Lost English Read online

  LOST ENGLISH

  By the same author:

  Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The reason behind the rhyme (2004)

  Cross River Traffic: A history of London’s bridges (2009)

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Michael O’Mara Books Limited

  9 Lion Yard

  Tremadoc Road

  London SW4 7NQ

  This electronic edition published in 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-843178255 in ePub format

  ISBN: 978-1-843178248 in Mobipocket format

  ISBN: 978-1-843172789 in hardback print format

  Copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 2009

  Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge all copyright holders. Any errors or omissions that may have occurred are inadvertent, and anyone with any copyright queries is invited to write to the publishers, so that a full acknowledgement may be included in subsequent editions of this work.

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Cover design by www.blacksheep-uk.com

  Designed and typset by David Sinden

  www.mombooks.com

  To everyone who helped, which is pretty much everyone – so thanks.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  ADC (aide-de-camp)

  Aggro

  Antimacassar

  Arriviste

  Aunt Sally

  Ayah

  Badinage

  Bagatelle

  Baker day

  Baksheesh

  Ban the Bomb

  Bassinet (sometimes bassinette)

  Bathing dress

  Beano

  Besom

  Best bib and tucker

  Birkenhead drill

  Black and Tans

  Black cap

  Blimp

  Blotting paper

  Blue

  Bob

  Bobby-soxer

  Boche

  Bohemia

  Brick

  Brilliantine

  British warm

  Brownie

  Buggins’s turn

  Bully beef

  Capital!

  Char and a wad

  Charabanc

  Character

  Churching

  Colour bar

  Combination

  Confirmed bachelor

  Co-respondent

  Cosmopolitanism

  Counterpane

  Courting

  Cove

  Darby and Joan

  Dear John (letter)

  Dekko

  Dolly

  Dolly bird

  Domestic

  Donkey jacket

  Doodlebug

  Doolally tap

  Dottle

  Doxy

  Dry county

  Egg on your chin

  Eiderdown

  Fancy goods

  Flicks (US: flickers)

  Four-eyes

  Galloping consumption

  Galoshes

  Gasper

  Gauleiter

  Gay

  Gimcrack

  Gin and It

  Halfpenny, ha’porth

  Ham-and-egg shift

  Hardtack

  Heath Robinson

  Here’s how!

  High days and holidays

  Home Service and Light Programme

  Hugger-mugger

  Indian giver

  Invacar

  Jam sandwich (or jam butty)

  Jerrycan (sometimes jerrican)

  Joey

  Knickerbockers

  Lascar

  Liberty bodice

  Lily-livered

  Lord Haw-Haw

  LSD

  Lucifer

  Lyons Corner Houses

  Magic lantern

  Matinee idol

  Milk bars

  Mods and Rockers

  Mrs Grundy

  Mufti

  Never in a month of Sundays

  Nice as ninepence, As

  Nippy

  Nit nurse

  None of your beeswax

  Nosy parker

  Not all beer and skittles

  Oojah

  Ottoman

  Parade

  Parthian shot

  Pell-mell

  Penny chew

  Pin money

  Pithead ballot

  Poodlefaker

  Pooh-pooh

  Pop (bottle of)

  Portmanteau

  Pound in your pocket, the

  Pully hawly

  Punchcard

  Puttee

  Quart

  Queer Street (to be on)

  Rachmanism

  Radiogram

  Rapscallion

  Rot or tommyrot

  Rozzer

  Rubber Johnny

  Rules OK

  Rum

  Running-board

  Sawbones

  Serge

  Shanks’s mare or Shanks’s pony (to go by)

  Shindy

  Sire

  Slide rule

  Spend a penny

  Spirit duplicator

  Spooning

  Sport

  Sputnik

  Stamps and coupons

  Street Arab

  Street cred

  Student power

  Tanner

  To boot

  Toilet

  Tommy

  Tonic

  Touch of the tar brush

  Trolleybus

  Tube

  Tumblers

  Tussie-mussie

  U and Non-U

  UB40

  Vapours (an attack of the)

  Veranda

  Washing boards

  Wayfarer

  Well, he would [say that], wouldn’t he?

  What the dickens!

  Whitehouse, Mary

  Wireless

  Wizard

  Woolton Pie

  Wrong side of the blanket (to be born on the)

  Xerox

  Yellow press

  Yob

  Z reservists

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INTRODUCTION

  English has the largest vocabulary of any language in the world. This may be because English has a magpie-like tendency to adopt words from pretty much anywhere as well as having been shaped by successive waves of invaders, bringing with them Danish, Anglo-Saxon and French words. Lost English reveals how some of those words have evolved and how others betray where the English themselves have invaded, or traded. The need for administrators in the far-flung corners of the British Empire meant that many Indian and Asian terms eventually made their way back home (ayah, dekko, mufti and veranda, qq.v., amongst others) and were absorbed into mainstream English. Similarly, trade links with China, the Middle East and Africa brought with them not only British prosperity, but a richer and more vibrant language, with words such as baksheesh (q.v.).

  However, as new words and phrases come into the language, so others fall into disuse. Over the past thirty years there seems to have been quite a cull as Britain has reassessed its relationship with the rest of the world, and in particular the countries of the former British Empire. This, and the demilitarization of British society with the end of National Service in the 1960s, left a slew of terms adrift in the lan
guage whose use has dwindled and all but disappeared. A shame in many ways, as life must have been made richer when people referred to ‘poodlefakers’, ‘rum coves’ and ‘knickerbockers’.

  Many of the words and concepts in this book will be distantly familiar to the reader, who may even use them in conversation from time to time – either ironically or deliberately to invoke a rather archaic tone. However, they are no longer part of everyday language, even though they may have been common until well into the last half of the twentieth century. Some are, as mentioned above, the victims of huge socio-economic events, whilst others lost out to changing fashion, social attitudes and new technologies.

  In the latter case, the words are doomed to extinction because, quite simply, the objects and practices they describe have become obsolete. Other ‘lost’ words occasionally make a comeback – and one of the dangers of writing a book like this is that one is setting oneself up for a fall. A hundred and fifty years ago the word ‘crap’ (meaning husk or waste product) would certainly have been included in a nineteenth-century version as no one in England used it any more. However, the confluence of two unrelated events that affected the lives (directly or indirectly) of everyone in Britain brought this word back in the early twentieth century.

  In the early part of Queen Victoria’s reign Mr Thomas Crapper perfected his flushing toilet at his workshop in Chelsea. He adopted the slogan ‘a certain flush with every pull’ and his lavatories sold across Britain. No one thought there was anything risible about this until the First World War, when American troops came over to the UK in their thousands. In the US the word crap was not obsolete and was used pretty much in its modern sense. Naturally the GIs thought it was hilarious, yet curiously logical, that they could take a crap in a crapper. So, in what etymologists refer to as a backwards formation, Crapper was reunited with crap in the speech of his countryfolk, and the word reappeared in Britain. Its widespread social acceptability is also an example of more recent changing attitudes to swearing. This has meant a drop-off in the use of muted oaths such as ‘What the dickens!’ (q.v.) and ‘By Jove!’ in favour of older and more robust Anglo-Saxon alternatives.

  We live in an age with unparalleled access to information and easy storage and dissemination of that knowledge. We also live at a time of incredibly rapid change and this is reflected in the turnover of words as well, particularly as technologies move on and social structures shift. The latter in particular has resulted in words like ‘character’ (in the sense of a reference), ‘beano’ and ‘brownie’ (qq.v.) which, while never quite falling out of use, have seen their primary associations shift. Even relatively newly minted words and phrases can quickly become archaic or mutate to survive, as the examples of ‘video’ and ‘yuppie’ highlight. Despite the fact that it is hard to buy a video player and that the tapes have been replaced by DVDs (a technology unlikely to survive half the time that videos did), bands still release promotional videos, while films downloaded from the Internet are still referred to as videos. Yuppies, on the other hand, have vanished linguistically.

  Yuppies were, if not exactly a new class, certainly indicative of many of the changes brought about since the 1980s in such things as financial security and, well, lifestyle (a word that has really come into its own this century). This before mentioning their key impact on the workforce and economy which has been transformed, whether one regards this as good or bad, over the past generation or so by yuppie values, and by politicians who shared those values. Politicians have, however, had a much more profound impact on spoken English in other areas, most notably with regard to what is usually referred to as incitement or inflammatory speeches. Nobody mourns the casually wounding terms used about sexual or ethnic minorities that were prevalent until quite recently, but equally the restricting of reasonable debate for fear of giving offence is an increasing worry to many sensible people, as well as to reactionary parrots in the ‘yellow press’ (q.v.).

  It’s odd that the phrase ‘yellow press’ (like the word ‘reactionary’, for that matter) has fallen from use, as we live in a golden age of exactly that. This is not the place for a discussion about the impact of mass media on contemporary culture vis-à-vis previous eras, except to say that how we speak and the words we use are changing more rapidly due to the sheer amount of (often conflicting) media sources in our lives.

  They could just be hastening the evolution of language, which has been tracked back almost 30,000 years by scientists at Reading University. These researchers (using a high-powered computer known as ThamesBlue) discovered that identity words like ‘I’ and ‘we’, along with numbers and basic questions such as ‘why?’ are among the oldest. They also claim to be able to predict which are likely to disappear soon, including such seemingly safe ones as ‘dirty’, ‘guts’ and ‘squeeze’. Apparently it is all down to which take the longest to evolve, usually numerals followed by nouns. After these come verbs and adjectives, with conjunctions and prepositions developing fastest of all.

  From the speed of a word’s or a phrase’s evolution can be calculated its half-life; basically, the faster one arrives, the faster it leaves. This is good news if one wants to see the back of irritating modern terms; ‘homer’ and ‘hardworking families’ could die out tomorrow and it wouldn’t be a moment too soon. However, it will be a shame if the deeply useful ‘telly-clapping’ doesn’t get a decent innings:

  Telly clapping: Phenomenon whereby television viewers of a live sporting or other event applaud, shout and even chant as if their behaviour could possibly have any impact on the contests shown great distances away, when actually they are effectively applauding the medium through which it appears. Most often used dismissively about football fans of the SKY Four Clubs, who very often have never been to a live match and get their songs from the Internet and opinions from radio phone-in shows.

  The point is that words come and go, and this book celebrates some of the most popular to have vanished – or at least to have fallen out of common usage – over the past couple of decades. They reflect, too, a lost Britain of different customs, leisure pursuits, modes of communication, curious slang and idioms, as well as the day-to-day experiences of ordinary people. In some ways this was a less strident, more innocent age, which I hope this book will allow the reader to visit.

  Who now goes out to a milk bar, or can buy a penny chew? How confused might you be if someone said ‘Charlie’s dead’ to you? If you found yourself beside a rum cove would you care? What would you do if approached by a Nippy? Could you order char and a wad in a Corner House, and if so, would a tanner cover the bill? If someone suggested the flicks, would you first take a dekko at the posters advertising the show? And would you think to order a gin and It afterwards, or take precautions with a rubber Johnny?

  All these and more are to be found in Lost English, which gives you an opportunity to visit a vanished world that seemed to disappear while we switched the wireless from the Home and Overseas Services to digital.

  CHRIS ROBERTS

  London, July 2009

  ADC (aide-de-camp)

  Even those with the most rudimentary grasp of French might guess that this is someone who helps in the running of a camp. An ADC is a sort of personal assistant who ensures that things run smoothly on behalf of a person of high rank. Originally a military term but the usage broadened out to any sort of leading personal aide, though in some places it is little more than an honorary title with the holder’s chief duties being ceremonial. The role is that of an all-purpose fixer operating, in some circumstances, alongside and sometimes over other command structures, whose loyalty is to the individual in charge rather than the organization as a whole. This can set up tensions and often in literature the ADC is a slightly sleazy character used to spy on other employees. With the post-war demilitarization of society and ending of National Service the word has retreated to the military and diplomatic circles it originated from. Not that it was an entirely cushy job, as Captain Hugh Sayers, ADC to the Governor of Bermuda,
discovered in 1973 when he was murdered alongside his boss, Sir Richard Sharples, and the latter’s Great Dane, Horsa. The killers were hanged, provoking two days of rioting on the island.

  Aggro

  During what has been described as the ‘golden age of soccer violence’ the chant ‘A-G, A-G-R, A-G-R-O, AGRO!’ (sic) would be the prelude to fighting, while (depending on the area) the refrain of ‘Geordie aggro! Geordie aggro! Hello! Hello!’ might act as a commentary once it had started. The word is a corruption of ‘aggravation’ and used to describe violent activities mainly, though not exclusively, associated with football grounds. The word, like its lumpen-shod, crop-headed practitioners (‘boot boys’ or ‘bovver boys’), disappeared in the early 1980s as the old guard were replaced by the smart casuals, who preferred to speak of ‘the business’, ‘tearing up’, ‘coming on top’ or ‘going toe-to-toe’ when referring to their violent activities. Nevertheless, the word still survives on walls in run-down areas where councils clearly have limited budgets for graffiti removal.

  Antimacassar

  A cloth to keep hair oil off the covers on the backs of chairs, sofas or anywhere else a head might be lain. Antimacassars can still be seen in passenger aircraft and on trains, though rarely called by their proper name, and were first widely introduced in theatres in 1865. The word derives from Macassar oil, used as a hair dressing, and originally made with ingredients exported from Makassar (now Ujang Padang), the chief port of the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. This popular hair treatment emerged in the early nineteenth century, though the means to combat its effects (the antimacassar) did not appear until 1850. The hair dressing was invented by a Mr Rowland of Hatton Garden – the famous diamond-trading district near Holborn in London – and is described by the Oxford English Dictionary as an unguent for the hair. It even made its way into literature as an interesting rhyme in Byron’s Don Juan:

  In Virtues nothing earthly could surpass her

  Save thine ‘incomparable Oil’, Macassar!

  Arriviste

  Like the similar parvenu (also French; literally, latecomer) this refers to a person who gains a position of power and influence without having ‘paid their dues’, and is consequently seen as not quite up to the job or, at best, unproven. It has fallen out of use in a social climate where mobility within the class structure is regarded as a virtue and something positive, rather than viewed with suspicion (often tinged with contempt). The arriviste would once have been seen as something of a bounder but today, given a general veneration of the new coupled with a love of change, the word has ceased to have a useful role.