George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

Jacket

), and Cockney is already changing; there are few

people now who say "fice" for "face," "nawce" for

"nice" and so forth as consistently as they did twenty

years ago. The slang changes together with the accent.

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the

"rhyming slang" was all the rage in London. In the

"rhyming slang" everything was named by something

rhyming with it-a "hit or miss" for a kiss, "plates of

meat" for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even

reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct.' Perhaps

all the words I have mentioned above will have van-

ished in another twenty years.

The swear words also change-or, at any rate, they are

subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the

London working classes habitually used the word

"bloody." Now they have abandoned it utterly, though

novelists still represent them as using it. No born

Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish

origin) now says "bloody," unless he is a man of some

education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social

scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of

the working classes. The current London adjective, now

tacked on to every noun, is ---------

. No

doubt in time---, like "bloody," will find its way into

1 It survives in certain abbreviations, such as "use your

twopenny" or "use your head." "Twopenny" is arrived at like

this: head-loaf of bread-twopenny loaf-twopenny.

the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.

The whole business of swearing, especially English

swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is

as irrational as magic-indeed, it is a species of magic.

But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our

intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we

do by mentioning something that should be kept secret -

usually something to do with the sexual functions. But

the strange thing is that when a word is well established

as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning;

that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word.

A word becomes an oath because it means a certain

thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to

mean that thing. 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. The rule

seems to be that words accepted as swear words have

some magical character, which sets them apart and

makes them useless for ordinary conversation.

Words used as insults seem to be governed by the

same paradox as swear words. A word becomes an

insult, one would suppose, because it means something

bad; but in practice its insult-value has little to do with

its actual meaning. For example, the most bitter insult

one can offer to a Londoner is "bastard"which, taken for

what it means, is hardly an insult at all. And the worst

insult to a women, either in London

or Paris, is "cow"; a name which might even be a com-

pliment, for cows are among the most likeable of animals.

Evidently a word is an insult simply because it is meant as

an insult, without reference to its dictionary meaning;

words, especially swear words, being what public opinion

chooses to make them. In this connection it is interesting

to see how a swear word can change character by crossing

a frontier. In England you can print «

Je m'en fous »

without protest from anybody. In France you have to print

it "

Je m'en f-----" Or, as another example,

take the word "barnshoot"a corruption of the Hindustani

word

bahinchut . A vile and unforgivable insult in India, this

word is a piece of gentle badinage in England. I have even

seen it in a school text-book; it was in one of

Aristophanes' plays, and the annotator suggested it as a

rendering of some gibberish spoken by a Persian

ambassador. Presumably the annotator knew what

bahinchut

meant. But, because it was a foreign word, it had

lost its magical swear-word quality and could be printed.

One other thing is noticeable about swearing in

London, and that is that the men do not usually swear in

front of the women. In Paris it is quite different. A

Parisian workman may prefer to suppress an oath in front

of a woman, but he is not at all scrupulous about it, and

the women themselves swear freely. The Londoners are

more polite, or more squeamish, in this matter.

These are a few notes that I have set down more or less

at random. It is a pity that someone capable of dealing

with the subject does not keep a year-book of London

slang and swearing, registering the changes accurately. It

might throw useful light upon the formation, development

and obsolescence of words.

XXXIII

THE two pounds that B. had given me lasted about ten

days. That it lasted so long was due to Paddy, who had

learned parsimony on the road and considered even one

sound meal a day a wild extravagance. Food, to him, had

come to mean simply bread and margarine -the eternal tea-

and-two-slices, which will cheat hunger for an hour or

two. He taught me how to live, food, bed, tobacco and all,

at the rate of half a crown a day. And he managed to earn

a few extra shillings by "glimming" in the evenings. It

was a precarious job, because illegal, but it brought in a

little and eked out our money.

One morning we tried for a job as sandwich men. We

went at five to an alley-way behind some offices, but there

was already a queue of thirty or forty men waiting, and

after two hours we were told that there was no work for

us. We had not missed much, for sandwich men have an

unenviable job. They are paid about three shillings a day

for ten hours' work-it is hard work, especially in windy

weather, and there is no skulking, for an inspector comes

round frequently to see that the men are on their beat. To

add to their troubles, they are only engaged by the day, or

sometimes for three days, never weekly, so that they have

to wait hours for their job every morning. The number of

unemployed men who are ready to do the work makes

them powerless to fight for better treatment. The job all

sandwich men covet is distributing, handbills, which is

paid for at the same rate. When you see a man distributing

handbills you can do him a good turn by taking one, for he

goes off duty when he has distributed all his bills.

Meanwhile we went on with the lodging-house life-

a squalid, eventless life of crushing boredom. For days

together there was nothing to do but sit in the under-

ground kitchen, reading yesterday's newspaper, or, when

one could get hold of it, a back number of the

Union Jack .

It rained a great deal at this time, and everyone who came

in steamed, so that the kitchen stank horribly. One's only

excitement was the periodical tea-and-two-slices. I do not

know how many men are living this life in London-it must