The Slang Trap by Lydia Syson

What a terrible temptation for the historical novelist they are, those dictionaries of slang, enticing you seductively into worlds of rattling mumpers and snappish slubber-degullions. Hundreds have appeared over the centuries, rich mines of the most exhilarating treasures, the fantastic vocabulary of vagabonds and whores, sailors and thieves, mollies and swagmen, the language of canting crew and flashmen all there for the prigging. Sparkling lexical diamonds leap off the page at you, claiming vim and authenticity, begging to be borrowed. Surely they’re the salt and pepper of dialogue? Where else can we better hear the vulgar tongues of times past calling us loud and true? How endlessly beguiling they are. . .books like Hobson-Jobson (beloved of Rushdie, Stoppard and, surely, Amitav Ghosh) and the works of Francis Grose and Pierce Egan, which echo through the Newgate Novelists of the 1830s and straight into the gutter-speech of Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite.

Pierce Egan, Real Life in London, Vol 1 (1821)
University of Leicester, Special Collections 

If only it were that easy. Last week, I was in pursuit of an actual copy of Passing English of the Victorian, a Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang and Phrase. I’d already found it at the Internet Archive, but intrigued by the wealth of sources – D. cls (Dangerous Classes), Mus. Hall (Music Hall), Society, Stock Exchange, Theatrical … I hoped, if possible, to flick through paper rather than digital pages. The very first entry is A.D., an abreviation which you might once have found on a ballroom programme. It means ‘A Drink’, but one young lady, looking flirtatiously over a potential partner’s shoulder, could easily imagine that he is already engaged to another for that particular waltz. Towards the end of the same dictionary comes ‘Word-mongering’ – an expression apparently used by the press in 1878 ‘in critical scorn’ signifying ‘redundancy of description’. A danger indeed. Nothing in this particular dictionary is remotely relevant to the book I’m working on right now, and there was no ‘hard copy’ to be found there, but still the Philology, Slang shelves of the London Library had me hooked. 

From amongst dictionaries of Polari, Austral English, seafaring speak, Robert Graves’ essay on the future of swearing and a hilarious reprint of a genuine phrasebook of English as she is spoke, a sort of 19th century version of Google Translate compiled by a Portuguese educational entrepreneur who was clearly translating literally from French, I pulled out Julie Coleman’s magisterial A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries (OUP). The scales – of course – fell from my eyes.

‘‘The history of British cant and slang lexicography is long and frequently disreputable…Literary critics and historians seize upon them for background information, often without reference to the unreliability of their contents. Playwrights, poets, novelists, and film-makers turn to them for lively contemporary or period dialogue, equally unsuspecting that the word-lists might not be all they seem,” writes Coleman. Over four fascinating volumes, she teases out the knots in this ‘tangled tradition’, exposing the cheats and pilferers of the world of lexicography, rapping the knuckles of the undisciplined and unscholarly, and those who fail to take sufficient account of the complex social contexts in which real language presents itself.

Caveats abound. The father of canting lexicography turns out to be a man called Thomas Harman, who published a short glossary of beggars’ language in 1567 called Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors: “Here I set before the good reader the lewd, lousy language of these loitering lusks and lazy lorels, wherewith they buy and sell the common people as they pass through the country.”  His plan was to rid the land of its undeserving poor by exposing the tricks and disguises of England’s rogues and beggars. 

John Camden Hotten's Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words
 goes one better and offers a map of cant symbols. His publishing house became Chatto and Windus.

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries glossaries, word-lists, and catalogues of slang from cant to flash multiplied. Their authors seemed to prig from each other as much as they did from the streets, back-alleys and gambling dens. By the mid-nineteenth century, Coleman finds attitudes had changed: ‘No longer menacing and thrilling glimpses of an exciting underworld, slang terms were just the vulgar, obscene, and profane effusions of the uneducated. They might provide a brief diversion, but those who sought respectability should steer clear of their contaminating influence.’ Later word-collectors betray a sense that they're recording an unwritten language just before it dies, or trying to preserve a time rather more adventurous and colourful than the present. Volume 3 covers 1859-1936, finishing just before the publication of Eric Partridge’s game-changing Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Gems of this era include collections of American jazz-jargon from the ‘30s (The ‘Slanguage’ of Swing-terms the ‘Cats’ Use), Jewellery Auction Jargon from the 20s* and Die Männliche Homosexualität in England (1910) by Leo Pavia, the German translator of Oscar Wilde.  As Coleman points out, you can see who and what was deemed interesting and worth recording at any cultural moment: there’s glamour and romance in gangsters, hoboes, first world war soldiers and even college boys, but was anyone taking note of the slang of schoolgirls or shift-workers or indeed insurance salesmen? 

I'm warier now, though also more addicted. What writer doesn't love encountering new words, and I've always been a sucker for the mystique of specialism - even chandlery shops excite me.  When I was writing That Burning Summer  I thoroughly enjoyed discovering exactly the right RAF slang a Polish pilot would have had to learn during the Battle of Britain (not to mention the fact that all the controls on British fighter planes were on the opposite side to Polish ones). And of course I'm all for accuracy and authenticity. But as a reader, if I start feeling an author has swallowed a (slang) dictionary, I'm quickly alienated. It's a very fine balance.  After this philological day, I went to the National Theatre’s new production of Our Country’s Good, a play I’d been wanting to see for several decades. Its themes remain horribly, depressingly relevant. One character, the erudite British Jew John Wisehammer convincingly loves (respectable) words with a passion, having learned them from his father’s dictionary (though only A-L). Liz Morden’s monologue accounting for her descent into crime sounds plucked from the pages of any lexicon of the canting crew. The effect is more flattening than vivifying. Historical novelists, beware.

*Here's a sample of its obscurity: “Prat-the-shill – a verb phrase, giving an order to ‘shillabers’ to step to the rear of the ‘come-ons’. Its meaning is different from its connotation.” Baffling. 

Blinding with Science or Charming with Curiosities? by Katherine Langrish

When one is writing historical fiction, problems of language often arise.  I don’t mean just dialogue, though that’s a perennial one which is solved in different ways at different times.  It was once thought colourful to go all faux-archaic and bespatter your characters’ speech with thees and thous, but the result was usually unfortunate: ‘Tush, tush, child, fie on thee for a wayward wench!’ Robert Louis Stevenson referred to this style as ‘tushery’: he tried it himself in ‘The Black Arrow’, but never thereafter, writing to his friend Henley,

The influenza has busted me a good deal; I have no spring, and am headachy. So I turned me to-what thinkest 'ou?-to Tushery, by the mass! Ay, friend, a whole tale of tushery. And every tusher tushes me so free, that may I be tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush. The Black Arrow: A Tale of Tunstall Forest is his name: tush! a poor thing.


Most historical writers now aim for an unobtrusive modern style, on the sensible grounds that ‘old fashioned speech’ sounded modern to those who used it.

But the other linguistic problem is what to do about obsolete or technical terms. Some time ago, friends of mine were having a conversation about words their editors had asked them to alter, or at least explain, in case children might be puzzled by them.  Among these were ‘colt’ (young male horse), ‘merlin’ (small hawk), and 'jesses' (the straps attached to the feet of a hunting hawk). When I was writing about Viking ships in ‘Troll Blood’, I was asked to weed out or explain much of the nautical terminology – ‘reefing a sail,’ for instance, and ‘a lee shore’ and other sailorly commands such as ‘luff’ or ‘jibe’.

Fair enough, you may think: we don’t want to be obscure. But do children really stop in their tracks – or worse, derail – when they come across an exotic word they don’t understand?  I doubt it. When I read an unusual word as child, one of four things would happen:

(A) I would semi-skip over it.  This is the best option for things like: “‘Luff, you lubbers!  Haul on those sheets!” roared the captain, as the sail went aback”. I didn’t have to know the exact meaning of the words; I could see that the ship was in difficulties and the captain was worried, and that was enough.  Luff and lubbers and aback, and their ilk, got stuffed into a mental category of ‘mysterious words that sailors use’.  (As does ‘ilk’, in fact, which I’m very vague about.) And that’s pretty well where they still are. 

(B) I would pick up the meaning from the context.  On reading that the Flopsy Bunnies fell asleep because lettuce is ‘soporific’, I didn’t go to the dictionary, neither did I make a conscious mental note that soporific must mean something to do with making you sleepy; the word merely took on a contextual colour, or flavour, which I would recall the next time I encountered it. Children are good at making these associative leaps because this is how they learn their own language anyway. It may lead to the occasional misapprehension, but such things are generally cleared up by experience.

(C) I would ignore the word entirely and carry on, which is what I still do if I’m reading The Waste Land or, say, a 19^th century literary essay with bits of original Greek poetry dropped in here and there.

As a last resort:

(D) I would carry the book to my mother and ask, “What does this word mean?”

All four of these options are legitimate and I believe we ought to make sure children feel OK about using them. A healthy reader is like a healthy cross-country runner whose steady pace is not broken by obstacles and stumbling blocks.  A confident child reader should have the toughness and elasticity to leap over the odd unusual word and keep going.  And how are they going to acquire that confidence if every text they read has been raked and weeded? 

Real pleasure can be got from working out the meanings of obscure words and phrases.  Here is an example which may remind us adults what it's like to read something peppered with unfamiliar words:

Vincent was the first of Matthew’s two sons to reach Darracott Place, driving himself in a curricle to which were harnessed two magnificent black geldings, randem-tandem; and by the time Richmond, who had been looking out for him, let out a halloo and exclaimed, ‘Here’s my cousin at last! Oh, he’s driving unicorn! He’s the most complete hand!’ even Mrs Darracott, with whom Vincent was no favourite, felt a measure of relief.

The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer

First of all, I have no idea in what way a curricle differs from a phaeton or a barouche or a landaulet or any of the other carriages Georgette Heyer frequently alludes to, but I get the point that the type of carriage Vincent drives is as important as the type of car he would drive if this were set in today’s world. If her editor had told Heyer that all these technical terms were just too confusing, and had made her stick always to the generic word ‘carriage’, the book would be poorer. I might never have realised that carriages weren’t just a way to get around, they were status symbols, indicators of character.  I would have a less nuanced view of the Regency world.

Second, knowing that a tandem is a bicycle built for two, I deduce that ‘randem-tandem’ means the horses are harnessed one behind the other rather than side by side.  This sounds flashy and difficult to manage, and sheds more light upon Vincent’s character and his young cousin’s admiration. As the book is not a fantasy, ‘driving unicorn’ does not for one moment fool me into believing that Vincent is actually driving a unicorn. Instead, I gather it to be a slang term for this same arrangement of the team, and Richmond uses it to show himself both knowledgeable and appreciative of his older cousin’s expertise. ‘A complete hand’ isn’t an expression in use today – a moment’s thought suggests that it comes from card games – but in context its meaning is obvious. Vincent is in control of his team and his life. He holds all the cards…

Heyer is magnificent at this kind of thing. It’s not tushery, either, because it works; it doesn’t get in the way. Instead of divorcing us from her characters, Heyer draws us in to share their world. Here’s an indignant young man complaining about the behaviour of the spoilt beauty he’s been trying to prevent from running off:

“She said she was going off to spout her pearls that instant, so that she could be gone from the place before you reached us!  She’d have done it, too!  What’s more, I wish I’d let her!”

            “I don’t wonder at it.  But you did not – which was very well done of you, sir!”

            “I don’t know about that,” he said gloomily.  “…The thing was, she’d put me in such a tweak by that time that I was hanged if I’d cry craven! Told her that if she tried to shab off I’d squeak beef – what I mean is, tell the landlord who she was and what she was scheming to do.  So then she threw the clock at me. That brought the landlord in on us, and a couple of waiters – and before I could utter a word, the little hussy was carrying on as though she thought she was Mrs Siddons!  Well, she’d threatened to tell everyone I’d been trying to give her a slip on the shoulder if I wouldn’t let her leave the room, and by God, she did it!”

            “Oh no!” exclaimed Miss Trent, changing colour.

The Nonesuch by Georgette Heyer

Could this be any clearer?  Well, it could.  ‘Spout her pearls’ could be altered to ‘pawn her pearls’ for instance. But though I’ve never heard of ‘spout’ as a synonym for ‘pawn’ (or maybe 'sell'), the general meaning is clear, and the slang gives much more character to the young man’s speech.  The really difficult bit – ‘if she tried to shab off I’d squeak beef’ is glossed, ostensibly for Miss Trent’s benefit – and ‘a slip on the shoulder’ is also glossed by Miss Trent’s embarrassed reaction. The dramatic actress Mrs Siddons is presumably still well enough known for the allusion not to be obscure, but even if a reader hasn’t heard of her, it shouldn’t matter. The context does the job. It’s fun – it’s exhilarating – keeping up with Heyer’s lively stream of eighteenth century colloqualisms.

Instead of worrying about individual words and their supposed difficulty, let’s teach our children to throw themselves into a story and keep going to the end, in spite of the odd word they don’t quite understand.  Learning not to be afraid of strange words is exactly like getting down the length of the swimming pool without minding the odd wave that hits you in the face. 

You discover your own ability, and it’s more fun that way.



Picture credits:
The Black Arrow - cover, 1888, Wikipedia 
The Unknown Ajax - Heineman 1959, cover by Arthur Barbosa
The Nonsuch - Heineman 1962, cover by Arthur Barbosa