Month: April 2023

P – Pony Up, Pipe Dreams, Pig in a Poke and Letting the Cat out of the Bag.

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Pony up means to settle the bill, so you might think that we are back in the realm of Cockney slang with a Pony being East End parlance for £25, but only a few of the Cockney money denominations are rhyming slang – in fact, the expression “Pony up!” has nothing to do with this particular slang at all, but while we are here – let’s list those that are amounts, rhyming or not…

  • £1 – Nicker/Nugget/Alan Whicker
  • £5 – Deep Sea Diver/Lady Godiva
  • £10 – Ayrton Senna/Cock and Hen/Cockle
  • £20 – Score
  • £25 – Pony
  • £50 – Bullseye
  • £100 – Ton
  • £500 – Monkey
  • In fact, Pony and Monkey are thought to have come from British soldiers returning from India where the Old Indian rupee banknotes had animals on them and it is said that the 500 rupee note had a monkey on it and the 25 rupee note featured a pony.

However, the expression “Pony up!”, mostly, but not exclusively, an American phrase, in use since the 19th century, comes from the Latin saying “Legem pone mihi Domine viam iustificationum tuarum” “Teach me, O Lord, the way of thy statutes” and since this expression is used in reference to March 25th – a traditional day for settling debts, this is a further pointer to a Pony being £25. According to Wiktionary, this etymology has been accepted by the American Heritage Dictionary. The Latin phrase is part of a psalm sung on the 25th and if debts were settled on that day, perhaps the association with pone is credible. Perhaps the British use of pony up, is a phrase that might have passed to us from our American cousins and maybe in the British imagination it has to do with Cockney slang for £25 – certainly that is what I thought until now…

In Cockney Rhyming Slang, pony has also become code for “rubbish” as in Pony and Trap – Crap!

The Cant languages listed below include Polari and here we are truly in the realm of secret languages. We saw the use of “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” under F, but here is a whole language to achieve the same aim – to hold a conversation without the meaning being detected by outsiders from an age when homosexuality was illegal in Britain and elsewhere. You can read more about Polari here, as well as the Wikipedia link below, and see a short film spoken in Polari here.

A Pipe Dream is a dream of, or plan, which is not likely to come to much. This is not the backwards-looking reverie of an old man (or woman) smoking a ruminative pipe in front of the fire, but the more sinister use of the Opium Pipe! There were in the US, and indeed any city that had a substantial Chinese population, in the second half of the 19th century, many opium dens and the effect of the drug, when smoked and probably when ingested as laudanum, was to promote dream-filled sleep. There is much debate about whether drugs, opium, marijuana or cocaine, promote creativity as many artists claim, or saps the will and lead merely to pipe dreams. I think the evidence is increasing that it adds nothing and takes away plenty…

LONDON SKETCHES—AN OPIUM DEN AT THE EAST END
from The Graphic (London) – 23rd October 1880

A Pig in a Poke refers to the practice of selling piglets at market in a sack or bag because otherwise, these energetically wriggling creatures would be too difficult to manage – so the buyer is buying sight unseen and this leads to the practice of substituting another small wriggly creature but of no financial worth – a cat instead of a piglet – hence the expression “Letting the cat out of the bag!” when the trick is revealed…

Cant Languages beginning with P, including Polari

  • Padonkaffsky jargon (or Olbanian) from Runet, Russia
  • Pig Latin
  • Pitkernese
  • Podaná, from Greece
  • Pajubá, from Brazil a dialect of the gay subculture that uses African or African-sounding words as slang, heavily borrowed from the Afro-Brazilian religions
  • Polari, a general term for diverse but unrelated groups of dialects used by actors, circus and fairground showmen, gay subculture, and the criminal underworld (criminals, prostitutes).

O – Offshore (rules are out of jurisdiction)

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Dictionaries today show two meanings for Offshore, one means out to sea, at some distance from the land, but this older usage has almost been usurped apart from those who go down to the sea in ships – no the new meaning which will jump to most peoples’ minds – so often is it used on the news, is the sending of money, or basing of company registrations in “offshore” jurisdictions where they do not have to pay so much tax, where the money-laundering regulations are more lax or absent altogether.

Technically, offshore begins at the bottom of the intertidal zone – beyond which the tide never descends and uncovers the seabed. Above that line is onshore, even if it is sometimes covered with water. However I think there is, for the old world of sailing ships, and perhaps even for today’s world of sailors and ships, a sense that once loosed from the land, once offshore, the normal rules don’t apply. Not that there are no rules – the Captain’s word is the law and unwritten rules of sailor’s customs apply, but I have the sense that offshore means being beyond ordinary rules. Certainly, as a fourteen-year-old, sailing to Australia and onwards around the world in 1968, every time we left port along the way, a sense of freedom leapt in my heart, of adventure, danger, the unknown but firstly freedom.

https://marketbusinessnews.com/offshore-definition-meaning/

It was Britain who really created the idea of offshore banking and offshore company registration as a way around international, financial regulations designed to stabilise the post-war economic environment. What it has become, is a way for multinational companies, the rich and criminals (heaven forbid one should conflate those three!) to avoid paying their fair share of taxes or even any tax at all. Perhaps they should be hounded towards where their money went – forbidden to set foot onshore and condemned to live out their lives offshore…

There are no Cant languages beginning with O according to Wikipedia.

N – Nutty Slack a tale of nudity, naturism and coal – oh and town planning – Nail Your Colours to the Mast…

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My partner and I used to be Naturists when we lived further south in the UK and when climate change had not yet started to put the reliability of seasonal weather into a blender!

In the village of Brickett Wood, in the heart of London’s Green Belt and near to the M25 motorway, there are no less than three nudist or naturist camps. It is due to a founding principle of the Green Belt, set up after WW11,  that the only thing which you can get planning permission for, is a caravan park and hence London is ringed with naturist or nudist caravan parks where those of the persuasion go for holidays or weekends in the buff – just as we used to do, living nearby. Nudism and Naturism camps differ slightly, in the former, nudity is de rigeur, whilst in the latter, it was optional except in the swimming pool otherwise the club would have been overrun with people joining just to use the pool. In any case, the pool was one end of the social hub at our club – Fiveacres Country Club – the bar being the other – we were pool people!

http://fiveacrescountryclub.info/

In fact, the oldest club in the UK was one of the other nudist clubs, called Spielplatz (German for playground) and just a week or so ago, I read in the Guardian newspaper about a protest by bare-breasted women in Berlin to campaign for the equal right of both men and women to go topless in public spaces and swimming venues in particular. Apparently, there is a long tradition going back about a hundred years in Berlin – yes The Roaring Twenties when “anything goes” and it is called Freikörperkultur  which translates as “free body culture” and so I guess the founders of Spielplatz were exponents of this movement – taking root in a generally prudish Britain…

Berlin welcomes topless female swimmers in victory for activists – The Guardian newspaper

And so to Nutty Slack! You see until I joined Fiveacres, I imagined Naturists to have stepped from the pages of the magazine “Health and Efficiency” which was full of svelte young things frolicking on beaches – but, I discovered, probably models rather than bona fide naturists.

A 1950’s cover from Health and Efficiency Magazine

Chatting by the pool under a blazing sun, to another member, I expressed the view that the members were nothing like those in the magazine. “No!” he said “Plumbers, plasterers and loads of nutty slack!” Now I had heard that expression and kind of understood his usage, but I had no idea of the origin – which is why it qualifies for this year’s A to Z theme!

Now the origins I have “dug up” (you will soon see how apposite that phrase is) from the web, go part of the way to explaining nutty slack as “Poor quality coal – a mixture of dust and small ‘nuts’ of coal -of such poor quality that post-war rationing did not apply to it.”. I say part of the way because I will now draw on half of my degree course – Geology – to explain nutty slack fully. Imagine Europe in the Carboniferous geological age – the course of the great River Rhine has long been established – draining northern central Europe including the area where devotees of Freikörperkultur would one day gambol. Britain lay in the delta of this river and as sea levels ros and fell, the process of coal formation occurred. First, enormous rain forests would flourish on the banks and islands of the delta – Amazon size trees whose diminutive descendants are the tough weed Equisetum or Mare’s Tail hated by all gardeners and alottmenteers. Then a rise in sea level would kill the forest with salt water and all the trees would keel over (another sailor’s term) and be buried by the sediments of the mighty river. Sea level would fall and the trees would grow again. This happened many times and eventually the many alternating layers of tree and sediment, compressed over millions of years with the wood fossilising into coal. These coal deposits were to fuel the industrial revolution of first Britain and then the rest of Europe.

A pile of nutty slack at the National Railway Museum in York, Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom.

Nutty Slack, is dug from the upper and lower boundaries of the coal where a mixture of thin seams of coal alternate with shales and the resulting mixture burns, leaving non-combustible chunks of shale behind – so a poor quality of partial fuel. Although perhaps good for keeping a fire going overnight I suspect.

The reason that this peculiarly British phrase has languished from memory is a combination of Margaret Thatcher killing the mining industry in order to break the power of the unions, and the advent of smokeless fuels to prevent air pollution and so our memory of coal fires had died like a grate full of nutty slack…

As to my fellow naturist and his description of the other incumbents of Five Acres – he meant that the various middle-aged bodies on display bore more than a passing resemblance to a sackful of nutty slack – all lumpy and bumpy…

Nailing Your Colours to the Mast is another sailor’s term – from fighting ships. You may remember False Flags under the “F” post and how it was necessary to reveal and fight under your true colours, well a fight would be ended when one side “stuck their colours” – lowered their flags in surrender. However, if facing overwhelming odds and having the determination to fight until the bitter end, a ship might nail it’s colours to the mast so that they cannot be struck – no surrender…

The crew of Vengeur du Peuple nailing the colours. This is an element of the later propaganda surrounding the event, and did not happen historically. Wikipedia

Today, we tend to use the expression “Nailing your Colours to the Mast” in the sense of declaring your views, or making a mission statement, but the original meaning has a sense of desperate commitment “Come Hell or High Water…”

We have three Cant languages from the Wikipedia article today

M – Mad as a Hatter, – Job related

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Hatters in the 18th and 19th centuries, used a toxic substance, mercury nitrate in the making of felted hats. Milliners are makers of ladies’ hats in particular, but hatters might have made felted hats for women as well as for men. Felt can be made from the fur or wool of many creatures and the mercury compound helped in the process by making the fibres more robust and easier to stick together by felting. Originally, felters had used camels’ urine for a similar purpose although as the trade grew further afield from camel lands, they substituted their own piss. Then a hatmaker who made particularly fine felt was discovered to have been taking mercury for the treatment of syphilis and the compound found its way into his work via his urine.

Hatters started to use mercury nitrate directly in their work – the compound is bright orange and the process became known as carrroting or secretage, perhaps because it was a trade secret. At this stage, the mercury nitrate was not so harmful, but once the felting has produced a fabric, it must be shaped to a mould of the hat shape with steaming and more rubbing (felting). The fumes were very poisonous and hatters developed tremors and other symptoms of mercury poisoning. It is for this reason that mercury barometers are banned in case firemen should inhale the fumes during a fire. Eventually, the process was outlawed and Mad Hatters became a thing of the past, of perhaps the most colourful and well-known forms of occupational hazard.

One of the most famous Mad Hatters, is the one who appears in Lewis Carrol’s “Alice in Wonderland” under the name of “Hatta”, and having grown up in Oxford, where Charles Dodgson had written as Lewis Carrol, and with Tenniel’s amazing illustrations, the hatter was imprinted on my brain from an early age…

A more recent and equally tragic incidence of mercury poisoning is depicted in the film “Minamata” in which Johnny Depp plays a “Life Magazine photo journalist, Eugene Smith, persuaded to photograph the victims of the disease as a result of a nearby factory polluting the sea and poisoning the fish eaten by the local people. The terrible contortions to affected bodies go far beyond the madness of hatters, a moving watch…

The languages from the Wikipedia article on Cant, are today:-

L – The Two Meanings of LOL, Lady Godiva and Use Your Head – more Rhyming Slang and Text Abbreviations…

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In my first blogging experience which was with a small blog called Mo’time, I suffered an embarrassing faux pas. I say small for although the site had some 10,000 registered members, the active core was probably smaller than the number participating in the A to Z this year. Mercifully, somebody pointed out that I seemed to be misusing the abbreviation LOL which I had grown up thinking of as meaning Lots of Love and consequently, on many sad posts, I had apparently been Laughing  Out Loud… I sometimes have to check with my grandchildren on the latest abbreviations in order to avoid future social accidents IMHO (In my humble opinion), this demonstrates the problem with texts, which are in any case a condensed form of communication compared an email or letter and it has been found that people are very erratic in interpreting the emotional tone of texts – perhaps because of their brevity. Apparently, this is what emoticons were invented to solve LOL replaced with a manic face, cocked to one side and spurting floods of laughter tears from both eyes. I am told by people whose young children grew up in the age of emoticons, that their offspring can have an entire conversation using only emoticons – perhaps this should be added to the Wikipedia list of Cant language that have become a feature of Blog this year!

LOL Surprise – part of a cartoon brand…

Time for a few more Cockney rhyming slang examples Lady Godiva – Fiver (a five pound note) although the cognoscenti probably abbreviate it  further – “That’ll be a Lady mate!” You see! Those pesky abbreviations again. Yesterday we had brown bread for “dead” but a Loaf of Bread means your head – as in “Come on Son – use your loaf!” (Just think about it Son!)

Lady Godiva by John Collier, c. 1897, in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry.

Other L’s from Cockney rhyming slang include “Light and Dark” – Park, “Lion’s Lair” the armchair where the head of the house might take a nap of a Sunday afternoon and woe betide anyone who wakes him up… “Loop the Loop” – soup.

We have five examples of “L” Cant languages from the excellent Wikipedia article on the subject

K – Kick the Bucket, bucket list, Know the ropes…

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GRUESOMENESS WARNING…

Here is another phrase whose meaning is well understood as a slang phrase for “to die”, but whose origins are severally disputed. There are two main contenders, firstly, when a man was to be hanged in an improvised fashion, he may have been stood upon an inverted bucket whilst the noose was drawn tight, whence the bucket was kicked away and the unfortunate victim left dangling. The second idea comes from the name of a beam from which animals are hung by the back feet whilst being slaughtered – thought to come from the French word trébuchet or buque, meaning “balance”. The animal might spasm whilst dying and thus kick the bucket. It seems unlikely to me that with the weight of the animal pulling down on the legs suspended from the beam, these legs could kick the beam or bucket, however, since some animals were killed by cutting their throats and draining the blood into a bucket below, this is much more likely to be knocked over by a death spasm from the poor beast.

Support for the first explanation comes from William Shakespeare (him again) who used the word in this sense in his play Henry IV Part II where Falstaff says:

“Swifter than he that gibbets on the Brewers Bucket.” — William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II*

Other contenders include the sometimes Roman Catholic practice of placing a bucket of holy water at the feet of a deceased person so that those paying their respects could sprinkle a little of it on the corpse. Another suggestion is that a human being might also spasm at the moment of death by way of stretching out to full length and thus kicking over a bucket that might happen to be at their feet, whilst yet another theory is that goats might be particularly prone to kicking over the bucket of milk that has just been drawn from them.

So take your pick as to the origin of “kicking the bucket” but one thing which is more certain is that the ubiquity of the phrase has given rise to another – Bucket List – a list of things to do before you die! This in turn gave rise to the film title “Things To Do in Denver Before You Die”.

I have a Retrospective bucket list which contains, as far as I can remember and not necessarily in this order:-

  • Sailing around the world (by ship not sailing a yaught)
  • Designing and converting an old stable into a house and our home
  • Completing a novel
  • Finding the love of my life
  • Painting my masterpiece mural (now sadly gone)
  • Taking my part in raising a step-family
  • Completing the A to Z Challenge 3 times already

And then there is a list of things I will almost certainly not now achieve before I die (Not a Hope List):-

  • Fathering a child of my own
  • Surfing
  • Climbing or even walking up another mountain
  • Making a fortune and distributing it to charity

And my current Bucket List might include:-

  • Going on a sea cruise to see the Northern (or Southern) Lights
  • Owning a boat be it ever so humble
  • Holding great-grandchildren
  • Publishing a novel
  • Meeting some of the friends I have made online in the real world
  • Visiting my Sister in Nova Scotia and other relatives in the US
  • Holding an exhibition of paintings -mostly still to be painted…

Know the Ropes…

There can’t be many of us who have not instructed a colleague to show a newcomer the ropes, or have been ourselves, shown the ropes, but I hazard a guess that few of us remember, each time we hear or use this expression, that it it is yet another one from the sailor’s lexicon despite how obvious that should be to see! Below is another picture from a treasured book from my father, who used to be a keen sailor until he got married.

A new apprentice sailor bemused by the complexity of the rigging (ropes) from “Sailing Round Cape Horn” by Gunther T. Schultz – an artist’s record of the last days of commercial sailing ships. 1954 – London – Hodder & Stoughton

And penultimately, as part of what has become an unexpected extra to this year’s challenge, another Cant language link from Wikipedia. But before that, since there has been a lot of death in this post so the Cockney rhyming slang for dead is “brown bread”.

J – Jiggered – Euphemisms

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Some claim Jiggered as a north of England word…

Jiggered is a slightly old-fashioned term meaning tired out, but at least one dictionary suspects that the origin of this word is aa a euphemism for buggered. It is a common thing in many languages, countries and societies, to imagine that by changing one or in this case, two letters, you can turn a downright dirty expletive into a socially acceptable exclamation. I lived in Ireland, where the robust four-letter Anglo-Saxon swear word (meaning copulation), is bowdlerised into the word “Feck!” which perfectly respectable people deem okay to say.

Bowdlerisation is named after the English physician Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825). In 1818 he published a censored version of William Shakespeare (The Family Shakespeare), expurgating “those words and expressions […] which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.”1

We shall encounter this phenomenon again when we come to words of a religious bent  – but not until the letter Z (spoiler alert – for Zounds).

So “J “was another difficult letter to find a word or phrase for but it is the last one for which I have not found multiple candidates so hurry on but come back tomorrow…

However, we do have four examples of Cant (cryptolect, argot, pseudo-language, anti-language or secret language) from Wikipedia…

I – In the doldrums, Idler, In the Offing.

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A yaught in the Doldrums

In the Doldrums is not just a positional term for sailors, but a very particular place not just in the Atlantic, but stretching around the world at the Equator – The Inter-Tropical  Convergence Zone – ITCZ or “Itch”. If you want to see the technical explanation see this excellent site. It is a region that all sailing ships passing from North to South (or vice versa) on the world’s oceans, could not avoid passing through. The air could be completely devoid of wind or the winds could be light and “flukey” (wandering in all directions) though equally, unexpected storms might release or deposit you in the doldrums. Because of the calm nature of the doldrums (mostly), great mats of Sargassum weed accumulate as an added hazard thereabouts so the doldrums are sometimes referred to as The Sargasso Sea.

The creeping threat of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt – The Guardian

Being trapped for long in the doldrums was a ship’s Captains nightmare, let alone ship-owners and cargo-owners and for the crew, being trapped under an equatorial sun with no cooling breeze and the water rations diminishing by the day – well you can scarcely imagine…

Below is a drawing of a ship fortunate to have found a light wind to take it out of the doldrums…

A ship sailing in very light winds from “Sailing Round Cape Horn” by Gunther t. Schultz – an artist’s record of the last days of commercial sailing ships. 1954 – London – Hodder & Stoughton

Idlers are yet another nautical term but with a counterintuitive meaning. Far from being lazy, idlers were those members of a ship’s crew whose work took place during the daytime and so were usually excused from working on the night watch – unless it was an emergency and “All hands on deck!” was called. So carpenters, sailmakers, cooks, and cabin boys were all idlers…

In the Offing – means a ship is within sight of port – many ports have a tower from which approaching ships can be sighted and the relevant people summoned to greet her shortly. A “Widow’s Walk” is an architectural term for a balcony at or above roof level where in the days of sailing ships, wives (sea “widows”), would watch for the return of their spouses – what a sad occupation…

A widow’s walk on a home overlooking Marblehead Harbor in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

We have two Cant examples for the letter “I”, from Wikipedia today…

H – He hath eaten me out of house and home – Shakespeare

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Not a hard one to figure out – if a guest is rapacious enough in their appetite and consumes everything in the pantry, then one is eaten out of the house and home and forced to go out for more supplies – hopefully having evicted the house-guest. H proved a difficult letter to find suitable phrases for, but with this one, we get the chance to consider the many phrases whose origins are ascribed to the great William Shakespeare – this particular phrase comes from Henry IV, Part 2, Act 2 Scene 1. As I said under apple of my eye, another phrase ascribed to the Bard, I cannot but help wondering, sacrilegious as it may be, whether Shakespeare originated all these phrases or was simply the first to commit them to paper. The Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust have no doubts though and have a webpage called Shakespeare’s Phrases which cites the phrase and the play in which it appears  – make up your own minds…

Here are a few:-

“The clothes make the man” Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3

“The be all and end all” Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7

“Wild goose chase” Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 4

“Brave New World” The Tempest Act 5, Scene 1.

The last one gives an example of how one phrase has been propagated – Aldous Huxley, surely a man well-educated in the Classics and Shakespeare, used “Brave New World” as the title of one of his own masterpieces which has in turn become a shortcut in any article describing utopian/dystopian paradigms but for all our familiarity with the phrase now, was it in common usage since Shakespeare and before Huxley or only a quote known to the cognoscenti, the literate class? Just as we have already encountered phrases which have multiple theories as to their origins, theories which multiply faster than rabbits in the warren of the World Wide Web (how’s that for a mixed metaphor!) – so with Shakespearean phrases, only by searching all written material and all recorded word, and counting all the occurrences could we truly know the answer…

The Clothes Make the Man – Photo by Taha on Unsplash

Lastly, we have only one “H” Cant language example from Wikipedia‘s excellent article on the subject… Hijra Farsi, from South Asia, used by the hijra and kothi subcultures (traditional indigenous approximate analogues to LGBT subcultures)

G – Greenlit, Get someone’s goat – Get there with the olives -Spanish at end of meal –Surviving historical anachronisms

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Greenlit or giving something the green light, barely scrapes into this theme since you would think that it’s not so hard to figure out – after all the traffic-lighting system has spread even further than the road traffic indicators with which we are all only too familiar. The reason it has made it into the blog is that it is not road, but railway signals that originated the coloured signalling.

Today greenlit has a special resonance with the movie industry since movies have so many hurdles to jump before they are greenlit to go ahead but green-lighting is used for all sorts of projects in many industries.

Railway semaphore signal. (2023, February 7). In Wikipedia.

The coloured lights, at least the red and green, moved over to road traffic lights fairly smoothly, although it took a while for universal agreement on the Amber warning phase. (See here)

Get Someone’s Goat…

Unlike greenlit, the origins of this phrase are not at all obvious! One might imagine from the current usage – To Make Someone Angry- that this refers to the natural consequence of the theft of a goat however the true origin is more bizarre – although it still involves the theft of hapless goats.    Goats are said to have a calming effect on horses and race horses are notoriously high-strung, so owners might put a companionable goat in the stall of a racehorse on the night before a race. Naturally, if a rival stole the goat and the horse was consequentially over-frisky, the owner would be very angry…

These are Greek not Spanish olives, taken by myself in 2020

Get There with the Olives…

Sometimes, olives are served at the end of a Spanish meal and so someone who “get’s there with the olives” is arriving very late!

Lastly – the links to Cant “G” languages courtesy of Wikipedia…