What the Dickens?
Slang in Great Literature?
by
Howard Richler
In 1807, Thomas Bowdler published The Family Shakespeare stating in his
preface that “nothing is added to the original text, but those words and
expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read in a Family.”
Within thirty years he had been eponymized and verbified in one swell swoop and
the OED defines bowdlerize as “to expurgate (a book or writing), by omitting or
modifying words or passages considered indelicate or offensive.”
Actually, the lexicographic recording
of slang is a relatively recent phenomenon. The first dictionaries only dealt
with “difficult words” that were relatively new to the lexicon and only
centuries later did they become more comprehensive in nature. There is the story,
perhaps apocryphal, that after Samuel Johnson wrote A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, two elderly sisters
congratulated the lexicographer for not including “ghastly” words in his tome.
To which, Dr Johnson reputedly replied, “What ! My dears! Then you have been
looking for them?”
But returning to Shakespeare, Jonathon
Green in The Stories of Slang reports
that Shakespeare employed over 500 slang terms in his works with 277 of them
representing the first recorded usage of the word. Green mentions that comedian
Lenny Bruce noted that everybody yearns for what “should be” but what should be
doesn’t exist, there is only what “is” and in describing the human condition, Shakespeare
described the many unsavoury aspects of our characters and he often used slang
terms effectively in his portrayal of people.
For example, in All’s Well That Ends Well, the term kickie-wickie is used to mean
wife; pickers and stealers in Hamlet
refers to hands; asshead in Twelfth Night
to a dolt, and small beer in Othello
replaces trifles. Perhaps intuiting that another great British writer would
emerge centuries later, he created the expression what the dickens in Merry Wives of Windsor. (Dickens is a
euphemism for Devil). Shakespeare created slang terms as required. So in Henry IV Part 2 he invented the word
fustilarian to refer to a smelly old woman by adding the suffix -larian to
fusty. In All’s Well That Ends Well,
he created the word facinerious to represent evil adapting the Latin facinor, “bad deed.” And to the chagrin
of the likes of the Bowdlers of the world, Shakespeare used many slang terms in
his countless double entendres. For example, in an early scene in Hamlet that begins with the Prince
saying to Ophelia, “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?”, the term “lap,” is a
double entendre for the lady’s pudendum. Also, Hamlet’s reference to his mother in the line “Frailty,
thy name on woman” takes on a different hue once we realize that “frail” or “frail sister” was a euphemism for
prostitute.
Many common words have distinct naughty
meaning in Shakespeare’s plays. In The
Stories of Slang, Green reveals that a nunnery isn’t remotely religious
(even if populated by nuns): we are in the world of brothels..; nor are the low
countries..even remotely Dutch but what
modernity coyly terms ‘down there.’ ”
Interestingly, the first OED citation of the word slang is only
in 1756 in William Toldervy’s The History
of Two Orphans, so what disreputable language was Shakespeare using seeing
that he died 140 years before the term slang was ever used? The first
dictionary that included what we would call slang terms was titled A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and
Modern of the Canting Crew was
compiled in 1698 London and we only know the author by the initials B.E. So while Shakespeare has been dubbed the“immortal
Bard,” even he could not access a tome written over 80 years after his demise.
One of Shakespeare’s major source of disreputable words seems to derive from his
contemporary John Florio’s 598 Italian-English dictionary The Worlde of Words. For example, in it, Florio translated fottere as to jape, to sard, to swive,
to occupy and the unmentionable f-word. Other
slang terms he used had been in the English language since at least the time of
Chaucer in the 14th century.
Shakespeare is hardly the only
English language literary great to successfully employ slang. Dickens describes
many of his characters slangily, and particularly in Oliver Twist. The Artful Dodger is dubbed a “downy cove,” which Green’s Dictionary of Slang defines as
“a knowledgeable, artful, aware, ‘fly’
person.” Uber-pickpocketer Bill Sykes is called a “swell mobsman” and Fagin
is a “fence,” a receiver of stolen
goods and Sykes says to him in one passage “What are you up to? “ill-treating
the boys… you insatiable old fence.” Lady of the street Nancy is called a tuppenny
uprighter due to the oft horizontal nature of her profession. Also, in The Stories of Slang, Green relates that
Ulysses by James Joyce, considered by
some as the greatest novel ever composed, contains almost 1000 slang terms.
Stating categorically, however,
whether a specific term qualifies as slang is often a fool’s errand. In The State of the Language Phillip Howard
states that “one man’s slang is another man’s colloquialism is another man’s
vernacular is another man’s everyday speech.”
That being said, slang is a monument
to language’s ability to evolve by slicing through its oft pretentious and
euphemistic nature.
Richler’s latest book is Wordplay: Arranged and Deranged Wit
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