A phone-call from a very dear and very long-time pal. No names, no pack-drill1 and all that but aside from his primary job and a social life that would leave the likes of Brenda Frazier, Paris Hilton and even Jackie O herself gasping in his dust, he is also, it transpires, what I choose to term an ‘obituary whisperer’. Or to quote himself, albeit in précis, ‘I warn the obituary desk that so-and-so is looking a bit peaky and maybe they ought to start de-dusting the file in question.’ I love it. So would Mayhew2 and definitely Dickens who missed a trick by failing to find at least a walk-on for such a fellow. Cruikshank, whether during or post-alcoholism, would surely have done the illustrative honours.
He too had received a call. If he had previously alerted the paper in question to any alleged peakiness on my behalf he wasn’t telling me. Nor, beyond all the ailments that accompany advancing geriatry, did I feel any more than usually lousy. It appeared that I would be getting at least one obit. Is it wrong, paradoxically since one will never read it, to be, yes egocentrically, pleased.3 I have, over the years, written a few. Largely in putting together the greatest biographical hits of colleagues in what was once termed the ‘underground’, the ‘counter-culture’ and most absurdly of all, the ‘alternative society’4.
The questions that my friend was asked to elucidate were, I suppose, what one might expect, though two at least were less predictable if undeniably job-specific. Father and mother’s names and jobs, children’s names and jobs. So far so boilerplate. Then something at least a little off-piste: ‘How many words for penis does the database currently hold?’ The answer (I quickly searched) is 1,641. And might their gatherer have a couple of favourites? The answer here was harder - every one of slang’s terms being, as it were, my best-beloveds - but I have long-since prepared answers for the lexicography’s equivalent of banalities that might have been fired at a Sixties popstar.5
Have I regaled you with my top pops, genus cocks?6 The first was short-lived, I could only find in it in a couple of satirical pamphlets that were penned to spur on the rivals engaging in the English Civil War, but slang works via stereotypes, and for me clatterdevengeance does the biz. The clatter suggests macho ‘noise’, the vengeance the misogyny that permeates slang, especially of the sexual sort. The ostentation of the manosphere, all tats, tits and trafficking. Suffice it to say that in the 17th century anecdote from which I plucked it, the peccant part was within a dick-stroke (epitomizing speed and brevity) of severance.
My second choice was random but not without its own stereotypicality. In this case it is one-eyed trouser-snake, one of 22 penis synonyms that the late Barry Humphries used and/or created and placed within the Fosters-guzzling lips of his ‘nice type’ of Aussie bloke Barry McKenzie. Bazza appeared in Private Eye in 1964. I was a loyal, if still naive reader by then. I lapped up the great man’s slang. Whether Humphries invented it or not, many years would pass before I did the necessary research. What I would find that while a good deal was sourced from existing material or at least the imagery that lies beneath it7 Humphries understood the role of stereotypes in slang imagery and coined dozens of neologisms that fitted perfectly into the established lexical patterns. That would be in the future, but can I really believe that my teenage meetings with technicolor yawns, beef bayonets, the bearded clam and drilling for Vegemite didn’t play some role in directing me to the track I’ve been trudging for the last 40-odd years. The dirty brick road? Perhaps; certainly there was a stop-off at Oz.8 Thanks, Bazza, yer blood’s worth bloody bottlin’.
Forgive what may seem to be swanking. It is, I trust, an ass-backwards variety and unloved by GDoS in every example but the adjectival where the usual put-down definitions permit a single by-way to ‘classy, sophisticated’ and often refers to places. It is not of that I write, believe me.
I have friends who are real achievers, those who adorn Who’s Who and similar: Nash Treasure, one, surely, of a kind and his ‘every line an epigram’, the graphic designer Rotring ‘Ten-A’ Scalpel, Royal Designer for Industry FRSA, Baroness Eponym, as great as she is good, and vice versa, and the learned list of Professors, each one an ornament of high table at Cleverclogs College. All these, and more whom I have been so lucky as to know, yes, I get it: they deserve the gongs, the glittering prizes and appearing with the speed of a semitic burial, the posthumous write-ups.
But moi? The kosher (well, when convenient) Mr Piggy of the party?9 The response I seek is Gertcha! though the database could undoubtedly throw up some coarser synonyms. As I say, I’ve written these things, and you really couldn’t make it up. Seriously. The word is substance. Anecdote, opinion, assessment, action, events. Something for the readers to chew on. I am not saying verifiable truth, like certain items of slang etymology one can only reach for such perfection, but a record is useful. As for me, I see a life in which, childhood and education disposed of, followed by the embarrassing attempt at bildungsroman-erie that was one’s twenties, once turned thirty, the available paths coalesced and became one. Like such as P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, I found what I could do, and have spent the rest of my life doing it.10
That said, what could I offer. Good times, good friends, much gratitude, but why do we, all right me, prioritise the downsides. That moment at Jane ___ ’s party c.1957 when, hearing her mother upbraiding her, I offered to summon ‘my gang’ and execute punishment on the birthday girl. No more party invites for me that year. A raft of bêtises that, blinded by Brideshead, I substituted for the syllabus at university. Rejections, subjections, dejections of many varieties. Slang didn’t wholly shut that door behind me, but like Rider Haggard’s great Umslopogaas in Allan Quartermain, helped erect some degree of sheltering barrier. The phrase is ‘one good place’.
In the calculus of great personal moments, I doubt that what sends my heart (always over-susceptible to the usual stimuli, and an ill-tuned, pacemaker-driven organ for some time now) a-beating would register on many others’ listicles. As those who note the posts that back up the database’s regular updates will be aware, it’s all about pushing back those ‘first recorded uses’. Far less the itemisation of the latest youthful coinages. I used to mock my predecessor Eric Partridge for his inability to ‘get’ things modern, his immersion in counter-linguistic antiquity. I’ve outlived the old boy now and my eyes are similarly focused. We learn, but most that means far too late. ‘Empty vessels…’ as an acquaintance once characterized me.
That relentless verbosity may be recalled, the obituarising euphemists recast it as ‘a tireless raconteur’ (real life opts for ‘gobshite’) but I’m not sure if I qualify for any of those other kindnesses that, with traditional piety, mask the gruesome truths. ‘Didn’t suffer fools gladly’? more likely one of their company; ‘confirmed bachelor’? not even an experimenting one; ‘vivacious’ and fun-loving’? ones for the girls, I believe; ‘colourful’, ‘larger than life’, ‘lived life to the fullest’? much depended on the moment’s ‘recreational’ additives, but generally I lacked the guts.
In any case, even were livelier anecdotes on offer, who would I trust to retail them? Long since, I assembled an oral history of London’s hippie Sixties. I talked to some hundred-plus movers and shakers and it’s a book of which I remain proud. All sorts of goodies, but consistency of reminiscence? No matter: little minds, hobgoblins, forget it. And back then the interviewees were only in their forties. It’s seventies now for such as survive and do you think anyone’s memories have improved? A friend recently regaled me with memories of a trip we had made, he was certain, to a gig sometime around 1975. If you say so, squire, and far be it from me, but while I claim no omniscience, I sure as fuck don’t remember minute one.
I collected a slim vol. of Famous Last Words in 1979, I don’t expect to add my own. I’ve opted for the crematorium so no gravestones required. For now, let’s go for this: Mister Slang: he knew a load of words for prick; he tried - reader, you play the judge - not to be one.
Something one might bet came out of Kipling’s Soldiers Three (can’t you see the Mian Mir cantonment at Lahore c. 1885) but the OED has no usage prior to 1903 (GDoS follows Oxford who label the phrase ‘colloquial’ and thus excludes it), and his military tales appear in 1890. No matter, the pack was that of a soldier, and loaded with some heavy burden (stones?), the basis of an army punishment in which the guilty man was drilled while thus encumbered. In the negative form it suggests that silence, ‘no sneaking’ as they say at school, would avoid such punishment.
Based on the cads, bounders, prossers, remittance men and similar that I meet in an unending stream while researching the era’s slang, I would that he had added one more volume to London Labour’s four (‘those that will work, those that can’t work’, etc) to be entitled: ‘those that, frankly, dear boy, would prefer not to work but what can one do?’
The accepted form is to murmur, ‘nothing to do with me, but a welcome tribute to slang.’ And you know, that’s just how I see it.
Purely coincidentally bluesky alerted me, just last week, to the screening of an episode of the long-gone BBC documentary and current affairs prog. Man Alive. In this case the episode was entitled ‘The Alternative Press’ and, with an admirable, if necessarily limited nod to what would become DEI, focused not just on the London mob, but beyond the metropole (and beyond hippiedom too). There were various pals, they are all dead. And yes, some at least received obits.
My favourite colour, for what it is worth, is blue. Is anyone really surprised. Covid, which I never consciously had but which I am informed must, surreptitiously, have had me, robbed me of too much taste to essay anything in the culinary line, though I do like a cheese that one has to chase down as in its glorious ripeness it proceeds unaided across the table.
The list as of maybe 2015 is here: https://timelinesofslang.com/penisct.html. Aside from the Penis the timeline may be investigated for the Large Penis, Small Penis, Erect Penis, Impotence, Circumcision, Foreskin / Glans, Testicles and terms for the threesome of Male Genitals. One may click through and get the GDoS text.
For instance, GDoS has snake, albeit trouserless, on record as penis since 1673; one-eyed, at this stage coupled with stag and set alongside Adam’s dagger, around 1775; the one-eyed rattlesnake joins them in 1940. As for the trousers, the trouser serpent enters the building around 1863 and the trouser trout in 1985; the zipper fish and pant python, both equally monocular, appear in the 1990s.
As are Wilde and Dorothy Parker for otherwise unattributed but snappy one-liners, the creator of Dame Edna and Sir Les is the go-to bloke for Australian slang coinages. Sometimes so, e.g. percy and the porcelain, and the lonely bastard on Father’s Day, but sometimes no. Shake hands with the unemployed, for instance, sounds a shoo-in but it ain’t First current recording is 1952 and not even Australian. The journal Western Folkore teams it with gotta go see a Chinaman about a music lesson, …fix the furnace and check on the stew for what it coyly defines as ‘temporary absence’.
The fount of Antipodean slang, of course, but also the London-based magazine, hugely notorious c. 1971.
Long before Sesame Street, and in thrall to Lord of the Flies, the book and maybe movie too, I wrote a piece for my school magazine entitled, ‘I am Piggy’. I don’t imagine I really meant it, but it was pleasingly counter-stereotype, or so I believed until I found the many equations of Jews and pigs/pork thrown up by slang. There was, perhaps, an accompanying cartoon. Perhaps, I neither know nor any longer care.
Setting aside even so nugatory a comparison to such superstars, this is still foolhardy: what exactly is ‘the rest of my life’. My dream, as often voiced, is that final moment, still at the desk, fingers, however gnarled and shaky, still entering some juicy citation, still at work. The reality…to borrow the old line: old age is not for sissies or cowards or wimps or whatever other brand of weakling. As for the coiner, btw, the excellent Quote Investigator has (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/12/02/aged/) checked it out. The actress Bette Davis, the popular favourite, sported a pillow embroidered with the line. But that was noted in 1983. QI’s best shot is a 1968 vignette in Reader’s Digest, with an old lady uttering the line to a table of similarly aged pals. I heard it from the then ‘senior’ mother of a friend, I dunno, it must have been around 1980.
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