If you’ve been reading the Delamere files, you will have noticed Jack uses a couple of what might seem odd expressions. One of these is, ‘Have a word.’ He says it as Londoners these days might say, ‘Leave it out,’ or ‘Do you mind?’ That’s one of his characteristics, in the same way it’s Baxter’s to use a lot of East End street cant (slang). As you may know, I like to have my characters use idioms in their speech as it makes them more individual.
One of the issues facing new writers, it seems, is to differentiate characters one from the other. A common trap to fall into (and I do it myself) is to describe an entering character right off the bat. Stoker does this when Harker first meets Count Dracula (ignore the coloured bocks, it’s from a learn English site:
That was Stoker’s style, and it’s one way of saying, ‘Here, meet the character,’ but these days, I am trying to ween myself from that easy way out and drip feed the details and build the character as the story goes along. One way to ensure your characters stand out from each other, is to hear them speak as you write their dialogue, and one way I do that is to use slang.
Baxter, for example, had a Scottish father so would have picked up some Scottish idioms in early life, and a London mother, ditto. He grew up around horses in a stable, then got kicked out onto the streets. He would have been, and is, full of colourful street language, horse-talk, Scotishisms and East End cant. Me being me like to be as accurate as possible with times, places, events, history and language within the scope of a novel, so I’m forever diving into my books as I write my London and other characters. One of my favourite books for this, as I’ve said before, is ‘The Vulgar Tongue.’ Although compiled in the early 19th century, this collection of street cant and slang is invaluable when writing dialogue from particular characters.
For example. Yesterday, I was writing a scene about Baxter but from Jack’s point of view. Bax had been up all night drinking coffee with lots of sugar in it, so he was what we’d now called hyper, and he was talking to Jack who was brought up in Limehouse, so they more or less understood each other when Baxter said,
‘Like I said, looks like they’d been on and off more times than a cockish Corinthian’s been on and off the Lady Abbess in a knocking shop.’
I was going to use another word for ‘knocking shop’ such as nanny house, nugging house, pushing school, snoozing ken, academy (which were all in use in the early 19th century), but for clarity, I went with a more modern term. A ‘cockish’ Corinthian is a hybrid as I made up ‘cockish’ to mean randy (which was not commonly in use until 1950s), but Corinthian was a word used to describe men who frequented brothels, where the Lady (or Mother) Abbess was the madam.
Here’s another note. You might have noticed Jack (and Baxter) use the word ‘Lob’ for their, er, dangly bits. The word, ‘Lob’ in old cant referred to the till in a shop, and to ‘frisk a lob’ was to rob a till. Baxter, and other ex-rent boys of Whitechapel, use the word because their, er, dangly bits, were how they made money, so the front of their trousers became where they kept the ‘lob.’
Yes, the words are vulgarities, but that’s how many of my characters would have spoken because it was a) how they were brought up, and b) all they knew. As they progress through the series, they change, of course. Where Will is learning to control his OCD, so Jack is learning to curb his vernacular, though some characters, such as Baxter and Ronny, are still having issues with that. (Ronny, btw, has been diagnosed as having a mild case of what we now call Tourette’s, mixed with 14 years of bad habits.)
While trawling my dictionary looking for suitable words to slip into Baxter’s vocabulary, I came across an expression I am going to have to throw into the next book at some point: Dicked in the nob.
Any ideas?
No, it doesn’t mean that – wash your mouth out…
It means silly or crazed. ‘That boy was dicked in the nob.’ Imagine saying that now.
Anyway, the point of this ramble was to bring the book to your attention, The Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose. I have a hard copy and a free PDF copy I found, and that’s much easier to trawl through because you can search for the word you want an alternative for.
While doing that, I found the book includes a section of a poem which I’ve put here so you can see a few choice words and also see how the book works.
FLASH PANNEYS. Houses to which thieves and prostitutes resort.
Next for his favourite MOT (Girl) the KIDDEY (Youth) looks about,
And if she’s in a FLASH PANNEY (Brothel) he swears he’ll have her out;
So he FENCES (Pawns) all his TOGS (Clothes) to buy her DUDS, (Wearing Apparel) and then
He FRISKS (Robs) his master’s LOB (Till) to take her from the bawdy KEN (House).
FLASH. A periwig. Rum flash; a fine long wig. Queer flash; a miserable weather−beaten caxon (wig).
I’ll be back on Wednesday with an update on the next book and its progress. Meanwhile, here is a promo you might want to browse.
