C – Cockney, Cant, Chip on your shoulder, Codswallop – Just weird…

If you thought yesterday’s tales of Brass Monkeys, was weird, then the origin of the word (etymology) “Cockney” is probably the weirdest etymology of any word I have ever come across!

I first learned the story of the word Cockney or Cockeney, from the incomparable writer of prose – Margaret Visser. The cover reproduced above is from the great 60p Penguin book which contains extracts from two of her books including “Much Depends on Dinner” – a socio-historic account of what we eat and why we eat it. In the extract “Man’s Eye View” Margaret recounts how “when a hen produced a small, malformed egg, as sometimes happens at first laying, the unsuccessful object used to be called a ‘cock’s egg’ or ‘cockeney’ in early English. The word was often used of a foolish or spoilt child, the pride of its doting mother; and then by country people to put down soft and ignorant city-dwellers. The expression was taken over by Londoners and used with pride: it is the origin of the word Cockney.”

Margaret Visser is a sublime writer of prose and although much of her writing is about and around, food, I strongly recommend her “The Geometry of Love – Space. Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church”

This embracing of a term that was meant to be insulting, is symptomatic of the East Enders (of London) – to consider themselves different (better) than others as is their development of Cockney Rhyming Slang. Linguists have several terms, all with slightly different meanings, for such linguistic phenomena –

Cant – which can be divided into Cryptolet, Argot, Pseudo-language, Secret Language or – and this is the best fit for Cockney Rhyming Slang – an Anti-language. According to Wikipedia Cant is “the ‘jargon’ or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group” Anti-languages “borrow words from other languages, create unconventional compounds or use new suffixes for existing words”. Cockney Rhyming Slang works in a unique way, with a double layer of hiding the meaning. Confusing enough to say “Give us a butcher’s hook” when you mean “Give us a look”, but to those familiar with the phrase, it is not even necessary to say the whole phrase, just “Give us a butchers” hence the jump from butchers to look is made even more obscure! I urge you to read the full article on Cant because it is fascinating. Meanwhile, here are a few examples of Cockney Rhyming Slang beginning with C. “Can’t keep still!” = Treadmill (a form of hard labour punishment in 19C prisons). Crowded space = Suitcase – this conflates the rhyme with the fact that a suitcase can easily be stolen in a crowded space such as a railway station. And most definitely not PC by today’s terms “Cut and Carried” = Married – a wife would be cut off from the support of her original family and would instead be carried or provided for by her husband.

Since the Wikipedia article on Cant (language) provides a compendious and most excellent list of examples from around the world, I am going to include their links in each day’s post for all except the letters D,O,Q,U and W for which there are no examples. So to catch up to date – here are the A-C examples of Cant…

• Adurgari, from Afghanistan
• Agbirigba, from Nigeria
• Äynu, from China
• Back slang, from London, United Kingdom
• Banjački, from Serbia
• Barallete, from Galicia, Spain
• Bargoens, from the Netherlands
• Bron from León and Asturias, Spain
• Beurla Reagaird, a Gaelic-based cant used by Highland Traveller community in Scotland
• Boontling from California
• Caló (Chicano), from the US/Mexican border
• Cockney Rhyming Slang, from London, United Kingdom

With A Chip on your shoulder! – we are back in the world of sailors – or at least as close as the naval dockyards. Samuel Pepys, though more famous as a diarist, had a day job as the civil servant tasked with sorting out and rationalising the naval dockyards and although I know not whether the following custom can be ascribed to Pepys or not, it is certainly the kind of efficiency he might have instigated. So – during the construction of wooden ships, there is, necessarily a lot of waste wood – offcuts if you will. The workers in the yard were allowed to take these offcuts home for use as fuel – BUT – only if they measured less than a foot long, and these pieces of wood were referred to as “Chips”. At the dockyard gate stood an official charged with judging whether the chips were small enough to qualify and one can imagine that as with all positions of relative power, the system was open to corruption, favouritism and cronyism. So whilst all the dockyard workers might literally have had chips on their shoulders, the expression became used to describe one who did not get on well with the measurer of chips and who could not get away with any chip slightly over the limit… For a fuller account click here.

Codswallop… Nowadays used as a term for rubbish or nonsense, the origin of the word is uncertain and several theories exist – I will let you judge…

Codd-neck bottle. (2022, September 21). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codd-neck_bottle

In 1872, soft-drink maker Hiram Codd of Camberwell, London, designed the bottle shown above which became known as a Codd Bottle. It was used to bottle carbonated soft drinks or fermented but non-alcoholic drinks such as ginger beer by filling the bottle whilst upside down and once full, the pressure of the co2 gas would force the marble in the neck against a rubber seal where the pressure would keep the bottle sealed. The BBC’s Antiques Road Show were presented with a perfectly intact Codds Bottle whose value they placed in the thousands of pounds due to rarity value. As they explained, children, on finding the bottles, knocked the tops of to get at the marble – hence the rarity. They also asserted that to open the bottle and pour the drink out, you had to hit or wallop the marble smartly and force it downwards – hence the codswallop! Other theories are that the word wallop was slang for “beer” and that beer drinkers disdained the non-alcoholic offerings such as ginger beer, as rubbish. Codding is an old word for joking, so somewhere in those ideas – codswallop emerged and lived on well beyond the life of the Codds Bottle, to mean rubbish. This illustrates how the original meaning of a word or phrase, can not simply be lost, but theories can multiply, and with the world-wide web, theories can spread – often without the rigorous referencing that might allow the truth, in so far as any historic truth can be known, to emerge.