Riding Saint george?

A lively guide to five centuries of English slang and profanity is a necessary counterblast to PC’s suppression of language

vulgar tongues An Alternative history of english Slang Max Décharné Serpent’s Tail 2016 Hb, 400pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781846685613

Hear the word ‘superfly’ and what image comes to mind? Ron O’Neal in a white fedora, doublebreasted Bri-Nylon suit and long shoes, standing beside his customised Cadillac Eldorado? His extravagant attire, the calling card of his profession, is a clue to the epithet’s origins in the 18th century, when it was first applied to anyone who was knowing or streetwise – a dandy highwayman, a member of the Hellfire Club or, perhaps, Jack Harris ‘Pimp General of all England’, whose landmark publication List of Covent Garden Ladies was published yearly from 1757 to 1795 as a guide for the buck-about-town to the attractions of the many ‘vaulting houses’ of the locale.

Such is the detailed delight in which Max Décharné charts the progress of profanity through this tome, from Elizabethan origins in Thomas Harman’s 1567 A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones through the criminal justice system, theatre, showground and music hall, military dormitory and cottage chatter of lizzies and queens to the Roger’s Profanisaurus of today. As well as identifying these groups – and their interconnecting Venn diagrams of popular music, pulp fiction, recreational libations and the sex industry – as the wellspring of his subject, Décharné’s discourse is rich with regional variations. He traces the origins of Rap to Richard Blakeborough’s 1898 Wit, Character Folklore & Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire (Rap, n, A friendly chat Ex. —Cu’ thi waays, an’ lets ’ev a pipe an’ a bit o’ rap.) and takes a Cockney walkabout with Ronnie Barker, Reggie Kray, Robin Cook, Frank Norman and Keith Moon, all of whom have made their contributions to the cataloguing of Rhyming Slang.

The entertainment to be found within this etymology is legion, but Décharné also has serious points to make about the creeping suppression of language through political correctness.

This is a timely reminder of Orwell’s warning, via the everdecreasing Newspeak Dictionary in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which aims to boil language down to one single word that: “might bring joy to the heart of any would-be dictator” but “attack the very impulse which gives rise to slang; a type of speech which revels in multiple layers of meaning and alternative readings of familiar words.”

Luckily for us, Décharné is a master of the manifold, who wields a light touch over a heavy amount of research. His parallel careers as a musician and expert on noir film and fiction make him particularly good on the jazz origins of so much jive. His list of singles from 1921 to 1945 presents the terms ‘rock ’n’ roll’, ‘reefer’, ‘cat’ and ‘groovy’ long before they came into common usage, many of them the legacy of band leader Cab Calloway, who produced his own Hepster’s Dictionary in 1938 that rapidly infused the pages of crime fiction with “the wisdom of illicit possibilities”. But Décharné is just as good marshalling the military: the chapter on how soldiers, sailors and airmen used slang as their shield is as moving as it is amusing. After all, from these deadpan ranks rose Eric Partridge, “arguably the greatest slang lexicographer of the twentieth century”.

The many kinks in the course of cant are acknowledged by the author, whose previous foray into the field, 2000’s Straight From the Fridge, Dad: A Dictionary of Hipster Slang now shares shelfspace with the dreaded Hipster Handbook, Robert Lanham’s 2002 guide to geekery that would spawn the Shoreditch Tosser. “Sometimes the hip word of today will turn unexpectedly into the embarrassingly square world of tomorrow,” he says, helpfully providing the origins of the word ‘geek’ as a performer from the American freakshow whose job it was to bite the heads off chickens.

It is the computer geeks of today whom the author fears will fulfill Orwell’s prophecy. In closing, he summons his spirit guide, Captain Francis Grose, whose 1785 Classical Dictionary of The Vulgar Tongue catalogued all the words Dr Johnson’s contemporaneous Dictionary of the English Language did not, thus evoking: “the realities of that time far more honestly than the corporate-speak and PC euphemisms of today could ever reflect our own”. He imagines this Admiral of the Narrow Seas posting drunken boasts of Riding St George and being lynched by Twitter users before the monitoring secret services can silence him.

Can we keep our sayings schtum now that Big Brother is watching us all? Décharné’s work ably demonstrates that the creation of slang is something hardwired in us, the need to mock suppression being the mother of its invention – one brilliant argument for never keeping a civil tongue.

Fortean Times Verdict

A Towering Monument to the Mother tongue 9