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Jonathon Green – visit his website here – is the English language’s leading lexicographer of slang. His Green’s Dictionary of Slang is quite simply the most comprehensive and authorative work on slang ever published. Today, with Valentine’s Day just around the corner, he gives us  Domestic Bliss according to slang…

“Advice to persons about to marry—Don’t!”
Henry Mayhew in Punch, 1845

A nag, says the OED, is a small riding-horse or pony and probably comes from the word neigh. But slang knows better. It sees the word ‘ride’ and sniggers. Nag is a penis, nag is a prostitute, nag is a woman and a case of VD. To tether one’s nags is to have sex, as is to water one’s nags, which can also mean to pee. Nag, as we see, is a woman, but there is another nag and she is not a ‘ride’ but a scold, and the word comes from various Scandinavian roots meaning to gnaw and rub and thus to grumble and irritate. She. Men do not nag neither do they scold. Men hit but that’s a different post.

Slang is a man-made language and does not treat women well. It is misogynistic and sexist and while one can possibly excuse such attitudes by virtue of man’s innate terror of the opposite gender, the proof is in the linguistic pudding and slang is not kind.

As one notes, terror. She goes right to the very heart of the male matter. She’s a ball-tearer, a ball-cutter and a ball-breaker; she balls-aches. On top of that she’s a ball-buster, which means the same, but given the transatlantic origin of all these terms one might cast a glance here at the Yiddish baleboosteh, a bossy woman, literally ‘mistress of the house’. On the other hand the Yiddish could be a simple transliteration. While we’re there she can also be a kvetch, another Yiddishism that comes from the German quetschen, to squeeze, to press. Kvetching is open to all-comers and Michael Wex’s excellent study of Yiddish, Born to Kvetch, has as many alte kakas* as old bubbes.** The yenta is not. The word came from the Italian gentile which meant a woman not an unbeliever and was first yiddished and then popularized through the fictional ‘Yenta Telebende’, created in the Jewish New York press by the humorist ‘B. Kovner’ (Jacob Adler). Popular or not, she still nagged.

She can be an alarm clock, who keeps one, in real or figurative uses, from ‘falling asleep’; she can bite or chew your ear or earflaps, get on your arse or ass, or bite or beat that same posterior. She can bitch (she is a bitch), she can boohoo and bug. Incessantly she beats her chops, while beating up on yours. She busts, flaps, runs, slices and wags those chops. Are we surprised to find hubby down in the chops which means depressed. She’s a crabber, she’s a clack (in 1785 Captain Grose saw it as linked to the clapper that regulates a water-mill and claimed that the term is ‘chiefly applied to women’). She has been Job’s wife and Job’s comforter as well as Calamity Jane, whose nagging is of course pessimistic too and whose name comes from that of the markswoman Martha Jane Canary Burke (1852–1903), known as such for the effect her six-guns had on those who opposed her. In 19th century Scotland she was Maggie Rab. Other names include the rubberneck (presumably from her metronomically shaking head), the old saw, who ‘saws away’ at her target, and the old hige, which is a Caribbean variation on ‘old hag’.

In the secluded comfort of their four-poster she gives curtain lectures (the curtains being those drawn around them), and in Ireland gives out Moll Doyle, a term taken from the clandestine agrarian society Moll Doyle’s Daughters, pitted against rapacious landlords and similar figures. In the Caribbean, she hands out a suck (hence sucker, the old woman who’s scolding) or a dish of rails, which is taken from standard English rail, an act of railing or reviling. Some call it a rib-roast, an ear-bashing, mouth-pie or the old wives’ paternoster. She can rag on or pitch on and since what would slang be without its rhymes, she can paper bag. And she can jenny, where jenny is generic for womankind, and thus equates every female with complaint.

Don’t you start! Or put another record on! bleats her husband, exhausted by this cat and dog life, but slang, as ever, has him bang to rights. Hen-pecked, says standard English. Apron-stringed says slang. Living under the sign of the cat’s foot or of the Queen’s head. Pussy-whipped and indeed whupped, suffering from hen fright. An egg, which plays on hen. Other names include Tom Tiler (which also meant ‘Mr Average’), and Jerry Sneak, the name of such a character in Samuel Foote’s 1764 play The Mayor of Garratt (1764). The Caribbean terms him a monkey man or, if he is seen as paying too much attention to household affairs and similar ‘women’s concerns’, a kitchen bitch. So too have been the hen hussy and the cot- or cockquean, which come from cotquean, a peasant housewife, and which smear the man with excess domesticity.

More elaborate is the stangey, which comes, as the OED explains, from the phrase ride the stang: ‘to be mounted astride of a pole borne on the shoulders of two men, and carried through the streets for the derision of the spectators.’ This custom, however, once popular in Scotland and the north, focused on unpopular, rather than specifically wife-dominated men, but the implication is that he has to ride a pole, since he cannot ‘ride’ his wife.

The hen-pecked husband may not be the cuckolded husband but stereotyping made him such. Horn means sexual enthusiasm, but it has the parallel meaning of cuckoldry, taken from the German hahnrei, a capon or castrated cock. From the 12th century until 1768 such unfortunate were paraded at the annual Horn Fair, held at Charlton, Kent on St Luke’s day, 18 October. St Luke bears the evangelistic sign of the Ox, and is thus ‘wearing the horns’ n. Processions of revellers and known cuckolds, all wearing horns and sometimes masks, and playing ‘rough music’ (pots, pans, anything that made a good noise), walked from Cuckold’s Point near Deptford, to Charlton. The origins of Horn’s Fair are debatable, but Ned Ward, writing in 1704, suggested that the festival, and the naming of Cuckold’s Point, came from a nearby dalliance by King John and a compliant landlady.

*An old man, lit. ‘old shitter’
**An old woman, lit. ‘grandmother’

Do you have a question for Mr Slang? Email it to editorial@thedabbler.co.uk and we’ll send it on to Jonathon.

image ©Gabriel Green

You can buy Green’s Dictionary of Slang, as well as Jonathon’s more slimline Chambers Slang Dictionary, plus other entertaining works, at his Amazon page. Jonathon also blogs and Tweets.