Filthy English, page 14
Because of the way Yiddish sounds, most people think it’s a dialect or offshoot of German but it’s not. More a cousin than a daughter, it has the same historical root as modern German. It also has elements of Hebrew, various Slavic languages and Loez – the French and Italian spoken by Jews in the Middle Ages. It began to come to life in the ghettos established by the Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1215 – Jews only, gates locked at night. This new proto-Yiddish was spread, southwards and eastwards, by the Plague and the pogroms of the First Crusade – Britain’s biggest was in York in 1190 when up to five hundred Jews were killed. When Jews from the Rhine area – including Sigmund Freud’s ancestors – were invited to Poland to work there as traders, acting as middle-men between the nobility and the peasantry, they encountered Jews who only spoke the local language. Yiddish emerged out of that encounter. It became a pan-European language for Jews, the lingua franca of daily life. By contrast, ancient Hebrew was used much the way Latin was in the Catholic Church – for worship, religious study and scholarly communication across the European diaspora. By the late sixteenth century, Yiddish was a written language. The first Yiddish newspaper was launched, in Amsterdam, in 1686–7. It was the language that Jews took to Ellis Island and beyond. It was that transatlantic emigration that killed it. Hitler and his pals, too, of course.
In its (almost) death, though, Yiddish has bequeathed us what made it its unique self – an attitude, a history, a collection of shared experiences precipitated into words, phrases and rhythms. Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics, wrote: ‘a nation’s mores have their impact on the language, and, conversely, it is to a large extent the language which makes the nation’. Yiddish has left us with words that express otherwise inexpressible concepts. To incorporate a Yiddish word into your vocabulary is to take on the whole sense of hard-won, wry world-weariness that the language embodies almost to the point of caricature. In a London lecture hall, I heard Israeli novelist David Grossman – who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home – talk about what he felt had been lost with the passing of Yiddish. Suspicion of all power, he said, lack of certainty, scepticism, delicacy.
Which is why, stepping aside from swear words for a moment, most of us – whether we know it or not – have taken to speaking a little Yiddish. Or rather, Yinglish – not a language but a collection of words that have leaked sideways from Yiddish into English, first via the vast Jewish immigrant population of early twentieth-century New York, then via culture – Phillip Roth novels, say, and Woody Allen films. Words such as shmaltz†, meaning excessive sentimentality, which comes to us from its physical analogue, fat. When I was first in New York, in the late 1970s, Lower East Side kosher deli tables held jugs of shmaltz – chicken fat to pour on your food‡. The fashion business, the shmutter trade: these are not the same thing. One of them definitely doesn’t involve air-kissing or Kate Moss. Shmutter is from the Yiddish shmatte – a rag. Shtik is cognate with the German Stück (piece) but it’s come to mean a performance, an act, or even an expression of self through words. It’s not always complimentary. In The Joys of Yiddish (one of the most joy-filled books ever written), Leo Rosten offers by way of example: ‘How did you ever fall for a shtik like that?’ This kind of shtik comes to us from the Yiddish vaudeville halls where comic acts could be divided into two kinds, shtik und tummel – wordy or physical.
We took kosher, which was a marker of dietary correctness, and extended it to mean fair, square or ethical. Partridge found it in east London as early as 1860, when the big wave of Jewish immigration had barely started. Yiddish also gave us ‘ish’. When asked how Jewish he felt, Jonathan Miller replied ‘ish’. (By extension, given the size and impact of my wife’s family, when faced with government forms, I sometimes fill in my religion as ‘jewishish catholic atheist’.) It gave us chutzpah: boy kills parents, pleas for mercy on grounds of being an orphan. There’s something for everyone in Yiddish. When discussing our offspring with my Scouse, Catholic-born cousin Dominica, she was much taken by my introduction of the phrase shep naches – to share, boastfully and mutually, one’s pride in the achievements of one’s children. When, facing the ignominy of failure, the then England football manager, Graham Taylor, turned – easily and unconsciously – to the emphatic yet almost witty despair of a Yiddish inversion: ‘Do I not like that!’
Yiddish is particularly good on penises. Not only are there a good number of words but they can also imply slightly different things. Shmuck, shlong, shvantz and putz – Yiddish pricks, all of them. Shmuck is a variant on the Yiddish shmock†. Most say it’s derived from a German/Yiddish word for ornament or jewel. Think of the English family jewels – same kind of metaphor, same area of the body. Other linguists and experts think it’s related to the Polish smok, meaning dragon. Shlong is from snake. Shvantz, too. Think of the Australian one-eyed trouser snake and ‘siphon the python’. (Why no English English snake words for penis? My only guess is that it’s simply a result of the legless reptile’s rarity in Britain. Also perhaps that British snakes are such skinny, scrawny things that not many men would want to be identified with them.)
In meaning, a Yiddish shmock is almost identical to an English prick. When it means penis, it’s not a word you’d use in front of an elderly aunt. When it’s used non-anatomically, though, its meaning varies, exactly as prick’s does. Said lightly, it’s a jerk or bumbler. Said with a harsher, punchier intonation, it can mean something far nastier. Say, ‘Don’t be such a prick’ vs ‘You prick!’
Translated into Yinglish, shmock’s sound changed. It now rhymed with fuck rather than cock. It also shed its harsher meaning. Probably because few English-speakers know anything of its penile roots, a Yinglish or English shmuck is always a jerk, nothing worse. No malevolence is indicated, only ever exasperation at most. It’s what Jim Carrey called himself for turning down the Ben Stiller role in Meet the Parents – after he’d come up with the gag of giving the character the surname Focker. On the other hand, it likely wouldn’t have been the same if Carrey had called the director a shmuck. ‘The difference is who is being referred to,’ suggested a friend who can’t speak it himself but grew up among Yiddish speakers. ‘When it is self-referential it becomes benign. If it’s directed at someone else, it means a nasty jerk, not an idiot.’ There may also be a hint of the original seriousness of the Yiddish shmock in the way Yinglish often shortens and euphemizes shmuck into shmo. We don’t do that to words we don’t take seriously.
‘Putz’ also means penis. In Yiddish, it’s pronounced pots, in English it rhymes with smuts. Again, experts diverge on the word’s history. A few suggest a link with a Turkish/Greek word for the ‘cleft in the buttocks’ – i.e. builder’s cleavage. Most, though, think it’s linked to the German putzen, to clean or decorate. Which means its roots are exactly the same as another putz (which rhymes with foots). These putzes have nothing to do with penises. Rather, they are miniature villages that Philadelphia Germans build and put on display in the run-up to Christmas.
Its connotations are perhaps indicated in the sobering Yiddish saying, ‘ven der putz shtet, ligt der sechel in drerd’. When the dick rises, the brain gets buried. While putz does literally mean penis, it wasn’t used that way in Yiddish. It always indicated a fool and, if anything, was more derogatory than shmuck – more ‘that little prick’ than ‘don’t be such a prick’, more disdain than anger. One online Yiddishiste sees a different difference. For her, a shmuck is a total asshole while a putz is merely a jerk. ‘A very subtle difference, I grant you, and the line is often blurry.’ She also recalled ‘an almost Talmudic discussion with my brother-in-law about this’. Brother-in-law’s considered view on how to distinguish a putz from a shmuck? ‘One is erect, the other is limp.’ As with shmuck, Yinglish has separated putz from its etymological ancestry.
Some claim that putz refers, literally, to a small penis. More disagree, pointing to the fact that Yiddish already had not just one but two perfectly good words for that, the diminutives shmekele (from shmuck) and petseleh (from putz). The difference? A small boy has a petseleh – as in ‘This from someone who has yet to have his petseleh touched by anyone outside of his immediate family’. Shmekele is more serious. It’s a man thing.
So Yiddish, like English, has a multiplicity of penises. Shmucks, pricks, shlongs, dicks, putzes, cocks, shvantzes. What about vaginas, then? English has a multiplicity of them, too. Not Yiddish. There just don’t seem to be any Yiddish vaginas. There’s a not very common euphemism, knish – a stuffed dumpling, sometimes sweet, sometimes meaty. The link? To knish is to crease.
And there’s zadnitze. Or rather there isn’t. Though usually said to mean vagina, it actually means arse – it’s from the Russian zad. So, at most, it’s a cousin to the American ‘piece of ass’. It’s said that the confusion persisted so long because of embarrassment. Ageing Yiddish speakers just couldn’t bring themselves to discuss vaginas with inquisitive young linguists. They couldn’t even let on that they knew that there wasn’t a genuine Yiddish slang word for vaginas. Probably, I should imagine, because that would let on that they knew there was such a thing as a vagina.
A joke. A Jewish joke. How do you know Jesus was Jewish? He lived at home till his thirties. He went into his father’s business. He was convinced his mother was a virgin.
That, I suggest, perhaps explains why there is no Yiddish slang word for vagina. There is, though, a German one that derives from Yiddish. Yentz, the Yiddish equivalent of fuck, started life as a euphemism, from the German jenes – ‘that thing’. In time, though, yentz became so associated with the act it euphemized that the word itself became obscene. In German itself, meanwhile, jenes came to euphemize not the act of sexual act but a sexual part. It’s the polite German woman’s word for vulva/vagina. German men, by the way, have a tail – Schwanz. Small German boys have snails – die Schnecke, a feminine noun that’s also used to indicate an attractive woman.
Though there is a linguistic similarity with German, Yiddish-speakers mostly lived further to the east, in Slavic lands. So it’s not unexpected that both Yiddish and Polish use the same testicular metaphor – eggs. Beytsim is from the Hebrew for eggs. Beytsim are also the pivotal feature of a traditional Yiddish riposte to fanciful thoughts: ‘as di bubbe volt gehat beytsim volt zi gevain mayn zaidah’. Which translates as: if my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather. And which made its way into English – perhaps via Dutch – as ‘If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle’.
Testicles are relative newcomers to the English language, only arriving in Britain in the fifteenth century. They’re a modification of the Latin for witness, testis – i.e. they refer to the belief that a witness’s quality is a direct reflection of his testicularity (or hers, in the modern world). See Genesis 24:9. ‘And the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham his master, and swore to him concerning that matter.’ Grab the balls and belief in your honesty follows. We still have that idea, firmly – as in ‘that took some balls’. Slanguagely speaking, testicles are pleasingly polymorphous. They can equate with both idiocy and courage. He’s talking bollocks. She’s got balls. And there is the Irish insult: you stupid bollix.
Long before they acquired testicles, though, Englishmen had bollocks. It was what they always called them, since something like the ninth century. Only when testicles came along, bollocks started to seem somehow … rude. Bollocks, ballocks, bollox, bollix? All the same things. The oldest version was ballock – i.e. ball, for which the allusion is obvious – plus -ock. The -ock bit is a Germanic suffix, a diminutive like the -leh in that little Yiddish prick petseleh and the -chen in the German endearment liebchen. This diminutive is not that common in modern English but it’s there – hillock, paddock and, of course, buttock. (Not hammock, though. That’s from a Caribbean language, via French.) So ballocks are little balls – though the former predates the later. Ballocks are there in the Wycliffe Bible of the late fourteenth century: ‘taken awey the ballokes is’ (castrated, in other words). Bollocks make their first appearance in a 1450 translation of a Latin text. They made it into Bailey’s dictionary – every edition from 1721 to 1800. They were excised from Dr Johnson’s though, reflecting the fact that, sometime in the seventeenth century, the word migrated from standard English to ‘coarse slang’ and kept moving obscenity-wards.
Bollocks has retained a surprising power to shock. In 1977, Christopher Seale, the manager of the Nottingham branch of Virgin record shop was charged under the 1889 Indecent Advertising Act for displaying the album cover of the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks. His barrister was John Mortimer – the QC who, a generation earlier, had successfully led the defence in the Oz obscenity trial. Bollocks, Mortimer told the magistrates, was not indecent. Rather, it was ‘strong, Anglo-Saxon, realistic and vivid language’. Seale got off. That would, you imagine, have been that, bollocks-wise, for British law. But, no. In the early twenty-first century, when the British government decided to outlaw hunting with dogs, they were challenged by the Countryside Alliance and the Countryside Action Network – which sold more than forty thousand red badges with three words on them: Bollocks to Blair. During the 2005 general election, a group of Action Networkers, wearing these badges, barracked Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott on his visit to the Staffordshire police headquarters. They were told to remove them or they would be arrested. At the Midlands Game Fair, Charlotte Denis, a twenty-year-old gamekeeper, was stopped by the police for wearing a polo shirt with the same slogan on it. ‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked them. ‘Take my top off and wear my bra?’ At the 2006 Royal Norfolk show, a Leicestershire trader, Tony Wright, was selling Bollocks to Blair T-shirts. Again the police took umbrage, saying people might find them ‘upsetting’. He was fined £80 for breaching the Public Order Act with language ‘deemed to cause harassment, alarm or distress’.
The same year, Penguin Books published a humorous tourist guide to Britain called Bollocks to Alton Towers. Almost without exception, British radio stations refused to air the book’s title, generally replacing bollocks with bollards. Only Radio Glasgow allowed the word and then only once – ‘with good Scots pragmatism’, commented one of the book’s authors.
There are, perhaps, not as many slangonyms for testicles as there are for penis but there are still a good number. ‘Goolies’, like pyjamas and bungalows, made the long sea trip from imperial India – by the 1930s at least. They’re from the Hindustani golí, meaning bullet, ball, pill. Presumably, it was soldiers who brought goolies back to Blighty – itself from the Hindustani bílāyatí meaning foreign or European. Knackers are from knockers – the physical analogy is clear. As it is with nuts – which date back to mid nineteenth-century England. When people say ‘I busted my nut to get that done’, though, they are not referring to testicles but to orgasm – it’s a 1960s American phrase. In the way of slangonyms, nut has also variously meant both semen and clitoris. Scrote is a pleasingly nasty abbreviation of scrotum, much favoured by policemen, particularly ones with a drink problem, a broken marriage, anti-authority leanings and an intuitive instinct for solving unsolvable cases – if TV cop shows are anything to go by.
Nadgers are an invention, created in the 1950s by Spike Milligan and Larry Stephens for The Goon Show – as a way of suggestively evading censorship. The word was then further popularized by Barry Took and Marty Feldman in their scripts for Ramblin’ Sid Rumpo, an imaginary English folk singer played by Kenneth Williams on Round the Horne. ‘Hit him in the nadgers with the bosun’s plunger/Slap him on the grummitt with a wrought-iron lunger.’ And so nadgers entered the real language. Though the American ‘nads’ looks similar, it’s actually a different word, a shortening of gonads. The horne in Round the Horne? The name of the show’s host, Kenneth Horne. But, yes, also a punning reference to the most popular slangonym for erection – along with, boner, stiffie and its not yet full-grown little brothers, softie and semi.
Round the Horne was a smorgasbord of smut. It was also the sound of my childhood Sunday lunch (dinner to me, then, of course). I can’t hear the theme music without smelling boiling cabbage. It also taught me – and the nation – a little Polari, the homosexual slanguage spoken on it by Julian and Sandy, ultracamp out-of-work actors. Polari was a bitzer language – made up of bits of this and bits of that. There’s Italian in there – its name is a corruption of parlare, the Italian for ‘talk’. There’s also all kinds of London and sailor’s slang in there, as well as some Romany and a little Yiddish. It gave us basket (for male genitalia) and crimper (hairdresser). It gave us naff, both as an adjective meaning rubbish and the euphemistic but firm injunction ‘Naff off!’ It gave us the title of Morrissey’s 1990 album, Bona Drag – lovely outfit. And it gave us the wonderful, camp observation: ‘Vide the bona lallies on that.’ Just look at those beautiful legs!
There’s rhyming slang, often far from obvious. Orchestras, short for orchestra stalls: balls. Cobblers, from cobbler’s awls – an awl is the sharp, pointy tool used to pierce holes in leather. Cobblers is often used to mean rubbish. Mostly, it’s used with no notion of its hidden, testicular meaning. I understand: I had a degree on my CV before I realized that ‘having a butchers’ was rhyming slang. Butcher’s hook: look. And maybe you, like me, only just learned that brass tacks are facts.
