Another sailing term, but this time to do with small boat sailing (although big sailing ships might well have sailed tenders). The sheets mean the ropes which are attached to the sails, so in a sailing dinghy that means two ropes, one each port and starboard and the same for the mainsail. Now you want to coil up the sheets which are not actually in use at any moment so that they don’t get tangled up with anything and are ready for the next time you change course and swap the sails from one side to the other. So if you are “Three Sheets to the Wind”, then you are hardly in control of your sailing craft – sheets blowing free bar one only a drunken sailor would be so sloppy – so three sheets to the wind means drunk, out of control…
Truffle Out refers to the way truffles – the underground fruiting bodies of the truffle fungus – are located by either a Truffle Hound or perhaps a Truffle Pig – animals which are trained to locate these expensive delicacies – of course, they are rewarded with a small portion of their finds to keep them keen… In current usage, it reflects a slightly gentle, indulgent form of searching for something, not the logic of Sherlock Holmes or the sharp no-nonsense of Philip Marlowe but possibly Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot…
Tarnation is the outlier of a group of religious swear words that we shall return to in “Z” but here we have, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, “1784, American English alteration of darnation (itself a euphemism for damnation), influenced by tarnal (1790), a mild profanity, clipped from the phrase by the Eternal (God)” Etymology is a fancy word for what this blog has been attempting to do this year – to truffle out the meaning and origin of words and phrases…
“Tits up!” is a delightful phrase which my partner and I grew to love from binge-watching “The Marvellous Mrs Maisel” a fictional, Jewish, New York, wise-cracking comedienne. She might have been fictional but several of the characters in the drama were real – Lenny Bruce for one and Miriam Maisel’s agent Susie Myerson, who specialised in female clients and always sent Miriam onstage with a robust admonition of “Tits up!” This is used as an expression for things going wrong and taps into the superstitious world of the stage in which “Break a leg!” serves the same purpose – the ritual wishing of the worst that might happen to someone wards off the possibility of it actually happening. There was me thinking for years that if you slipped backwards on a banana skin – a Pratfall – you would land tits up…
On Tenterhooks refers to the hooks that line the sides of a tenter, or frame for stretching fabric. Wet fabric is stretched on the tenter and secured by the hooks with even tension and hopefully, all wrinkles will be stretched flat as the fabric dries. Of course, that means waiting to see whether you have pulled the fabric taut enough to get rid of the wrinkles, else you have to start again and that is how it has come to mean waiting on some desired outcome with trepidation. I always thought the expression was referring to the meat hooks on which gangsters like to hang those from whom they are trying to extract information (surely a perilous position in which to wonder about the outcome) – turns out those are just meat hooks…
When I was a child and asked my father where he was going, often, and I think it was more out of mischief, than to truly keep us in ignorance, he would say “To see a man about a dog!” As so often in this exploration of the origin of phrases that we know the usage of but have forgotten the origin of, we find multiple claims… This site lists some of the earliest recorded appearances in print (1865) and also includes the 1930’s cartoon below.
What is certain, is that the phrase became synonymous with signalling that you are going somewhere but you don’t want to specify where – anything from going to the toilet, going to an (illegal) speakeasy bar (America in the 1920s) and perhaps the original source of the expression – going to place a bet on a greyhound race.
With Spill the Beans, we are back with the ancient Greeks – the originators of Democracy. Voting in their parliament took place by choosing either a white or a black bean from a dish and placing it into a container and once everyone had voted, the beans would be spilt out and then counted – nothing to do with Heinz 57 Varieties!
Strike while the Iron is Hot has nothing to do with ironing a shirt and everything to do with Blacksmiths working their metal while it is still hot enough to be malleable, glowing red hot, because it takes longer to heat the piece up than the time it remains workable so you must work quickly and strike while the iron is hot…
Steal Someone’s Thunder comes from the failed Enlightenment playwright (and critic) John Dennis – whose first play was a failure, but one thing that appeared in it for the first time in the history of theatre was the thunder sheet – a large sheet of thin metal which when shaken, creates a realistic thunder sound. Later, the technique was used in a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth so Dennis responded by saying “Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!”
Swinging the lead – the Leadsman heaves the lead whilst standing on the fore-channel 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
Swinging the Lead takes us back to sailors and their expressions – as a ship moves through shallow water, the “leadsman” stands near the bow of the ship and throws a lead weight on the end of a line with knots marking the length of line which the leadsman counts up and calls out to the helmsman as he goes. The weight also has tallow on its base so that bits of the seabed may get picked up – sand, small shingle or if it is rocky, perhaps nothing – hence “Two fathoms by the head, sandy bottom!”. Swinging the lead was considered to be an easy job compared to those manning the sheets (ropes) or climbing up the rigging to haul in the sails. Physically easy it might be, but the speed and accuracy of the leadsman is vital to the safety of the ship. The picture above shows the original meaning of swinging the lead but the picture below shows what it came to mean – trying to have an easy day or night by pulling a sickie…
The skipper looks a bit ‘crossways’ at the sick sailor. He is not sure whether the man is malingering and working for a few nights unbroken sleep. At any rate, he prescribes a nice little glassful of castor-oil .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
Shake a Leg is an earlier naval seaman’s term from the days of wooden warships. The regime and the enforcement of rules seem to have been very variable in the British Navy – at the discretion of the Captain and via his Officers then in some ships, especially on home leave at Portsmouth, the naval headquarters, WAGS (wives and “girlfriends”) were allowed not only to visit on board, but to sleep over with their sailor companions in their hammocks, a few ships even allowed such women to accompany voyages and may have had some other duties cooking or doing the washing, perhaps looking after the squeakers (young boys might start in the navy as young as eleven). However, even in port, duties abound and so the men in charge would move between the rows of hammocks calling the sailors to “wake up and shake a leg!” If a clearly feminine form was shaken over the edge of the hammock, then the owner of the leg was allowed to remain aslumber…
We have a good few Cant languages from the Wikipedia article today:
The origin of the word Robot, is the Czech word robota, meaning “forced labour”, from a Slavic root – rab, meaning “slave”. Herein lies much of our fear and angst when we consider the future of robots because Slave implies a Master and so slaves are capable of revolt – of turning against their masters…
The pursuit of developing robots, is that they might assist humans in doing jobs which are too difficult, dangerous or just too plain boring for humans – things which in the past, and even today – (think wage-slaves, modern slavery) – have been done by human slaves and so these fears have a foundation in fact – there have been many slave revolts!
The problem of creating robots is twofold – body, and mind. On the body side, we have long had Automatons – they range from say a music box which can play a tune, to the most sophisticated machines that are now being tested for their ability to play football. On the mind side, we have the quest for AI – Artificial Intelligence which is the subject of hot debate at present for reasons varying from “Will AI take our jobs away?” to “Will AI outgrow and destroy human beings?” which brings us back to the man who first coined the word robot in his play “R.U.R.” (which stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”) premiered in Prague in 1921, Karel Čapek. Like many of his generation, just out of the horrors of the First World War, Čapek was sceptical of the utopian benefits of science and technology – or rather the uses which human beings put those things. You can read a more detailed account of his play here. But what “R.U.R.” illustrates is that science fiction is the way we explore the possibilities and problems of what may be achieved in the development of robots and our relationship to them.
Starting with the body problem, long before the amazingly intricate creations of the 18th century with watchmaker ingenuity inside, the ancient Egyptians imbued statues with souls and the Greeks envisaged artificial men such as Talos But those later amazing mechanical figures who might play a tune on an inbuilt musical box, are only built to perform one task, albeit a potentially complex task and in this respect, modern technology has created many robots which assist us today without posing any threat except to the workers they superseded. Car plants use many robot arms to manufacture cars with greater strength, dexterity (programmed), speed and accuracy than the human beings who used to do the jobs. Still, without reprogramming, these robot arms do one thing only and their “intelligence” is limited to a programmable computer.
Turning to the issue of robotic minds – Artificial Intelligence is progressing in leaps and bounds, to use an anthropocentric metaphor – several people doing this year’s A to Z Challenge have experimented with AI including Misky who has used the AI graphic app Midjourney to create amazing illustrations for the poems she has posted – check out her site! She has talked about how many times she has to try and prompt the app in order to get these illustrations the way she wants them, tweaking the style and content descriptors and this shows that although the Midjourney app is incredibly powerful, it is still soft AI. The limitations of soft AI are best illustrated by Alexa the Amazon speaker app – instruct it thus “Alexa – tell me a joke!” and she will indeed tell you a joke, but then say “Alexa – tell me another…” and Alexa doesn’t know what you mean unless you specify “another joke”. Hard AI would be the kind which was truly capable of independently sentient thought, and we are some way off from that if Alexa is anything to go by. Alan Turing, imagining (stupendously) the future possibilities of AI devised the Turing Test in which an evaluator would hold two remote conversations, with a human being and with an AI and if they could not distinguish which was the AI, then it might be said to have truly intelligent behaviour. We may be approaching this watershed moment but I like to think that, writing this blog, for example, an AI would not be drawing out the ideas that I have – at least not without close supervision – anyway, I am going to do my own evaluative exploration of AI right here once the A to Z is finished, so watch this space…
The problem for designing robots which are indistinguishable from human beings, is how to cram an AI sizes computer into the body of a robot – Chat GPT can generate text which only another special app can discern to have been written by an AI, but the computers necessary to run ChatGPT are enormous and the miracle which is the human brain is most notable for its compact size – given it’s power. Nevertheless, there are many who are afraid that AI alone, without human-looking robots, can outmatch the human race and destroy it. Of course, we have many science fiction thought experiments to thank for that particular trope from Čapek’s “R.U.R.”, Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”, through Asimov’s “I Robot”, My own favourite, “Bladerunner” and looming large in these debates about the dangers of rampant AI – the “Terminator” series of films.
(From left) Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge in Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, 1927. From a private collection.
In all these fictional considerations of the relationship between men and machines, different solutions are proposed to keeping the “robota -slaves” in check. Asimov came up with The Three Laws of Robotics –
First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
These laws would be encoded into the AI controlling all robots at their inception and would be sacrosanct. This idea escaped the creators of the Terminator series robots whilst in Bladerunner, the manufacturers of the “replicants” had to build in auto-destruction of their products after a small number of years lest their self-learning robots get too big for their boots and turn on their creators – sensibly too, replicants were not allowed on Earth but only sent to do the typical jobs of slaves, out in space as miners, soldiers, builders – dirty, dangerous jobs. Ultimately, the Replicants in Philip K. Dick’s story, show us something about what it is to be human ( as all good science fiction does, if only because it is written by humans), at the end of the story, (spoiler alert) the human Bladerunner, charged with tracking down and destroying renegade Replicants who have made it to Earth in pursuit of getting their lifespans extended, is being dangled over the edge of a roof by the leader of the group of Replicants. Rutger Hauer, the actor who plays The Replicant Roy Batty, whilst dangling the Bladerunner, makes a speech which has become known as the ”Tears in the Rain monologue” as follows:
“I’ve seen things… seen things you little people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium… I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments… they’ll be gone.”
Moments later he lifts the Bladerunner to safety just before his brain self-destructs – talk about saved by the bell! But of course, the Bladerunner -played by Harrison Ford, was saved by the robot/ replicant, perhaps out of mercy (a very human trait which the replicant might have developed) but perhaps in the hope that the Bladerunner might respond by trying to change things for Replicant To me this gets to the crux of being human – just when we are getting the hang of life, out time is up…
Incidentally, Rutger Hauer, not liking the lines that had been written for him, and with only a few minutes of shooting time left, famously improvised the “Tears in the Rain” monologue – kudos!
In our fears over the development of robots and AI, are we perhaps projecting our fears about our own human traits onto them, we aspired to create them to be our helpers, such as AI interpreting MRI scans more effectively than human beings, so why would we think that AI would want to destroy or enslave human beings (The Matrix)? Perhaps it’s because we human beings, given the chance, have all too often enslaved other human beings, abused, exploited and been ready to lynch them at the first sign of independence, let alone revolt. Do we need to take heed of the results of science fiction’s thought experiment warnings – of course we do! We should no more allow the unregulated development of AI any more than we would allow our children to play with loaded guns, but those regulations would be to keep in check the humans who would use AI, or rather misuse it. We should watch out for governments who want to create AI-powered weapons or control their people with ever more efficient propaganda – even before AI we are struggling to know what is true in the news. We have plenty to worry about in the humans – let alone AI and Robots. However, between regulation, commonsense, and perhaps most of all. the fact that AI might have learned lessons from the human mistakes that are messing up the planet, might we be pleasantly surprised to find that AIs assist us as they were intended to do, solving problems of the environment, working out how to operate an economy not based on permanent growth and war – might we be headed for Iain Banks’ “Culture” series rather than “Terminator”…
So one final sci-fi thought experiment from the great Marge Piercy – “He, She and It”, which goes to the question of what would happen if we could achieve hard AI and make it small enough to fit into an android-style (human shaped) robot. In an environmentally post-apocalyptic world, a woman is given the task of socialising just such an android, because Marge Piercy imagines that true sentience, as opposed to a glorified search engine, would require teaching and guiding as to what sense to make of the world – rather like a child. If she is right, then the great leap forward to hard AI, true sentience, would not be a runaway Terminator scenario, but a chance to imbueAI with the best qualities of human beings rather than the worst. Running through the book is the story of The Golem – a man made from mud and brought to”life” by Cabbalistic magic in order to protect the ghetto and in this story is that familiar warning of the dangers inherent in creating powerful androids which has echoed through speculative fiction ever since Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”… “He, She and It” is such an amazing book that I am surprised that it has not been made into a movie…
So what do you believe will be the future of AI and Robots -slave, nemesis of the human race or willing and able helper?
And so lastly, to – as pernicious a law as humans could devise, The Rule of Thumb – another phrase that has disputed meanings. Some people imagine the Rule of Thumb to describe a readily available way of measuring things – an Inch is approximately equivalent to the breadth of the top joint of an adult thumb, but a ruling by Judge Francis Buller in 1782, allows that a man could legally beat his wife, as long as he used a stick that was no thicker than his thumb – see here. I suspect that those who favour the measuring theory and disparage the beating one, are men…
This Gillray cartoon of Judge Buller from 1782 shows ‘Judge Thumb’ selling sticks for wife-beating Bridgeman
The Cant languages from the Wikipedia article for the letter “R” are:
But where did the nursery rhyme draw its inspiration from? At simplest, some believe that the rhyme draws on nothing more than that “hearts” rhymes with “tarts” but a more intriguing answer is that “The Queen of Hearts” was “Elizabeth, daughter of James I. This unfortunate Queen of Bohemia was so called in the Low Countries from her amiable character and engaging manners, even in her lowest estate. (1596-1652)” 1
Elizabeth had a very eventful life with many ups and downs, – for example, had the gunpowder Plot succeeded in killing her father James I and the protestant hierarchy, Elizabeth was to be placed on the throne of England as a Catholic queen. She was a desirable catch and had many significant suitors, and Frederick (Friedrich) V, Count Palatine of the Rhine was chosen but became very much a love match producing thirteen children over a twenty-year marriage.
Frederic was offered the elected position of King of Bohemia – in part to thwart the reign of Archduke Ferdinand – the previous incumbent, but after just one year, Frederic and his Queen Elizabeth were ousted again by Frederic. You can read a much fuller account of Elizabeth’s life here. Suffice it to say that Elizabeth lived happily in the Hague until, widowed – she returned to England upon the restoration of the Stuarts with the accession of Charles II. So Elizabeth could well have been the model for the Queen of Hearts, although, in the context of Bohemia, she and Frederick were called the Winter King and Queen due to the shortness of their reign and the season of the battle that removed them.
The nursery rhyme The Queen of Hearts famously features in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” where the Queen of Hearts is very unpleasant and whose catchphrase is “Off with their heads!”. The nursery rhyme is presented in evidence in Chapter XI “Who Stole the Tarts?” – a chapter that lampoons the British legal system…
Many people would like to be remembered in perpetuity, but in the case of Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling, he would probably have preferred not to become a byword for traitor. Rather, he would have liked to be remembered for his attempts to combine Christian thought with contemporary physics to produce a “new world religion.” Universism. Unfortunately, he strayed down the path of Nordic racial superiority (he was Norwegian) and fell under the spell of Hitler facilitating the Nazi invasion of Norway and temporarily being placed in charge… Go here for a fuller account.
Vidkun Quisling Vidkun Quisling, leader of the collaborationist Norwegian government, returns a salute during a ceremony in Oslo. Norway, after April 1940. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD
There are many other people whose names have become Eponyms,
Louis Pasteur – Pasteurisation,
Lord Cardigan – Cardigans obs!,
4th Earl of Sandwich – Sandwiches, a surprisingly late invention…
Hoover and now Dyson brand names that became eponymous,
Boycott – a beastly Estate Manager who caused his tenants to stop harvesting and paying him, and local shops to refuse to serve him
Adolphe Sax – inventor of the Saxophone,
Dahlia, after Anders Dahl, an 18th-century Swedish botanist
Bloomers, after Amelia Bloomer, a campaigner for women’s suffrage
Franz Anton Mesmer, who gives us Mesmerise (hypnotise)
The 4th earl of Sandwich – gambler who invented a food he could eat at the gambling table so as not to miss the action…
You can find more here…
There are no Cant Languages beginning with “Q” in the Wikipedia article on that subject.
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…
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).
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.
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.
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!
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…
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.
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.
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…”
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:-
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!)
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.
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”.
