The Language of Looting

Mr Slang responds to recent events in his own inimitable style…

Loo! loo! Lulu! lulu! Loo! loo! Loot! loot! loot!
Ow the loot!
Bloomin’ loot!
That’s the thing to make the boys git up an’ shoot!
It’s the same with dogs an’ men,
If you’d make ’em come again
Clap ’em forward with a Loo! loo! Lulu! Loot!

(ff) Whoopee! Tear ’im, puppy! Loo! loo! Lulu! Loot! loot! loot! 

Rudyard Kipling ‘Loot’ (1892)

They are my people. Or should I say slang’s people. But because slang and I have more than a nodding acquaintance, I must accept them as mine too. And how can I deny the reality of my dependence: I need their language, far more than they need my recording of it. Their language is my language, or at least the language I place between two covers and offer to a wider world. That I love that language does not require me to love its coiners – my devotion is to the sin, and not the sinners – but one cannot write sentences that declare ‘slang is the language of the disenfranchised, the alienated and the marginalised’ and assume that such terms are merely polysyllables on a page. Or one can, but there come rude awakenings. There is an element of voyeurism in what I do and it’s never so shamefully apparent as in this wretched week.  

They are the mob. ‘His Majesty King Mob’ as the Gordon rioters daubed across the wall of Newgate Prison in 1780. Burnin’ and lootin’ as Bob Marley put it. Mob. From Latin mobile vulgus, the fickle crowd. Shadwell is the first recorded user, in The Squire of Alsatia (1688) when he exhorts a crowd of villains,  ‘Here honest Mob, course this Whore to some purpose.’ Course: chase down, and doubtless harm. One of those words – along with bamboozle, phiz, uppish and couldn’t – that so worried Jonathan Swift who demanded its expurgation from pure English. Samuel Johnson was another enemy of bamboozle and of many more supposed vulgarisms, but he had no problems with mob; he defined it as ‘the crowd’ and uncharacteristically restrained himself from further comment. Slang coined the punning posse mobilitatis which plays on Latin posse comitatus, literally ‘the force of the county’, a band of citizens summoned by the sheriff to deal with outbreaks of rioting and similar disorder. That lot have another name now; the bluebottle mob or sometimes the heavy mob and the mob who do not wear blue uniforms but opt for boxfresh trainers and hooded jackets and which gangs 1930s America named troops, does not love them.   

There are sub-mobs, mobs with jobs: the boosting mob who shoplift (the ladies of the party hiding beneath their skirts voluminous boosting bloomers into which they cram their bulkier gains); the cabbage-tree mob who were Australian and wore hats woven from cabbage tree leaves and who moved into less organic headgear and turned into larrikins. There’s the swell mob, the cream of 19th century con-men, posing as the toffs they deceived, and there’s the yegg mob, who were safebreakers. Yegg may memorialise John Yegg, a late-19th century villain and the first safe-breaker to use nitroglycerine; it may also come from a Chinese dialect term yekk, which means beggar; it may be something else again. 

In the 17th century their mob’s leader was a bell-wether. The word referred to a flock’s leading sheep, distinguished by a bell and walking in front. It seems fitting now, though it’s hard, media alarums notwithstanding, to see whether the current parade has any leaders. In 1800 he was Captain Tom, which used the generic Tom, a man, often a foolish one.  

There have been other names for mobs and crowds: bang (from whole shebang) and boodle (usually as whole boodle and thus related to whole kit and caboodle), barney (from barney, a fight), a dose (in Ulster), an edge or a hedge (though both usually refer to those surrounding a find-the-lady man), habra, dabra and the crew, a jam (which is jammed together), a jing-bang, a ram-jam, a rort (from rort, to shout), a scrouge (most likely from 16th century scruze, to squeeze), a scuff (of people ‘scuffing’ together), a shove, a stir (from stir, movement) and a tip,  

Or there is the push which began in the 1600s as a crowd or ‘press’ of people, moved on in the UK to describe a small gang who mask the activities of a pickpocket by surrounding the victim and by the late 19th century was Australia’s standard term for a gang, usually criminal, and also referring to a bunch of vagrants or a prison work gang. The upper-ten push were upper-class criminals and influential prisoners. The word gave pushism, the world of gangs and pushite, a gang member. It could also mean a clique or set and around 1960 gave the world the Sydney Push, properly Sydney University Libertarian Society, members G. Greer, C. James, R. Hughes, B. Humphries, R. Neville et al. 

For slang loot is pretty much a synonym for swag which sits in the same dressing-up box as masks, stripy sweaters and bracelets as in ‘it’s a fair cop, guv, put the bracelets on.’ And if swag is somehow softened, then loot has gained a certain glossy glory. Kipling’s much-criticised poem probably didn’t do that trick, but everyone who’s wandered a stately home or a large museum can consider themselves complicit. 

Slang does not judge, slang lays out a stall and presents its wares. No one need look, no one need approve, no one need buy. But the goods must be put on offer and as the stall-holder I have to source them. Slang being what it is, and as I believe I have explained before, I go where I must. It is not, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler, a very fragrant world but it is the world I live and work in. And my people, slang’s people, live there too.

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.
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About Author Profile: Jonathon Green

Jonathon 'Mr Slang' Green is the world's leading lexicographer of English slang. 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.

4 thoughts on “The Language of Looting

  1. Brit
    August 11, 2011 at 14:44

    They played the Bob Marley burnin’ and lootin’ track on Newsnight yesterday, it reminded me of the dark, romantic attraction of the protest rampage… somewhat undermined by the visual footage of Mancs in trackies robbing Footlocker and the T-Mobile store.

    Any pictures of these cabbage tree leaf hats anywhere? They sound great.

  2. law@mhbref.com'
    jonathan law
    August 11, 2011 at 14:55

    Any idea where this word mandemcame from? Meaning, I take it, a posse of da yute /i>or brevs. And when did the good old British filth become feds?

    • Worm
      August 11, 2011 at 19:10

      …I think filth became feds after one too many games of Grand Theft Auto

      excellent looting of language as ever Jonathon

  3. jgslang@gmail.com'
    August 13, 2011 at 14:07

    Disappointing lack of cabbage-tree hats. One might have expected some contemporary engravings, but if they exist, they escaped on line reproduction.

    mandem is literally ‘man them’ and is simply generic for ‘person’ or ‘people’.

    As for the feds, UK use of that one is around a decade old. No sense of its original police-related use in the US, i.e. the FBI. (Original use in US was a Federalist, c. 1780, then a Northerner in the Civil War). I would suggest a misreading of the term when used in a TV cop show, but in truth I have no specific answer as to why it has been adopted in the UK. The filth was always properly the CID, rather than a bog-standard uniform. Looking at my examples it seems to have slipped into more general use, but as you suggest, it’s no longer that common. But neither is Babylon, the knuckle-dragging Starkey’s mouthings notwithstanding.

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