The Too-Vulgar Tongue
The Counter-Linguistic Delicacies of a Militia Captain
[This, somewhat shorter, was originally created for the blog Strong Language and as a self-indulgent paean to my then-recent purchase (no-one more shocked than myself) of a first edition of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, within which were bound a large number of manuscript pages, either adding new or updating old material, the bulk of which would, three years later, provide many new and revised additions to the 1785 edition. I remain the current possessor of this wonderful volume, and my hero Grose remains the star of my profession. I am unashamedly proud to be its custodian, however temporary that role must prove.]
Francis Grose (1731-91), the militia-captain, antiquarian, and, most pertinent to our discussions, author of three editions – 1785, 1788 and 1796 – of that epochal slang dictionary The Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, was, as illustrations underline, pleasingly aptronymic. Butchers, it was claimed, vied to proclaim his custom. He may (though disappointingly probably may not) have been strapped to his bed every night, lest were the weight of the Captain’s stomach to edge its way floorwards, it might be pursued by the rest of him. A man of flesh, he seems, perhaps indicative of his milieu and its era, to represent an alternative sense of gross: if not wholly coarse, then undoubtedly bearing a pronounced inclination for matters distinctly corporeal.
Over his three editions he offers us 17 terms for penis (arbor vitae, matrimonial peacemaker, sugar-stick), 37 for vagina (crinkum-crankum, dumb glutton, the monosyllable), 56 for sexual intercourse (hump, pray with one’s knees upwards, shag) and 5 for gay sex (backgammon, fun, larking). Brothels, whores, madames and pimps are all available. Jokes, puns, metaphors, Latinisms, euphemisms literary or otherwise abound. And there is ‘C**t the κοννώ of the Greek and the Cunnus of Latin Dictionaries, a Nasty name for a Nasty thing.’ Then we have ‘Burning shame, a lighted candle stuck into the parts of a woman, certainly not intended by nature for a candlestick.’ (The explanatory comment being appended, just in case we were uncertain, for the later editions.) Or ‘Nickumpoop, or nincumpoop, a foolish fellow; also one who never saw his wife’s ****.’ Predictably sexist stuff, but the Captain, we can safely say, is no prude.
He was also, perhaps ordained by his captaincy, a patriot unashamed, though one hopes of a more civilised variety than that decried by his acquaintance Samuel Johnson. Where Johnson, whose English Dictionary had been commissioned in part to challenge the relatively recently convened Académie française and prove the superiority of the English language, had stepped back from overt linguistic nationalism, Grose saw his ‘vulgar tongue’ as an essential badge of the bulldog breed. No mincing frogs and simpering toads this side of the Channel. Say it as you find it and if that was rough, coarse, leavened with slang and washed down with a rump and a dozen, so be it.
And yet.
With the success of the 1785 publication of the dictionary’s first edition, Grose began making notes towards what would be a second, much expanded edition in 1788. These manuscript additions have been fortuitously bound into Grose’s own copy of the original work. On the whole and albeit with slight alterations – mainly stylistic and duly smoothed away by his editor before publication – these notes simply prefigure the 1788 expansion. But not all. There are 47 entries that never leave these tipped-in pages.
Some have no sexual inference. Among them let go an anchor to the windward of the law: to keep within the letter of the law; blue as a razor: drunk; busy as the devil in a high wind: very busy; calabash: the head; chaffer: the tongue; a screw loose: something wrong. Not all are new, and some would reappear in posthumous takes on Grose, such as Pierce Egan’s edition of 1821, but Grose himself having noted them down, apparently forgot them. Perhaps they simply fell between the cracks.
But ten additions, effectively 20% of the omissions, seem to have been excised rather than forgotten. I list them in A-Z order.
A—se Men. Sodomites [sic]. Said also to belong to Captain Jones’ Company. Invaders of the Back settlements.
Arse man does not re-emerge until 1971, transmuted to the US spelling, ass man, and probably in heterosexual use, i.e. the antithesis of the leg man (or tit man). The first gay use (Bruce Rodgers’ compendium of 1972 does not have it) is in an on line gay slang dictionary of 1989. And even there the sense is of preference rather than, as Grose suggests, penetration. As for Captain Jones, might this have been the payment of a personal score?1 The invaders… are of course a typical pun, cognate with such as gentleman of the backdoor, rear admiral and so on.
Cream Pots or Juggs Womens Breasts.
Remarkably, what one might have imagined to be a staple of smut, only exists in one other example. Enshrined in the New Swells Night Guide of 1846, one of many similar vade mecum’s for neophyte sporting gents abroad in the Metropolis, it is worth perusal (and with help, translation):
As soon as he saw the grog’ums in the steppers, her legs trembled; he was on to her [...] and had his stretchers round her tripe-box, and copped her rumbo, and stalled her from a downey – sucked her jowl; fammed her cream-jugs, and shouted – ‘Give her some pawney’.
Diddle [...] also something else, to be guessed, not written. I slipt her a Jorum of Diddle.
All editions include diddle as gin, but despite the jorum (a drinking vessel in standard English), it is ‘to be guessed, not written’ and thus confirms the sniggering. Diddle, to have sex, had been established since around 1635 but the noun, which would also come to mean vagina, and intercourse, had not evolved. Again, a near-solitary example of the term which does not reappear, and there in the context of small boys, until the late 19th century. Like the earlier Pearl, Oyster and others, the Cremorne (named for the louche pleasure gardens situated at Lots Road, Chelsea) provided the usual diet of insinuating, smutty soft porn. Thus in 1882:
‘I had only seen the innocent little ‘diddles’ of the black picaninnies.’
Eight-Eyed Monster, a Woman who has Two Eyes, two Bub Eyes a Bell-Eye, two popes Eyes and a Cun-eye.
Another labored Grosean pun, perhaps culled from a contemporary riddle. It failed to make the book; yet he had no problems with the reasonably similar gormagon: ‘A monster with six eyes, three mouths, four arms, eight legs, five on one side and three on the other, three arses, two tarses, and a **** [i.e. cunt] upon its back; a man on horseback, with a woman behind him.’2 (The Ancient Noble Order of the Gormagons was a short-lived 18th century secret society, possibly charitable, and certainly anti-Freemasonry.) Grose also offers the seven-sided animal: A one-eyed man or woman, each having a right side and a left side, a fore side and a back side, an outside, an inside, and a blind side.
Goose Neck & Giblets. A Mans tackle. She longd for a Goose Neck and Giblets, for the Child carries the Mark, i.e. she is delivered of a Son.
Turkey neck is common but not goose’s neck which seems to be a Grose special. (Though perhaps we should note this from John Heywood’s Proverbs (1546) ‘Set the hares [i.e. whore’s] head against the gose jiblet. She is (quoth he) bent to fors you perfors / To know, that the grey mare is the better hors’ i.e. the woman runs the relationship). Especially as regards its one-off pairing with giblets, although for slang the illustrative use is positively domestic rather than openly sexual. Other exemplars of the genital threesome, though later than Grose, include Christ and the two apostles, musket and bandoliers, okra and prunes, twig and berries and two dots and a dash.
Knocker the Penis
Only Motteux, in his 1696 translation of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel had come up with this one: ‘I perceived that every cock of the game used to call his doxy his hatchet; for with that same tool (this he said lugging out and exhibiting his nine-inch knocker) they so soundly and resolutely shove and drive in.’ The canonical nine inches would be immortalized by Grose’s friend Robert Burns with his paeans to ‘nine-inch men’ and their ‘sonsie pintle’ but the lexicographer kept things un-competitive.
Nonsense, a Girl playing with a dead man’s penis.
One imagines a tavern with drunken friends vying for obscene creativity. The Captain at, perhaps, his most truly gross and its omission was surely judicious. In print he preferred to define nonsense as ‘melting butter in a wig’. This may have hinted at smut – butter had meant semen since 1594 – but the unalloyed image is probably sufficient and in any case we have no record of wig meaning pubic hair until 1834.
go shove your mother’s sister’s devil. Another answer to Impertinent Instruction is Go Shove your mothers sisters devil, i.e. your Aunts ****.
Incomprehensible, or am I missing something? Shove does mean to fuck (Burns, again, uses it but it was long established) but devil, or certainly in slang, has never meant vagina and the usual trope has the devil-penis being inserted. Urquhart uses shove-devil in his great list of synonyms for the youthful Pantagruel’s penis, among them: ‘my lusty live sausage, my crimson chitterlin, rump-splitter, shove-devil, down right to it, stiff and stout, in and to, at her again, my coney-borrow-ferret, wily-beguiley, my pretty rogue.’
There is the devil’s bite, but this contraction of the vaginal muscles around the penis during intercourse is a staple of 19th rather than 18th century porn and whatever the date Grose would still have been doing some drastic reverse engineering.
Thing a Womans Commodity.
Again, far from a neologism, but Grose resists committing it to print. Yet all editions offer the nudge-nudgery of ‘Mr Thingstable, Mr Constable, a ludicrous affectation of delicacy in avoiding the first syllable in the title of that officer, which in sound has some similarity to an indecent monosyllable.’
_______________________
‘Batch and his master used frequently to start at midnight from the King’s Arms, in search of adventures. The Back Slums of St Giles’s were explored again and again; and the Captain and Batch made themselves as affable and jolly as the rest of the motley crew among the beggars, cadgers, thieves, etc., who at that time infested the ‘Holy Land’ [the ‘rookery’ of St Giles’s]. The ‘Scout-Kens’ [watch-houses], too, were often visited by them, on the ‘look-out’ for a bit of fun; and the dirty ‘smoke-pipes’ in Turnmill Street did not spoil the Captain’s taste in his search after character. Neither were the rough squad at St. Kitts, and ‘the sailor-boys cap’ring a-shore’ at Saltpetre Bank, forgotten in their nightly strolls....In short, wherever a ‘bit of life’ could be seen to advantage, or the ‘knowledge-box’ of the Captain obtain anything like a ‘new light’ respecting mankind, he felt himself happy, and did not think his time misapplied.’
Pierce Egan Introduction to his ‘revised and corrected’ edition of Grose (1823)
And if in dull reality he was tucked in by ten, who but a shit-breeched cake would care?
Print the legend!
No scores, merely a reference to reasonably recent history: one Capt. Robert Jones, who had been tried in July 1772 for ‘committing an unnatural and detestable crime on the person of Henry Francis Hay, a boy about thirteen years of age’; sentenced to death, Jones was pardoned by the King, and left the UK for France and latterly Turkey (for detail, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jones_(artilleryman))]
The N.Y. Mercury of 16 Feb. 1761, pipped him to the post: ‘This monster is larger than an Elephant, of a very uncommon shape, having three Heads, eight Legs, three Fundaments, two Male Members, and one Female Pudendum on the Rump. It is of various Colours, very beautiful, and makes a Noise like the conjunction of two or three Voices. It is held unlawful to kill it, and is said to live to a great Age. The Canadians could not give it a Name, ’till a very old Indian Sachem said, He remembered to have seen one when he was a boy, and his Father called it a gormagunt.’
A friend gave me an edition, and I ought to read a page every night...