A great deal of quite colourful language has been lost over the years and I suppose we have to accept this fact because we all know that over time language changes – if it did not reliably do so we would all still be speaking Chaucer’s English. Unlike my grandmother, few women of her ilk these days are regularly about to be Struck Pink or Knocked Down by a Feather. Her only son, my ever jovial Uncle Edgar always became Ticketty Boo when he’d had a couple of pints at the Jolly Farmers and he mystifyingly went off to See a Man About a Dog several times each week despite the fact that the canine never eventuated. His daughter Daphne confided that he had never been known to harbour any true fondness for dogs and the closest she got to any family pet was the Ring Necked Parakeet he brought home from the pub one Friday evening. She even wondered if it had been exchanged for the much discussed dog and for a while made a decision not to like it as a protest. Aunt Mag sensibly commented that at least it had come complete with cage which had saved a lot of trouble because a bird without a cage amounted to a bloody nuisance. Parakeets were still something of a novelty and buyers were warned they could be dangerous. There might have been something in that as we now know they are said to terrorise whole neighbourhoods descending in flocks to alarm small children in local parks.
My mother was eventually to blame the Great Storm of 1987 for the aerial bombardment of Wallis Park, and said Northfleet had become a Dead and Alive Place and that was a fact. She did not subscribe to the idea that a number of pop stars might be to blame for the problem. However, this was all to come and back in 1949 she was still talking about old Mr Bassant next door knowing his onions when it came to mending a door frame or changing a fuse. Somehow or other I realized that the onions under discussion were not those very same ones he grew on his allotment.
This vast array of now almost forgotten expressions was part of an accepted web of communication that all children growing up in the Thameside towns of North Kent were totally familiar and comfortable with. We all knew that Bob was our Uncle and Fanny was our Aunt. We accepted that Brass Monkeys had a lot to do with low temperatures. Cock Ups were not in any way lewd and we didn’t whine for attention when we knew the adults around us were Knackered. A Nod was always as good as a Wink and some people could be As Keen as Mustard. Little Birds often informed my mother and aunts on vital information and there was a lot of excitement locally if someone decided to Have a Do. In fact with neighbourly help general preparations could be carried out in Two Shakes of a Gnat’s Whisker.
Along with this disappearing argot a lively collection of ethnic slurs that would today horrify were apt to effortlessly trip off the tongue and we were largely unaware of the racist connotations. Those racial groups being maligned also seemed mostly oblivious to insult and cheerfully accepted being known as Jocks and Micks and Krauts. It was some time before I fully understood the latter term because it seemed to spring out of nowhere following the war years, completely sweeping away Hun, its fully comprehended predecessor.
Old Nan, always at the forefront where offensive conduct was concerned, was unembarrassed to refer to the local jeweler as a Kike and to the new Jamaican immigrants as Coons which looking back was a line her daughters seemed reluctant to cross. To my grandmother this lexicon was merely useful descriptive language and she might well have expressed considerable surprise to be reprimanded for it. Throughout my childhood when faced with an uncooperative grandchild she would dole out a hefty clip around the ear and tell us we were being Proper Tartars or Right Bleeding Brahmans! She would have been quite unaware that the former are an ethnic group still living in the Volga-Ural region and that the vast majority of them are Muslim. Nor would she have cared. As for the latter, where she acquired the term Brahman remains a mystery but she certainly would have been unaware of the fact that they are considered the highest Hindu caste and responsible for teaching and maintaining sacred knowledge. To her a Brahman was simply an uppity child in need of stern rebuke coupled with a thick ear. My brother, once he had become fully involved in the dissection of family history, decided that her frequent use of the term had something to do with the fact that her own mother had been born in India and thus would have brushed against the caste system at one time or another. How much validity this supposition had is debatable but it would be interesting to know where some of the more extravagant terms and phrases used by Old Nan Constant actually came from.
In these more progressive times when the morbidly obese object to being described as Overweight and those lacking vision can no longer safely be called Blind, one can only view with amazement what the average man/woman/person in the street once got away with. In primary school playgrounds Asian children had long been immune to being described as Chinks, Nips or Japs and would have been unlikely to be affronted. Even the youngest among us understood such terms and for most of us they simply indicated an acceptance that a particular group might differ from the majority but were still safely part of the larger community.
There was surprisingly little confusion although I can recall asking my father what the difference was between a Wop and a Wog at the age of about seven and him explaining that a Wop was simply another word for an Italian and a Wog was a more general term for someone with a dark skin. There was no sharp intake of breath coupled with a look over the shoulder, no speaking in a hushed whisper. He died in late 1951 and would have been perplexed if told that within a relatively short space of time the word Eskimo would have developed unpleasant connotations and that the Englishmen who had served alongside him in the Eighth Army most of whom had grown quite fond of being called Limeys were beginning to feel slighted when described as Poms. He would have been bewildered to be told that Cretins and Cripples no longer existed along with Imbeciles and that referring to those from Pakistan as Pakkis was a definite No-No!
There is nothing very surprising about any of this but losing language that was once fully integrated within a functioning society can surprise and startle and leave the speaker groping for alternatives. Who could have anticipated that the expression No Can Do would become clearly contemptuous of the manner in which the immigrant Chinese once used English? And could men like my father have possibly foreseen that Long Time No See holds the Native Americans’ traditional greeting up to scorn and ridicule? Could my mother have taken seriously the fact that by using one of her most favoured invectives – Bugger, she was actually referring to Bulgarian sodomites? And how would she have reacted if called upon to explain herself for describing Little Old Maudie from a few doors along as Feeble Minded? After all everyone knew Little Old Maudie was Feeble Minded and that’s precisely why her neighbours looked out for her and made sure she wasn’t exploited by Them Buggers involved in doorstep selling.
A great deal has been lost along with swathes of now unacceptable terminology but the campaigners for its demise are clearly more absorbed with the possible suffering of those who might find parts of it offensive for an increasing number of reasons. Customs and traditions linked to a disappearing way of life are of minor importance and in the overall scheme of things who can argue about that?
What in the first place might have instigated this now rampant aversion to once acceptable language is already lost to legend and when it is discussed a range of outlandish theories are offered. Perhaps there is some similarity in the origin of Britain’s Plagues of Parakeets – was it Jimi Hendrix releasing a breeding pair called Adam & Eve? Or George Michael? Or was the real culprit Humphrey Bogart? Did the birds simply escape from the set of The African Queen? New research, however, reveals that Parakeet sightings actually date back to the 1880s and one study reports that it was actually 1855!
I daresay we will never know the truth.
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