The Canon & the Counter-language

Carry on Barding, or, Much Ado About Pistol's Cock

[A further dip into The Stories of Slang. The idea of a slang canon, touched on below, can be further explored here where I have attempted to use the Timelines of Slang software to create a chronological list of slang’s most fruitful sources. While a number of the ‘great’ writers undoubtedly use slang in their texts they are rarely among its major exploiters. I note a number at the start of the piece, but the burden of my research focuses on William Shakespeare. As will be seen the parallels to such double-entendre sodden creations as the Carry On movies, are, if unacknowledged, much more substantial than might be assumed.]

Moira Plunkett: ‘I keep on forgetting what a big girl I am’

The nature of slang – seditious, obscene, impertinent, too often lacking, we have to  admit, the supposedly necessary seriousness of tone and depth of topic – means that many of its keenest users are not rated among the lit. crit. pantheon. That isn’t to condemn them to mere hackery. But in the end, however much we revel in Seth Morgan, Helen Green van Campen, such best-sellers as George Ade or Irving Welsh, and others who run glorious riot with the lexis, there just aren’t that many superstars. Not a good career move? Low on creative writing sinecures. Yet for all those who opt to steer clear, some of the giants do nod in slang’s direction.

Thus the greatest of them all, Shakespeare, uses, at my count, just over 500 ‘slang’ terms, of which 277 are currently the first recorded use of a given term. Among  these are every mother’s son, fat-headed, heifer (for woman), pickers and stealers (hands), small beer (insignificant matters), what the dickens, and many more.

The Bard (which naming seems to have been originated by the actor David Garrick in 1769) is not alone.

There is Dickens, for instance. No-one then or possibly even now could claim to know London as did he, and that meant knowing its language as well. Slang, in context, gives authenticity and Dickens was happy to draw on it. So too did such contemporaries as Harrison Ainsworth or Edward Lytton, but where they seemed to have the dictionary in one hand and the quill in the other, hunting and pecking for juicy syllables, with Dickens the seams never show.

The slang in, say, Oliver Twist, is one more way in which the novelist displays his mastery of the environment. Fagin the fence, Bill Sykes the swell mobsman, the Artful Dodger, that downy cove (though not Nancy, who for all her actual profession – a whore, and not a very classy one, the world would have called her a tuppeny uprighter – is female and as such sacrosanct and speaks standard English) are all imbued with cant, the language of the professional criminal. One does not ring a bell but jerks the tinkler, the handkerchiefs the gang steals from juvenile kinchins (i.e. German kindchen, a child) are fogles (from Italian foglia, a leaf or French slang fouille, a pocket), and Fagin, hoping for a lagging (from lag, to carry away, in this case in the form of transportation to Australia) will end his days scragged (from scrag, the neck), or hanged on the gallows erected outside the Stone Jug (a jug that contains people rather than liquids), Newgate jail.

Moving forward, no-one could have been more loving of slang, and so wondrously productive in his use of it than P.G. Wodehouse, whose 100-plus books provide nearly 1,500 examples. Browsing and sluicing (eating and drinking), soup and fish (a dinner jacket), ranny-gazoo (perhaps from dialect ranny, rash and French slang gazouiller, to sing),  ‘rum goings on’, and ooh-jah-cum-spiff (oojah defeats research, spiff means first-rate), exactly as required. The fact that Wodehouse blithely intermingled these Edwardianisms with such modern American terms as bump off, chucker-out and four-flusher(from poker) merely ups the humorous ante.

Another example: James Joyce. It may come as a surprise to find that Ulysses, a book often cited as the greatest novel ever written and as such rated as somewhat serious, is a contender for slang stardom, but so it is. Joyce, always a connoisseur of language, was as keen on slang as the rest of the dictionary and his magnum opus has nearly 1,000 slang terms. For a book that is celebrated for the recreation of a single day, June 16, 1904, Joyce is splendidly all-encompassing in his borrowings. There is rogue’s language from  1560 and Kiplingesque soldiers from the Raj, alongside stage Irishmen, English toffs and so much more.

However, as its title should have made clear, what we are discussing here is Shakespeare. So let us do so.

This, for instance, is Shakespeare:

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

Ophelia: No, my lord.

Hamlet:  I mean, my head upon your lap?

Ophelia : Ay, my lord.

Hamlet:  Do you think I meant country matters?

Ophelia:  I think nothing, my lord.

Hamlet:  That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.

Ophelia: What is, my lord?

Hamlet: Nothing.

W. Shakespeare The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark c. 1600

This is definitely not.

Dr. Kenneth Soaper (Kenneth Williams): It has been my experience as once young people sample the delights of country life and the wonders of nature they just can't get enough of it.

Miss Haggerd (Hattie Jacques): Exactly.

Dr. Kenneth Soaper: Well I was thinking of the girls...

Miss Haggerd: So was I.

Dr. Kenneth Soaper: Exactly.

T. Rothwell Carry on Camping or Let Sleeping Bags Lie 1972

Definitely not? Are we sure? It is tempting to ascribe the latter scene to the former, what the lit. crit. world calls intertextuality and what the less guarded among us might see as plagiarism. Not so, and it would be to traduce Talbot Rothwell, the ex-pilot turned Carry On scriptwriter, who surely picked up his doubles entendres in the wartime RAF messes of which he was doubtless an adornment, rather than from scanning the Bard. In any case, the point is the reverse. Not that Carry On films jam an elbow into your ribs, removing it only to jab it back even harder, but that Shakespeare, that epitome of ‘literature’ was already there so long before.

‘Pistol’s cock is up and flashing fire will follow.’ Is that the late Frankie Howerd drawing an insinuating breath? Or maybe Kenneth Williams. But in fact it’s Shakespeare, in Henry V (c.1600) And do not be fooled, Britain’s most celebrated citizen knew exactly whereof he spoke. Shakespeare is awash with double (and even single) entendres, a veritable Carry On… of his era.

Nudge-nudgery has always lain at the heart of British humour. Playing with words is central to slang, and even if not (quite) everything is smut, the double entendre is ever-present. The jolly rustics spouting low humour have a time-honoured place in theatre; indeed the first ever recordings of slang in French are in 13th century passion plays, in which the rib-ticklers are delivered in the very shadow of the cross.  Chaucer too can offer piety, but, typically in The Miller’s Tale, he also gives us plenty of bawdy. But Hamlet is hardly a laff riot, and Hamlet’s double entendres – lap: vagina, c(o)untry matters, and nothing, again the vagina, which Francis Grose in his 1785 slang dictionary defines thus ‘(    )’, i.e. ‘nothing’ – are delivered reflectively, and shortly after he briefs the Players on the delivery of their play within a play. It is one of Shakespeare’s many great speeches, and there are no rustics here, no nudges either.

The doubles entendres, however, are inescapable and Shakespeare, for all his elevation to literature’s Parnassus, has no desire to run away. Take Romeo and Juliet, another that gets listed among the tragedies. ‘O, that she were / An open et-caetera, thou a poperin pear!’ Nothing, one can be assured, to do with fruit, though it does suggest what elsewhere he describes as plucking. Any more than is his use of fig. As for et-caetera, the usual belief is that this too means  the vagina , but it may in fact be a printer’s oversight rather than a playwright’s smut: sometimes what we see is really what we get. (On the other hand there is Henry IV Pt 2 and ‘Come we to full points here, and are etceteras nothings?’ where point is surely the penis, and as seen above, nothing its partner in pleasure.)

Nor is an aunt a relation, a nunnery remotely religious (even if it is populated by nuns, not to mention an abbess): we are in the world of brothels and sex-work; nor are the low countries (or indeed the netherlands) even vaguely Dutch but what modernity, coyly, terms down there. The play also offers bauble for penis, bird’s-nest for pubic hair and salt-fish for vagina (an early example of the many terms that equate the woman or her genitals with the water-borne species and doubling down with salt, sexually voracious), as well as the once widely used sir-reverence for excrement, which led to Grose’s 1796 definition of reverence:  ‘an ancient custom which obliges any person easing himself near the highway or foot-path, on the word reverence being given to him by a passenger, to take off his hat with his teeth, and without moving from his station to throw it over his head, by which it frequently falls into the excrement …’

Shakespeare uses hare-finder, to mean a womanizer (hair, as in pubic) and in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1595) he plays on Ajax, both Greek hero and a jakes, i.e. a ‘close-stool’ or water-closet. The pun was behind Sir John Harington’s squib The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), a plea for the introduction of the water-closet, the supposed coarseness of which so displeased Queen Elizabeth I that its author was temporarily banned from court. 

Shakespeare’s works are full of crime, often at the highest level, but unlike most of the 16th century writers to whom one has to look for early examples of the counter-language, he has no examples of cant (the formal term for criminal jargon). Such fellow-playwrights  as Thomas Dekker or Shakespeare’s enemy Robert Greene may have harnessed script-writing with pamphlets on what the latter called coney-catching, i.e. confidence trickery, he did not. Those 500 slang terms cover a good deal of ground, but the primary focus – far more so than that of the pamphleteers – deals in slang’s favourite topic:  sex. The penis, vagina and the intercourse between them; a minor deviation for the buttocks and good many prostitutes. Still, there are very few of what modernity categorises as ‘obscenities’; a list – by necessity short – would include foutra (i.e. fuck) in ‘a foutra for’, cock for penis, but only as a double entendre, come, to achieve orgasm, hole for vagina, and piss as both noun and verb – and piss, around 1600, was hardly slang. The double entendre, surrounded by pretty penetrable context, is far more likely: juggle or occupy for intercourse,  plum-tree or medlar for vagina, sword or weapon for penis.

Intercourse itself is it, nibbling, tick-tack (‘an old variety of backgammon, played on a board with holes along the edge, in which pegs were placed for scoring’ OED), night-work and stair- or trunk-work, which last suggest clandestine or casual sex. A diver is a man ‘on the job’. To have sex is predictably a man’s occupation. Only put a man in one’s belly, shake a man’s back and spin off or cleave the pin (to bring a man to orgasm) take the female position (and even these are determined by the male point of view). Otherwise there is the usual ‘man hits woman’ aggression of slang’s couplings:  board, charge (from sharge, to attack), foin (i.e. stab) and stab itself, horse and mount (both precursors of ride), plough, pluck, leap (and take a leap in the dark), thump, tumble, vault, work and top. Tread and tup borrow from animals, the first from poultry, the second rams and ewes. Otherwise there are the slightly euphemistic do the deed (i.e. ‘of darkness’), do it, flesh it, have, bed, put it to, sluice and taste. More elaborate are play at cherry pit (not the cherry of virginity, which other than a one-off in 1700 is a 20th century creation) but the pit or pip that lies within a fruit), board a land carrack (literally a coasting vessel, here a woman, usually a whore), make the beast with two backs (with its satanic overtones) and grope for trout in a peculiar river, which predates the use of trout as a woman, and again links to the many uses of fish for both the woman and her vagina.

That same vagina can be her beef (which also serves for the penis, and elsewhere, as does meat, for the entire body, irrespective of gender), breach (i.e. hole), buckler (a small shield, and set against his sword), eye (expanded in the 19th century to the eye that weeps most when pleased), fountain (‘of love’), buggle-bo (otherwise a demon), hell (taken from the dictionary-maker John Florio who used it in 1598 to translate Valle di Acheronte, ‘a womans priuie parts or gheare.’ and which refers to the river Acheron, supposedly leading to the underworld), Netherlands (a pun on low countries, though Shakespeare only uses that for the buttocks), lap, nest, ring, medlar (tree) (as a fruit nicknamed open arse), orchard and plum-tree, petticoat, placket, rose and, sounding more like something from John Cleland’s infinitely euphemistic but highly pornographic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), Venus’s glove.

If sex is violence, then the penis is made to dole it out: the lance, pike, pistol, poking-stick, poll axe, sword, weapon. Meanwhile, as well as beef, edibles include carrot, poperin pear (i.e. Poperinghe, in west Flanders, plus a supposed pun on ‘pop her in’), and potato-finger. The bauble, otherwise a jewel, suggests the later family jewels, while kicky-wicky (from French quelquechose, something) is yet another euphemism, and a less self-aggrandising image than all that weaponry. So too pillicock, which evokes cock, but elsewhere means a fool. Otherwise there are the classic cock and prick, the pen, the tail, (multi-purposed as vagina and buttocks) and the tool.

Finally, for flesh, the buttocks, which are variously arse, bum, tail and such jocular or punning uses as catastrophe, holland (the ‘Netherlands’ but also, perhaps a nudge towards ‘hole-land’), low countries and wind instrument.

There are neutral women in Shakespeare but they are rare: fro (from Dutch), hen, petticoat, she. Otherwise there are two choices. The first portrays the woman as overly independent (or as Shakespeare would put it robustious), and thus a problem: a line from The Merry Wives of Windsor gives a good selection: ‘Out of my door, you witch, you rag, you baggage, you polecat, you ronyon!’ Only ramp, from rampant, is missing. Or, independent again, she is what the era termed light (i.e. easily pushed onto her back) or easy: the doxy, the wench and the baggage (originally a camp-follower — a woman who follows the military ­ — but more commonly found in such combinations as saucy baggage or sly baggage; there may also be links to French bagasse, a prostitute, a wanton). Then there is ling, another woman = fish image, and summed up in the coarse mid-19th century song ‘The Maid & The Fishmonger’: Then the girl shoved her hand ’neath her clothes in a shot, / And rubbed it about on a certain sweet spot; / Then, blushing so sweetly, as you may suppose, / She put her hand up to the fishmonger’s nose. / The fishmonger smelt it, and cried with delight, ‘I know what you want, by the smell, now, all right, / ’Twas a good thought of yours, recollection to bring; I’ll tell you directly – you wanted some ling’.

Usually she is simply a whore and the hold-door trade, and its attendant brothels supply the largest chunk of Shakespeare’s non-standard lexis. There is, inevitably  an overlap between lightness and commerce. Such as baggage and doxy can go either way. Other gamesters (the precursor of on the game), include the Barbary hen, boiled stuff (from the sweating tub in which she battled the pox), bona roba (literally ‘a fine dress’) and loose-bodied gown (like the contemporary synonym white apron, this was fashion as a badge of office), carrion, flirt-gill, skainsmate (a mystery word: perhaps from the dialect skain, a dagger; thus a figurative penis; or a skein of thread or wool, and thus related to the ‘sewing’ imagery of intercourse), Galloway nag (a strong, small horse), daughter of the game,  green goose (a young girl, soon to be a whore) and the punning guinea hen (an expensive girl), hackney (the hackney horse, a run-of-the-mill horse, i.e. not a warhorse or hunter, which was used for everyday riding and thus the sort of horse available for hire), hare (playing on hair, presumably pubic, but also the stereotyped image of rabbits or hares as sexy beasts and possibly on puss, a hare and cat a woman), heifer, hobby horse (which is ‘ridden’), jay (a bird noted for its noisiness and bright colouring), laced mutton (the lacing is that of stays or corsets, embellishing a young, or disguising an ageing, figure), ladybird, light o’love (playing on light but also referencing on a popular dance), Maid Marian (the morris dancing tradition of having that character played by a local prostitute), mermaid (who lured men, usually sailors, to their doom), open-arse, pagan, punk, puzzle (from dialect puzzle, a slut and beyond that French pucelle, a virgin; the reference is to young girls, especially when fresh from the country, who presented themselves as virgins, however inaccurately, and thus demanded higher prices), quail (a supposedly amorous bird), stallion (also used of men at the time and returned to female identification in mid-20th century African-American use), drab, trader, trull (from German), and the punning wagtail.

Brothels, were primarily houses: house itself, the hot-house (both hot as sexy and hot as venereally diseased), the house of profession, house of resort, house of sale, leaping house, victualling-house (a pimp was a victualler although eat, as in fellate, was still far distant) and naughty house. Two examples deal not with the whole house but its design: a red lattice and the manor of picked hatch. A red lattice or grate was a popular tavern sign and thence, if the tavern was thus inclined, could also indicate a brothel; at one time an actual Red Lattice inn stood at Butcher’s Row, off the Strand. A picked, properly piked hatch was a half door, topped by spikes so as to prevent anyone climbing over. Again it denoted a brothel and the original such address was a tavern-cum-brothel in Clerkenwell (either in Turnmill or Turnbull Street – recalled by Falstaff as a favourite stamping ground  —  or slightly further north in a nest of alleyways off Old Street). Shakespeare also mentions the suburbs. Literally ‘beneath the city’, such early suburbs – Holborn, Wapping, Mile End, Bermondsey, Clerkenwell– may have become parts of central London but, in the 16th and 17th centuries, they were beyond the City and its walls, and, as such, were home to various ‘stink’ industries – tanning, leper hospitals, playhouses and brothels. And most notoriously the last. Thus a whore could  be an aunt of the suburbs, a suburb wench, a suburban strumpet, a sixpenny suburb-sinnet (presumably a misprint for sinner, sinnet is ‘a kind of flat braided cordage’ OED) and a suburb lady, while the world of prostitution was the suburban trade.

Slang’s default gender is male. In slang terms, Shakespeare’s default male type is the fool. He offers asshead, beetlehead (from beetle, a large hammer), block, calf, calf’s-head, goat (also a lecher), hobby horse (its wooden head), jack, jolthead, jolterhead, loggerhead (a logger being anything heavy and solid), loon, nit, noddy andwoodcock. Lubber, the basis of the nautical land-lubber, a landsman or incompetent sailor, comes either from Old French lobeor, a swindler or parasite, and beyond that lober, to deceive, to sponge upon or to mock. The clumsiness implicit in the nautical use implies a further link to SE lob, a country bumpkin, ultimately from a variety of Germanic forms all meaning heavy or clumsy. To be stupid is to be clay-brained, knotty-headed or loggerheaded.

Shakespeare uses all these and much else that in my book qualifies as slang too. But there’s the rub. Can we really talk about ‘slang’ before the 18th century. The first dictionary that might be seen as including ‘civilian’ alongside criminal slang, appeared only in 1698. The word itself doesn’t come on stream in the context of language till 1756 (there are a few adjectival references that equate slang with ‘corrupt’ twenty years earlier) so what do we do with all those terms plucked from the Bard and which have long since settled into to the slang dictionaries?. Can we define a lexis as slang in a world where slang does not yet exist? Is it just groundling talk? The street’s unfettered alternative to what by 1600 was established as the early modern version of Standard English and as such toff-speak.

That these terms would in time enter the slang dictionaries is unarguable. But we must still ask: at the time that they were used, can they be classified as ‘slang’? Is that what Shakespeare was using, consciously or not? They certainly fit the bill: they focus on slang’s obsessions: parts of the body, sexuality, defecation, misogyny, insults and they are voiced by the lower classes of society: vulgar people and their vulgar tongue.  If they are not yet labeled as slang, then it’s hard to know where else to put them.

There is so much we cannot know. Where did Shakespeare find his slang words and phrases? He seems to have drawn on John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary The Worlde of Wordes (1598), which among much else translated Fottere [...] to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy; the lexicographer and the playwright overlap on 17 occasions. He has 15 terms in common with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales of 1,386 (mainly sex and defecation) and 13 with the Gesta Grayorum, the record of a Christmas entertainment performed in 1594, and among several other authors some 76 with Robert Greene, a rival playwright (and author of pamphlets on ‘coney-catching’ or confidence trickery) who christened his contemporary ‘an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.’

Nor do we know to what extent these ludic winks and nudges had the gallery roaring. The groundlings may have heard nothing much beyond their own conversation thrown back to them. The sexual references may have passed without comment. The parallel with Carry On movies may be semantic rather than social.

What we do know is whatever they may have felt up in the gods, those in the dress circle would become less tolerant.  Other than certain ‘classic’ works of out-and-out, purpose-written porn, the works of Shakespeare have been more often expurgated than those of any other English-language author except Chaucer.

The expurgations were not initially based on sex but on politics. Whole speeches rather than single, ‘dirty’ words. The first example came via Elizabeth I, who found the passage in Richard II in which the king is deposed so infuriating that she had it cut from all performances and it was only restored after her death. The next recorded expurgation of Shakespeare was carried out by Sir William D'Avenant, who held a monopoly of licensed plays in London, in 1660. In what was basically a sop to Puritan interests, he trimmed seven of the plays with the general intention ‘that they may be reformed of prophanes and ribaldry.’ Up to the 19th century, most censorship had the same justification: the authorities, especially the royal family, must not be mocked. Nor should the national playwright display anything that diminished his own dignity. Thus one expurgator removed the gravediggers from Hamlet: such low comedy disgraced so great a play. Paradoxically, Shakespeare was made if anything more ribald, as in Dryden's version of The Tempest in which Miranda is given a sexier twin sister, Dorinda.

This changed in 1807 when one Thomas Bowdler, a former physician, now country gentleman resident on the Isle of Wight and a herald of the grim moralism that evangelical Christianity would trumpet half a century on, took it upon himself to censor Shakespeare’s works of ‘everything that can raise a blush on the cheek of modes­ty,’ in effect about 10 per cent of Shakespeare's text. The book, initially created by his sister Henrietta Maria (Harriet) Bowdler, was entitled The Family Shakespeare. The Bowdler’s timing was perfect, and much-embraced by the newly powerful evangelistic world. The word bowdlerize, a synonym for censoring on moral grounds (another synonym, since 1627, was castrate) is first recorded in 1836.

Profanity was verboten: "God!" invariably became "Heaven!" "Jesu!" was simply dropped. The religious preferences were distinctly evangelical; Catholic susceptibilities were not soothed and oaths such as "Marry!" (Mary) and '"Sblood!" (God's blood) were left intact. What mattered most was irreverence: No vestige of humor at God's expense was spared. Bowdler slashed Romeo and Juliet (the over-earthy Nurse practically disappeared), King Lear and Henry IV, Part 2. Measure for Measure defeated him and had to be printed with a warning, so hard was it to cut, as was Othello, which he stated was ‘unfortunately little suited to family reading’ and suggested that it be transferred ‘from the parlour to the cabinet.’ The Bowdlers had launched a minor industry. By 1850 there were seven rival expurgated Shakespeares; by 1900 there were nearly 50. Not until 1916, when he was finally debunked in the English Review, did Bowdler's version of Shakespeare lose its authority.

Shakespeare, then, takes his place among the great slangsters. But let us not forget the Carry On stars with whom at least his humour seems to be running down similar lines. It is a truism that low comedians yearn to play the tragic greats. Sid James, of course, did play Marc Antony, albeit in Carry On Cleo (Kenneth Williams was Julius Caesar.) It may be, however, that we have it arse-about face. Hamlet, had he but known, might have shone as Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond or the Rumpo Kid.

So exit, if not pursued by a bear, but by yet more doubles entendres.

Malvolio: By my life, this is my lady’s hand: these be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s; and thus makes she her great P’s.

Shakespeare Twelfth Night (1600)

Stuart Farquhar (Kenneth Williams): Please, Miss Plunkett, you’re squashing my itinerary.
Moira Plunkett (Gail Granger): Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I keep on forgetting what a big girl I am now.
Stuart Farquhar: Quite, shall we get them out now?
Moira Plunkett: Why, Mr Farquhar!
Stuart Farquhar: The people for the coach, I mean.
Moira Plunkett: Oh, those. Yes, of course.

Rothwell Carry On Abroad 1972

Stuart Farquhar. Plus ça bleedin’ change, eh.