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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 Jonathon continues his epic survey of the Seven Deadly Sins of Slang with Pride…

We know about pride. Platoons of young men with little or no clothing and much of that leather,  flesh garlanded with tattoos and parading through our major cities. Pride with a capital ‘P’. But that’s the positive pride, the pride of parents, and sports fans, and other devotees to their devoted. And of gay people in their sexuality. Pride as our sixth deadly sin is not that pride, though the word may be identical. Pride comes from its contemporary proud which in turn comes from old French prod or prud (modern French has made these preux) , which meant courageous, good, noble, just, prudent, wise and profitable. And beyond that it is linked to classical Latin prōdesse to be of value, be good. But while the French and others took pride in pride,  the Brits opted first to use it as a lash, and synonymised it with ‘haughty’ and ‘arrogant’. Up oneself as the modern slang would have it. It was established as such in old English; the positive versions only appear around 1300. Pride is that which comes before the inevitable fall, a concept that emerged in 1509 as ‘first or last foul pride will have a fall’. And all pride’s proverbs invariably end in tears. Personified, Thomas Browne called it ‘the first and father sin’, Dekker preferred ‘the Queene of Sinnes’; and before it fell, wicked Pride rode a roaring lion.

If slang is reticent as regards some of our transgressions, pride gets a good response. Or perhaps not pride itself, since a search tends to come up with terms that refer to the swallowing or suppression (teeth gritted, fingers surreptitiously crossed) of the emotion. But if one slips sideways into arrogance, conceit and snobbery, the list expands.

Let us start with personifications. Smart Aleck, who some claim refers to Alec Hoag, a celebrated New York City thief of the 1840s, who, with his wife Melinda and his accomplice French Jack, specialized in ‘the panel game’, i.e. robbing Melinda’s clients while, bereft of their wallet-bearing trousers, they were otherwise engaged. (Australia’s democratizes him as mug alec).  A Thomas, who is stubborn and conceited and reminiscent of the Bible’s Doubting Thomas.  Lord and Lady Muck, those hypothetical aristocrats, snobbish and conspicuous in their contempt for lesser mortals, yet since the lordship is but of ‘muck’ no better than those they disdain. It is they, perhaps, who serve the late-19^th century speciality muck and a halfpenny afters, a pretentious, unpleasant dinner ‘spotted at the corners with custard powder preparations, and half dozens of stewed prunes, etc, etc.’ The chief muck of the crib is another swell-head, but the synonymous high mucky-muck comes from the Chinook jargon muckamuck, food. Mrs Astor’s pet horse or pet poodle were arrogant and haughty person and name-checked New York’s  1890s society superstar. Astorperious turned Mrs A. adjectival, and synonyms, each meaning all that and a bag of chips, have included boldacious, braggadocious (from braggadocio), stocious (from ostentatious) and rumbumtious.

Proud can mean sticking above a surface and there’s plenty of de haut en bas. High all alone can mean self-important, as can high-headed (which originally referenced haughty horses), high-flying (which also denoted High Church Tories), high-heeled (to have one’s high-heeled shoes on is to show off), high-stepping (horses again), and high-nosed. The  highsider shows off their material wealth and the highfaluter is a snob. High hat, which sneers as a noun, adjective or verb, comes from vaudeville, as explained in 1939: ‘John Juggler, who has been performing in white flannels, or other cheap costume, appears in new wardrobe presenting his act in a full dress suit and top hat, i.e. – a “high hat.” This new ensemble indicates greater prestige, apparent prosperity, and a professional advance. Other vaudevillians, upon commenting upon it might remark: “I see John has gone high hat”.’  There is top-loftical and top-lofty, and both above and up oneself. One finds uppish which Johnson decried as ‘low’, uppishness and uppity and to uptown which is to act or treat in an arrogant manner.

Highty-tighty seems to suggests ‘high’ but the OED notes that the word was first cited in 1698, when the contemporary pronunciation of ‘oi’ was ‘igh’, and declares it as no more than a variant of hoity-toity (or  haytie twaytie), which itself reduplicates standard English haughty, although the synonymous phrase upon the hoyty-toyty was possibly linked to walking on a high wire. (Hoity-toity had meant a promiscuous woman before it turned snob which suggests a further link to ‘flighty’, or perhaps the implication that such women saw themselves ‘above’ monogamy’s constraining rules.)

All of which leads to looking down the nose. Which imagery gives blue-nosed (originally used of a Puritan Yankee), long-nosed, snooty (snoot meaning nose) and snifty or indeed sniffy. The snob was a sniffer, again a snoot, and of course toffee-nosed, which extended toff, which in turn found roots in Oxford’s tuft-hunter, the tuft in question being the exclusive golden one (the rest sported subfusc black) that once surmounted aristocrats’ mortar-boards. And from the nose comes snot. Like highty-tighty, snot began life both as a scrubber and a snob, and gives snotty,  snotnose and snot(ty)-nosed and snotbag.

We are spoilt for choice even if some lacks charm. The nether regions give arsey and pooey and pissy, stiff-arsed, and stiff-rumped, all of which pertain to kiss-my-arse king-shits who hot-shit around and act like their shit don’t stink. Bushwa, meaning a stuck-up even doodoofetic individual (perhaps from infantile doo-doo?), may come from Canadian bourgeois, the head ‘voyageur’ of a trading post or expedition, but maybe just from bullshit.

Yet such hincty strut-noddies with more side than a billiard ball delude themselves. Let us give them the rah-rah, take the granny off them and deflate their swank : mere dogs in doublets they couldn’t hit someone in the behind with a red apple.

Lah-di-dah!

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.