Dust and Dustmen

Dust used to be the subject of poetry. Hamlet, in his great prose speech, asks of mankind:

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me...

Because men are made of dust, and to dust we return. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, fun to funky. So Auden also asked:

May I, composed like them
Of Eros and dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

In which he merely adds sexual appetite to the vacuum-fodder. It was therefore rather pleasant to find this entry in an old slang dictionary of 1811:

DUSTMAN. A dead man: your father is a dustman.

Which lends a certain poignancy to this song:

Two Slang Dictionaries

The TLS has an excellent review of two dictionaries of slang: one brand new and one reprinted from 1699. I thoroughly recommend that you surf off and read it here.

As an incidental point, the review contains the word equivoque, which is a beautiful synonym for ambiguity.

The purpose of early slang dictionaries was to reveal to the honest and literate world, the secret language of criminals. Without a work of reference it is all to easy for an honest man to find himself bamboozled, as this video amply demonstrates.

Quicunque Vult and Athanasian Wenches

Some bits of slang are astonishing in their intricacy. For example, an Athanasian wench was an early nineteenth century term for a strumpet or messalinist. Why? Well there was a fourth century chap called Athanasius who was terribly holy and became a saint. He also wrote a creed called the Athanasian Creed. This creed opens:

Quicunque vult salvus esse, ante omnia opus est, ut teneat catholicam fidem...

Which translates roughly as:

Whoever wants to be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith.

The creed is often known by its first two words: Quicunque vult, Whoever wants to.

And thus from the Athanasian Creed to an Athanasian wench or whoever-wants-to girl. The phrase was mentioned in Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue back in 1811 where such a creature is gently described as:

A forward girl, ready to oblige every man that shall ask her.


It seems to me to be a term ripe for resurrection, as it manages to obscure its rather unkind meaning in a distant ecclesiastical reference. Why use a nasty term, when you can just say that a girl is Athanasian?

Try not to think about the cannon

Passing the Buck

Fool that I am, I had always thought that the buck in passing the buck or the buck stops here was a dollar. Of course, when you think about it, that hardly makes sense. How would passing somebody a dollar shift responsibility? I probably thought that it was a dollar only because the elaphine alternative, that you were passing a male deer, was even less congruous. But that's etymologically closer.

Bucks have horns. The horns can be chopped off (it's best to kill the buck first, or at least get it drunk). Why would you chop off a buck's horn? To make a beautiful knife handle, of course. And once you have your buckhorn knife you can use it to cut things, stab people or mark the dealer in a game of poker.

The question of whose turn it is to deal is terribly important as the dealer can fiddle the cards, choose the form of poker, and has the advantage of placing the last bet. So in the saloons of the wild west and untamed Occident he needed to be clearly marked. This was done by stabbing a knife into the table in front of him. When his deal was done he would pass the buck(horn) to the next dealer.

Here is Mark Twain describing a conversation between a priest and a "rough" in the 1860s:

"Are you the duck that runs the gospel-mill next door?"


"Am I the-pardon me, I believe I do not understand?"


With another sigh and a half-sob, Scotty rejoined:


"Why you see we are in a bit of trouble, and the boys thought maybe you would give us a lift, if we'd tackle you - that is, if I've got the rights of it and you are the head clerk of the doxology-works next door."


"I am the shepherd in charge of the flock whose fold is next door."


"The which?"


"The spiritual adviser of the little company of believers whose sanctuary adjoins these premises."

Scotty scratched his head, reflected a moment, and then said:


"You ruther hold over me, pard. I reckon I can't call that hand. Ante and pass the buck."


"How? I beg pardon. What did I understand you to say?"


"Well, you've ruther got the bulge on me. Or maybe we've both got the bulge somehow. You don't smoke me and I don't smoke you. You see, one of the boys has passed in his checks and we want to give him a good send-off, and so the thing I'm on now is to roust out somebody to jerk a little chin-music for us and waltz him through handsome."


"My friend, I seem to grow more and more bewildered. Your observations are wholly incomprehensible to me. Cannot you simplify them in some way? At first I thought perhaps I understood you, but I grope now. Would it not expedite matters if you restricted yourself to categorical statements of fact unencumbered with obstructing accumulations of metaphor and allegory?"


[In case you're wondering, Scotty's friend has died and he wants the priest to deliver the eulogy at the funeral]

Anyway, a chap called Fred Canfil visited the warden of a prison in Oklahoma and saw a sign above the desk saying The Buck Stops Here. He liked it so much that he had a copy made and gave it to his boss Harry S. Truman who put it up in his office.

Which leads us, dear reader, to one overwhelming question: what was Harry S. Truman's full name?

I'll give you a clue: it's the same principle as Ulysses S. Grant and H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

Nerds of Lincoln

And then just to show them I'll sail to Ka-Too

And bring back an It-Kutch, A Breep and a Proo,

A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too!

Dr Seuss, If I Ran A Zoo

I managed to go to the only college in Oxford with almost no famous alumni. This was deliberate. My plan was, and is, that they would therefore have more room for a gold-plated statue of me. Even the few old boys that you might have heard of barely had a connection. John Wesley was there post-graduate and Dr Seuss came, hated it and left after a couple of terms.

Other colleges had portraits of Auden or Laurence of Arabia up in their halls. We had some rectors from the eighteenth century.

However, through Dr Seuss, Lincoln does have one great claim to lexicographic fame. The passage quoted above, which is from 1950, is the first recorded use of the word nerd. It seems, though, miserably unlikely that this is the origin of our familiar insult as by 1951 Newsweek recorded nerd as Detroit slang for a weakling or drip. So unless the underbelly of Detroit was eagerly reading all Dr Seuss's works just as they came out, nerd must derive from another source.

Perhaps, it was an alteration of turd; but, if so, why the E? Or maybe it was backslang for drunk=knurd. Who can tell what strange linguistic pericombobulations produce these odd insults? By the nineties nerd had taken on the modern sense of somebody more interested in computers than soap.

Anyway, here to cheer you through Saturday is another poem by an Old Lincolnite, Edward Thomas:

Gone, gone again,
May, June, July,
And August gone,
Again gone by,

Not memorable
Save that I saw them go,
As past the empty quays
The rivers flow.

And now again,
In the harvest rain,
The Blenheim oranges
Fall grubby from the trees

As when I was young
And when the lost one was here
And when the war began
To turn young men to dung.

Look at the old house,
Outmoded, dignified,
Dark and untenanted,
With grass growing instead

Of the footsteps of life,
The friendliness, the strife;
In its beds have lain
Youth. love, age, and pain:

I am something like that;
Only I am not dead,
Still breathing and interested
In the house that is not dark:--

I am something like that:
Not one pane to reflect the sun,
For the schoolboys to throw at--
They have broken every one.

Read that to your kiddies and let them sob themselves to sleep.

The Original Nerd of 1950

I Just Spazzed A Monkey

A chap I know was having a quiet drink with some friends in a club on Pall Mall. A lady of about eighty strode up to them. She appeared to be no stranger in the land of gin.

'I just spazzed a monkey on the gee-gees,' she exclaimed, and then looked at them all sternly. 'Now, do any of you young men know what that means?'

She was terribly impressed that they all knew that she had lost £500 betting on race horses, and wandered off without further conversation. I'm more impressed with her. I like the idea of a lady who goes around springing surprise tests of slang on the youth of Britain.

And, in case you were wondering, a pony is £25, and a Dead Brazilian = Ayrton Senna = Tenner = £10.

As for quid, nobody is sure. It may come from quidditas in Latin, meaning that which is, perhaps with the sense of hard cash against airy nothings. But it may come from cud, as in the thing that cows chew. The idea is that cud came to refer to chewing tobacco and therefore to the little piece of tobacco to be chewed. It then came to mean any small amount of anything, and hence a unit of money.

Anyway, the first use of quid comes from the 1661 classic Strange News From Bartholomew Fair:

The fool lost his purse, but how he knew not; for the reckoning being suddainly brought in, his Quids were vanisht.

The Inky Fool in a rare lapse of concentration