wife (there is also a left-handed bridegroom), the side-dish and the bit on the side. The long-vanished loteby, coined in the 14th century was based on lote, to skulk or hide. She could be a rainbow, from her taste in colourful, thus arousing clothes (so could also be a whore) but she can equally be a wife in water-colours, a muted version of the actual spouse, presumably portrayed in ‘loud’ and garish oils. One the other hand, and contrasted with the excitements of adultery, the wife is a cooler, who ‘cools one’s passions’ while the mistress ‘heats them up’. The relationship is not acknowledged as serious: she’s a bit of nonsense or a gallimaufry, which also works for her vagina and is properly defined as a stew that is made of random bits of food (and may prefigure Viz Comic’s coinage of badly-packed kebab for vagina). Clothes may also underpin the fancy piece or fancy bit, though these may be matter of ‘a little of what you fancy’.
However independent the grandes horizontales of courtesan legend may have been, slang’s mistress is, of course, at her lover’s disposal. A convenient or conveniency (itself a convenient word, meaning not just mistress, but wife, prostitute, vagina, brothel – a convenient house – and lavatory). She is both a comfortable importance, and a comfortable impudence, especially when he takes her out in public and introduces her as his wife. Her lover cannot see her daily, and may not wish to, which makes her a weekender, or a Saturday-to-Monday, although these seem illogical since most married men are locked into domesticity at that time of the week.
She is, however could she not be, morally unacceptable. Thus the blowen (also a whore) which according to the 19th century expert in matters Romani, George Borrow, comes from beluñi, ‘a sister in debauchery’, though Hotten brings in German’s bluhen, bloom, and buhlen, sweetheart, but adds ‘the street term ... may mean one whose reputation has been ‘blown on’, or damaged’. Trug or trugmallion, from Italian trucca, defined in 1598 as ‘a fustian or rogish word for a trull, a whore, or a wench’ is possibly cognate with SE truck, to barter or exchange commodities (and commodity is yet another synonym for a prostitute and for male and female genitals).
She’s a plaything, a gamester (her game being sex; when used of men the word means stud) and a dolly, which comes from doll, but may be linked to Italian’s dolce and thus part of the stage/gay language Polari. She is quite simply a toy, which slang uses indiscriminately for penis, vagina, whore and mistress. One of her earliest incarnations was the doxy. She began life in the 16th century as the female companion of a variety of mendicant villains and soon embraced a less specific role as a mistress. If she survives, anachronistically, it is as a ‘good-time gal’. Roots are debatable: possibly Dutch docke, a doll, possible standard English dock, a tail (and thus its various sexual meanings in slang) and possibly lowland Scots doxie, meaning lazy.
Her role is primarily sexual, which makes her an underput or belly-piece, both suggesting the missionary position, and a pintle-bit or pintle-maid, where pintle is the penis; the dismissive bit has been used for women, always in a sexual mode, since 1665 (the ur-bit, it is made clear, being no more than a chunk of meat: ‘Butchers have jolly handsome Wives [...] make choice of a fine young plump bit for themselves’), usually in compounds such as bit of drapery, of muslin, of skin, of raspberry and so on. Bit of how’s-your-father is of course sex. The buttered bun (butter being semen and bun the vagina) was originally and remains a woman who has had intercourse with one man and is about to repeat this immediately with a new partner; she has also signified both mistress and prostitute. And if sex is riding, she can be a mount, a mare (a semi-positive use of a word that usually, and, nastily, denotes an older woman), or a hobby horse, not so much the children’s toy, but a small horse who can be ‘ridden’ by all and sundry. So too may the bicycle or bike (usually specified as the ‘town’, ‘office’ or ‘village’ variety) though she is more goer than mistress. The 18th century ligby seems to come from lig, to lie down. Ironically, we assume, she is a pure. Yet like all women she is weak: a frail, and the frail sisterhood was one of many Victorian euphemisms for prostitutes. ‘Frailty,’ declared Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though for once sidestepping entendres of any dimension, ‘thy name is woman.’
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Postcript from S*L*A*N*G: The Musical:
(A foolish idea sensibly suppressed by its author who had nothing better to do one sunny Parisian afternoon in 2009. I know: ‘kill your darlings’.)
‘There’s No Word for “Love” in Slang’
When your pitching the woo
Or you’re after a screw
And your trying to chat
Cos you’re cracking a fat
You want some kind of lingo
That’ll make her go bingo!
But the trouble with slang
Whether spoken or sang
Is there’s no word for love.
You tell you’re after
A bit of the other
You can offer a fuck
Or an old muddy duck
Or a bit on the side
Or a nice cosy ride
But the trouble with slang
Do you fancy a bang?
Is there’s no word for love.
There’s the beast of two backs
Or a jump in the sack
There’s a Down-Under naughty
It’s ripper, it’s rorty
You can try for a shag
If you’ve pulled an old slag
But the trouble with slang
The whole damn shebang
Is there’s no word for love.
You can ask her to get
Her tits out for the lads
You can tell her you’ve got
Blue balls with your nads
You can come it all pervy
Say she makes your prick curvy
But the trouble with slang
Tell me, how does it hang?
Is there’s no word for love.
I’ve had it up to here
I tell you, I’ll go queer
Politically incorrect?
OK, let’s call it bent.
Cos the pain in the arse
The whole bleedin’ farce
Is the trouble with slang
Don’t ask me, ask the gang
Is there’s no word for love.
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