Orwell on slang and swearing
Andy Averill
little goldmine of information about London slang c. 1933. For example,
according to Orwell, rhyming slang among Cockneys was on the way out by
then -- I had the impression it continued for considerably longer. He also
says that people had stopped saying "fice" for "face" by then (Pygmalion was
written in 1912). And the interchange of "v" and "w," which we see in
Dickens ("weal" for "veal") was apparently long gone.
When he gets to swearing, he loses me, because most of the key words in have
been replaced by blanks in my edition (Berkley 1959). Have these words been
included in any edition? It seems unlikely that Orwell intended blanks
where they now occur, or he would have written it differently. For example,
he says that nobody in the London working classes now says "bloody" --
instead, ______ has become the all-purpose adjective. (It doesn't appear
that the lengths of the various blanks have any significance, so I'm using
the same length for all of them.)
In the next paragraph he points out that swear words often lose any
connection with their original meaning:
"For example, ______. The Londoners do not now use, or very seldom use,
this word in its original meaning; it is on their lips from morning till
night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing. Similarly with ______,
which is rapidly losing its original sense. One can think of similar
instances in French -- for example, _____, which is now a quite meaningless
expletive. The word ______, also, is still used occasionally in Paris, but
the people who use it, or most of them, have no idea of what it once meant."
(Oh for the days when no reputable English-language publisher would print
French swear words!)
Can anybody fill in the blanks for me?
--
Andy Averill
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Martha Bridegam
Andy Averill wrote:
> I'm currently reading Down and Out in London and Paris. Chapter 32 is a
> little goldmine of information about London slang c. 1933. For example,
> according to Orwell, rhyming slang among Cockneys was on the way out by
> then -- I had the impression it continued for considerably longer. He also
> says that people had stopped saying "fice" for "face" by then (Pygmalion was
> written in 1912). And the interchange of "v" and "w," which we see in
> Dickens ("weal" for "veal") was apparently long gone.
>
> When he gets to swearing, he loses me, because most of the key words in have
> been replaced by blanks in my edition (Berkley 1959). Have these words been
> included in any edition? It seems unlikely that Orwell intended blanks
> where they now occur, or he would have written it differently. For example,
> he says that nobody in the London working classes now says "bloody" --
> instead, ______ has become the all-purpose adjective. (It doesn't appear
> that the lengths of the various blanks have any significance, so I'm using
> the same length for all of them.)
Per the Orwell Complete Works, the word in the blank is "fucking."
>
>
> In the next paragraph he points out that swear words often lose any
> connection with their original meaning:
>
> "For example, ______.
"fuck"
> The Londoners do not now use, or very seldom use,
> this word in its original meaning; it is on their lips from morning till
> night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing. Similarly with ______,
"bugger"
>
> which is rapidly losing its original sense. One can think of similar
> instances in French -- for example, _____,
"foutre"
> which is now a quite meaningless
> expletive. The word ______,
"bougre"
> also, is still used occasionally in Paris, but
> the people who use it, or most of them, have no idea of what it once meant."
> (Oh for the days when no reputable English-language publisher would print
> French swear words!)
>
> Can anybody fill in the blanks for me?
>
> --
> Andy Averill
Thx for making me look it up in the CW. I remember this chapter confused the
___ out of me in an older edition.
/MAB
Joe Fineman
> Can anybody fill in the blanks for me?
Orwell's collected works have now been published, and would very
likely have the blanks filled in. I don't have them, but a large
library might. Some of the regulars on alt.books.george-orwell
actually own them; if you posted a query there, you might well get an
answer.
--
--- Joe Fineman j...@TheWorld.com
||: If you don't like the fortune, don't eat the cookie. :||
Andy Averill
"Martha Bridegam" <ma...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:3BD5F978...@pacbell.net...
Thank *you*! Great book, wouldn't you agree? But why was he quite so far
down? Couldn't an old public school man have found a job easily, especially
in London? It doesn't appear that he was just slumming for research.
Martha Bridegam
Andy Averill wrote:
Down & Out is almost all true but not quite. The usual theory goes that he was
slumming for a) research, and b) atonement for five years in the Burmese
Imperial Police.
He genuinely lived poor in Paris for about a year beginning spring 1928, but in
England he put his account together from several different tramping excursions
of a few weeks each, otherwise staying in a rented room arranged by friends &
with his parents.
I don't think the "tame lunatic" existed at all.
/MAB
felix
> It doesn't appear that he was just slumming for research.
I think he was, wasn't he? I think the point was to find out what was
going on on the other side of things.
Foutre, I think in France almost no longer means copulate, it's just a
swear word (much politer than 'fuck' is here). Slang for copulate (or
one of them anyway) is 'niquer.'
As in:
Qu'est-ce que c'est passe quand il y avait un feu dans le bordel?
Tous les filles sont pas niquees (paniquees, geddit?)(Apologies for
lack of aceents, misspellings etc).
My favourite Parisian slang word comes from the north african/arabic:
'zob', meaning the male member. Listen to that onomatopoeia - very
close to 'schlong', really.
felix
Simon R. Hughes
> "Andy Averill" <nospa...@lisco.com> writes:
>
> > Can anybody fill in the blanks for me?
>
> Orwell's collected works have now been published, and would very
> likely have the blanks filled in. I don't have them, but a large
> library might. Some of the regulars on alt.books.george-orwell
> actually own them; if you posted a query there, you might well get an
> answer.
<gulp>
Are you trying to indicate that there is something strange about a
person who owns "the complete works of X" (where X is not
Shakespeare, of course)?
--
Simon R. Hughes -- http://www.geocities.com/a57998/subconscious/
(The time is 01:35, and I can smell baking -- someone is baking at
this time of night. And now I have to try to go to sleep with that
gorgeous aroma on the loose.)
Tom Deveson
>Are you trying to indicate that there is something strange about a
>person who owns "the complete works of X" (where X is not
>Shakespeare, of course)?
Joe was referring to the 20-volume edition of the Complete Works of
George Orwell. They've been edited, in an extraordinary one-man feat of
scholarship, by Peter Davison. It's far more exhaustive than any
previous version, full of footnotes and textual details that are
unobtainable elsewhere. Though some cheaper selections from it are now
starting to appear, Amazon is currently selling the set at £750. It
would be nice it were strange not to be able to own it.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Charles Riggs
I'm _able_ to own it. My question is who'd _want_ to own it? He's not
exactly Shakespeare, Joyce, Faulkner, or ten dozen others I can think
of.
Charles Riggs
Joe Fineman
> Foutre, I think in France almost no longer means copulate, it's just
> a swear word (much politer than 'fuck' is here). Slang for copulate
> (or one of them anyway) is 'niquer.'
When I was briefly in Paris in 1959, a student friend of mine told me
that among the students there, "foutre" meant masturbate, and the
usual equivalent of "fuck" was "jazzer". I thought that was pretty
sad. Reduced to *American* slang for so fundamental a word!
--
--- Joe Fineman j...@TheWorld.com
||: If you don't love me, love whom you please. :||
||: Throw your arms round me, give my heart ease. :||
Andy Averill
"felix" <fel...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:430d1c32.01102...@posting.google.com...
Onomatopoiea? I don't know about you, but my penis doesn't go "schlong."
"Schwing," maybe.
felix
> > 'zob', meaning the male member. Listen to that onomatopoeia - very
> > close to 'schlong', really.
>
> Onomatopoiea? I don't know about you, but my penis doesn't go "schlong."
> "Schwing," maybe.
Your puir wee laddie! How about wang? Does your wanger go wang?
felix
Donna Richoux
> fel...@hotmail.com (felix) writes:
>
> > Foutre, I think in France almost no longer means copulate, it's just
> > a swear word (much politer than 'fuck' is here). Slang for copulate
> > (or one of them anyway) is 'niquer.'
>
> When I was briefly in Paris in 1959, a student friend of mine told me
> that among the students there, "foutre" meant masturbate, and the
> usual equivalent of "fuck" was "jazzer". I thought that was pretty
> sad. Reduced to *American* slang for so fundamental a word!
You probably learned better since then, but in case anyone else misses
the joke: according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of
American Slang, one of the possible sources of the American word "jazz"
is the French slang "jaser," to copulate with. It was recorded in 1896,
and also appears in the 1917 song "Mademoiselle from Armentieres."
--
Best --- Donna Richoux
Isabelle Cecchini
"Donna Richoux" <tr...@euronet.nl> a écrit dans le message news:
1f1upos.rokv3p7ocmpdN%tr...@euronet.nl...
> Joe Fineman <j...@TheWorld.com> wrote:
>
> > fel...@hotmail.com (felix) writes:
> >
> > > Foutre, I think in France almost no longer means copulate, it's
> > > just a swear word (much politer than 'fuck' is here). Slang for
> > > copulate (or one of them anyway) is 'niquer.'
May I be allowed some nit-picking here?
felix is quite right to point out that "niquer" is modern for "foutre".
What I am not so sure about is that they both mean "copulate".
I might be mistaken about the meaning of "copulate" in English, but it
seems to be some sort of two-way business, some kind of reciprocal
affair, so that it goes both ways, as it were, whereas "foutre", as well
as "niquer", in French, are quite aggressive words. I think they both
refer to a male point of view: I mean that only a man can "foutre" or
"niquer" a woman. If I --a woman-- were to say about a man "Je l'ai bien
niqué", it could only be understood jocularly.
> >
> > When I was briefly in Paris in 1959, a student friend of mine told
> > me that among the students there, "foutre" meant masturbate, and the
> > usual equivalent of "fuck" was "jazzer". I thought that was pretty
> > sad. Reduced to *American* slang for so fundamental a word!
>
> You probably learned better since then, but in case anyone else misses
> the joke: according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of
> American Slang, one of the possible sources of the American word
> "jazz" is the French slang "jaser," to copulate with. It was recorded
> in 1896, and also appears in the 1917 song "Mademoiselle from
> Armentieres."
I cannot find any references to "jaser" in the meaning given by that
dictionary. The meanings I know of in French are "sing in the manner of
birds", "talk", and "speak ill about somebody".
I suppose "jaser avec quelqu'un", meaning "talk", or "sing sweetly with
somebody" might be understood as "copulate with somebody", but I have
never met that usage.
I have searched the Web, via Google, for _Mademoiselle from
Armentières_, but I have been unable to find either "jaser" or "jazz".
Isabelle Cecchini
Donna Richoux
> "Donna Richoux" <tr...@euronet.nl> a écrit dans le message news:
> 1f1upos.rokv3p7ocmpdN%tr...@euronet.nl...
> > Joe Fineman <j...@TheWorld.com> wrote:
> > > When I was briefly in Paris in 1959, a student friend of mine told
> > > me that among the students there, "foutre" meant masturbate, and the
> > > usual equivalent of "fuck" was "jazzer". I thought that was pretty
> > > sad. Reduced to *American* slang for so fundamental a word!
> >
> > You probably learned better since then, but in case anyone else misses
> > the joke: according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of
> > American Slang, one of the possible sources of the American word
> > "jazz" is the French slang "jaser," to copulate with. It was recorded
> > in 1896, and also appears in the 1917 song "Mademoiselle from
> > Armentieres."
>
> I cannot find any references to "jaser" in the meaning given by that
> dictionary.
Yes, RHHDAS notices that also. The entry begins:
jazz, verb [cf. Farmer & Henley, _Slang and its
Analogs_ VI pp. 23-24: "To possess carnally ...
French synonyms ... jaser (also jazer)," a sense
unrecorded in standard French dictionaries. Yet the
French verb in its ordinary sense of 'to chatter or
gossip' was indeed anglicized as jazz on at least
one occasion [snip 1831 British use of "jazz" to
mean "chatter"]]
1. to copulate with... 1896 S. Farmer _Vocab.
Amatoria_ 162: Jaser (or Jazer). To copulate; "to
chuck a tread." Tu as les genoux chauds, tu veux
jaser -- La Comedie des Proverbes. 1918 in M. Carey
/Mlle. from Armentieres II (unpublished): She jazzed
a nigger, she jazzed a Jew. Ibid: Hasn't been jazzed
for fifty years.
Then come seven citations from the 1920s, followed by more from each
decade.
>The meanings I know of in French are "sing in the manner of
> birds", "talk", and "speak ill about somebody".
>
> I suppose "jaser avec quelqu'un", meaning "talk", or "sing sweetly with
> somebody" might be understood as "copulate with somebody", but I have
> never met that usage.
>
> I have searched the Web, via Google, for _Mademoiselle from
> Armentières_, but I have been unable to find either "jaser" or "jazz".
It was never a common variant of the song, apparently, since RHHDAS
relies on an unpublished citation. There's a version of "Mademoiselle
from Armentieres" (also called "Hinky Dinky Parlay Voo") with a lot of
uses of "shagged" and "fucked" at
http://www.acronet.net/~robokopp/english/armentir.htm
Bob Cunningham
>Isabelle Cecchini <Isabelle...@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
While we're on the subject of screwing, let me interject that I've found
it fascinating to learn that a common word for "fuck" in parts of Latin
America -- as an alternative to "joder" -- is "coger", which in polite
conversation means things like "take", "catch", and "get".
This appears to be yet another euphemism gone bad.
Makes me wonder how "Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded
wife?" would be translated into Latin-American Spanish. Not too
literally, I suppose.
Tony Cooper
>
> While we're on the subject of screwing, let me interject that I've found
> it fascinating to learn that a common word for "fuck" in parts of Latin
> America -- as an alternative to "joder" -- is "coger", which in polite
> conversation means things like "take", "catch", and "get".
>
often.
--
Tony Cooper aka: tony_co...@yahoo.com
Provider of Jots and Tittles
M. Ranjit Mathews
> "Donna Richoux" <tr...@euronet.nl> a écrit dans le message news:
> 1f1upos.rokv3p7ocmpdN%tr...@euronet.nl...
> > Joe Fineman <j...@TheWorld.com> wrote:
> >
> > > fel...@hotmail.com (felix) writes:
> > >
> > > > Foutre, I think in France almost no longer means copulate, it's
> > > > just a swear word (much politer than 'fuck' is here). Slang for
> > > > copulate (or one of them anyway) is 'niquer.'
>
> May I be allowed some nit-picking here?
> felix is quite right to point out that "niquer" is modern for "foutre".
>
> What I am not so sure about is that they both mean "copulate".
>
> I might be mistaken about the meaning of "copulate" in English, but it
> seems to be some sort of two-way business, some kind of reciprocal
> affair, so that it goes both ways, as it were, whereas "foutre", as well
> as "niquer", in French, are quite aggressive words.
Ah, so a niquerbonker would be aggressive!
> I think they both
> refer to a male point of view: I mean that only a man can "foutre" or
> "niquer" a woman. If I --a woman-- were to say about a man "Je l'ai bien
> niqué", it could only be understood jocularly.
If taken seriously, a woman who says this might be pegged for a femme
petit (rather than a petit femme).
Alec McKenzie
Bob Cunningham <exw...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> While we're on the subject of screwing, let me interject that I've found
> it fascinating to learn that a common word for "fuck" in parts of Latin
> America -- as an alternative to "joder" -- is "coger", which in polite
> conversation means things like "take", "catch", and "get".
>
> This appears to be yet another euphemism gone bad.
>
> Makes me wonder how "Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded
> wife?" would be translated into Latin-American Spanish. Not too
> literally, I suppose.
>
It's not quite like that:
a) "coger" is not not just a common word for "fuck" -- it's THE word.
b) "coger" is not an alternative to "joder" -- "joder" is never used.
c) "coger" is just not used in polite conversation.
--
Alec McKenzie
alec_m...@hotmail.com
Isabelle Cecchini
> Isabelle Cecchini <Isabelle...@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> > [...]
> > I cannot find any references to "jaser" in the meaning given by that
> > dictionary.
>
> Yes, RHHDAS notices that also. The entry begins:
>
> jazz, verb [cf. Farmer & Henley, _Slang and its
> Analogs_ VI pp. 23-24: "To possess carnally ...
> French synonyms ... jaser (also jazer)," a sense
> unrecorded in standard French dictionaries. Yet the
> French verb in its ordinary sense of 'to chatter or
> gossip' was indeed anglicized as jazz on at least
> one occasion [snip 1831 British use of "jazz" to
> mean "chatter"]]
> 1. to copulate with... 1896 S. Farmer _Vocab.
> Amatoria_ 162: Jaser (or Jazer). To copulate; "to
> chuck a tread." Tu as les genoux chauds, tu veux
> jaser -- La Comedie des Proverbes. [...]
That is very interesting. Thank you, Donna.
The nearest thing I could find, in _Curiosités françaises_, by Antoine
Oudin, 1640, is:
« Il a les pieds chauds, il veut jaser, " il est à son aise, il a envie
de discourir, " vulg. »
= His feet are warm, he wants "jaser", meaning "He is at ease, he feels
like talking." considered vulgar.
As _La Comédie des Proverbes_ also dates back to the 17th century, I
think that might be similar enough.
Another reference in the _Dictionnaire de l'Académie_, 1762, is:
« On dit proverbialement à un homme, Vous jasez bien à votre aise, vous
avez les pieds chauds. » In my opinion, that is the same meaning, «
jaser » = "talk".
I have to admit that I do not really know what to do with this
information.
When Oudin says of an idiom that it is "vulgar", I do not think he means
that it is obscene. In his usage, it seems to mean "low", or "used by
peasants or uneducated people".
As for the Académie française, as that august body recorded the use in
1762, it cannot have been considered either marginal or specially
obscene at the time. (The Académie is not known for going into slang.)
The shift from « pieds » to « genoux » might have some significance, as
well as the fact that _La Comédie des Proverbes_ seems to have been be a
specially spicy play, according to a book about proverbs published in
1823:
« La Comédie des Proverbes, par le comte de Cramail, Paris, 1616, est
farcie de proverbes si vulgaires, qu'il serait aujourd'hui impossible
d'en soutenir la lecture. » = It is filled with such vulgar proverbs
that it would be impossible to bear reading today.
Still, it seems such a long way from a proverb used in the 17th and 18th
century, and from then on completely ignored, to "jazz" as used in the
trenches of WWI...
[About _Mademoiselle from Armentières_ ]
I only knew a bowdlerized version, so all this is very interesting.
Thank you!
Isabelle Cecchini
Bob Cunningham
A Spanish instructor who was originally a native of Argentina told us that
the word for "fuck" is "joder".
Your remarks about the vulgar sense of "coger" are apparently true only in
Latin America and only in parts of that. _The Oxford Spanish Dictionary_,
Second Edition (1998), marks it "Mexico, Rio de la Plata area, Venezuela".
"Rio de la Plata area" seems to refer to parts of Argentina and Uruguay.
Bob Cunningham
said:
[ . . . ]
>"Rio de la Plata area" seems to refer to parts of Argentina and Uruguay.
I see now that the Information Please Encyclopedia at
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/world/A0839315.html
says:
The viceroyalty of Río de la Plata, more or less corresponding
to the present Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay, was
established in 1776.
So I suppose "Rio de la Plata area" probably still refers to the region
comprising those countries.
Alec McKenzie
Bob Cunningham <exw...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> A Spanish instructor who was originally a native of Argentina told us that
> the word for "fuck" is "joder".
Yes it is, in Spanish. But not in those parts of South America.
--
Alec McKenzie
alec_m...@hotmail.com