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This week Jonathon goes walking in a winter wonderland, as he considers how slang deals with the cold…

Le soleil brille and le ciel est bleu but like so many things this is both snare and delusion and a glance at the thermometer says -9° Celsius which is not good news for a foolish lexicographer who left London when it was relatively warm and in any case and for reasons that like so many things I lay at the door of my late mother, dislikes excess baggage of both lit. and fig. variety – and thus left my overcoat behind. Now I am resigned to the life of an ageing recluse, trapped in their apartment, cupboards bare, awaiting extinction.

So let us ponder the weather.

Slang’s use of the word itself is less than creative. There is, at least according to a 1970s policeman’s glossary a fair-weather drink: a small celebration before initiating some project or journey, but this was a list that suggested to young coppers that the wearing of trainers equalled drug dealer, so perhaps beware; there is the weather-sharp, a weather forecaster where sharp indicates, as it does of a lawyer, duplicity and untrustworthiness; there is the 1940s freezing weather, which meant an unattractive woman and presumably, in its suggestion of ‘frigid’, made slang’s regular mistake of equating looks with sexual appetite. Finally the weather gig, the female genitals, but here we are betrayed by orthography, and while in Middle English and later gig meant a coquettish young woman, and in 17^th century slang the vagina, the root here is wether, a castrated ram.

We must turn to synonymy. Spell it out. The cold day. Slang is not especially fecund. Comments on the day’s temperature tend to be limited to summer’s scorcher, which the Sun headline notwithstanding has been around since the 1880s, and, as of now, winter’s perisher, which seems to start life around 1900 as an Australianism. And there is a course the necessary pun: Pearl Harbor, because ‘there’s a nasty “nip” in the air.’ Cold winds give the barber, which ‘cuts’, the hawk, personified as Hawkins and long established in black America, and Australia’s southerly buster, though this comes as a relief, appearing at the end of a hot, dry day.  Brickfielder can be a synonym, but its origins lie in Sydney where wind on the neighbouring sandhills, known as ‘brickfields’, choked early city dwellers and even now, while it can offer relief, it often bring a bonus sand-storm.  

And do not, by the way, unglove so as to produce alms for the seemingly frozen mendicant in your path. Those scanty rags are not be trusted and odds are that he’s  on the shivering dodge, i.e. stripping off to elicit your sympathy; or at least he might have been c. 1850. The things folk do for money.

And the snow from which he is extending that shaking hand? Well, there’s to and fro, and the uninspired dandruff and confetti. But slang has other uses for the white stuff. Snow can mean a white woman, a blond or indeed any white man, and small change, logically silver. And who could resist an order of dyspepsia in a snow storm, short-order cook-speak for an order of pie topped with powdered sugar. Or the snow job , an untrue but totally convincing story, and thus con-man’s patter; an alternative meaning refers to oral sex, But the primary uses are twofold: the 19^th century’s meaning of linen, and the 2oth’s for white powdered drugs. 

Both give us a variety of compounds: there is the world of stealing clothes, specifically, I fear, what were once known as ‘scanties’, from washing lines. This can be snow-birding, snow-dropping or snow hunting; the snow lay or snow rig (both of which nouns mean ‘job’), though this 19^th century pair lacked the sexual aspect, being merely for the purpose of selling on the stolen items. The furtive fondler is the snow-dropper, –hunter or –gatherer or indeed snowbird, though that’s more commonly found referring to those Americans – originally hobos – who flee to Florida for the winter, thus avoiding the cold, but thereby missing the snow bunnies,  amenable young women found around ski slopes). 

But it is the drugs that really get slang going. Snow can be heroin, it can be morphine, it can be amphetamine but above all it can be cocaine.  Those were the days: the standard salesman being the wicked Limehouse Celestial, as in Sax Rohmer’s debut Dope (1919): ‘You sniffee plenty too muchee “white snow,” hoi, hoi!’ But times, as we know from Diana Cooper (and Lady Snow, one might recall, is another synonym though she was more a morphine gal), were far from invariably so sordid. One did not need to slum. Here’s A.B. Reeve’s female sleuth Constance Dunlap in 1913, eavesdropping at a society party: ‘Constance could just catch the greeting of one of the girls: “Hello, Sleighbells! Got any snow?”’ Sleighbells? Afraid so. That and the sleighride which one could take or go for; in a snowdrift and snowed under, snowed in and snowed up, all meaning under the influence, which could also put one in a snowstorm.  Or the snowbank, the place where cocaine users gathered to take their drug and so much more refined that the modern shooting gallery, let alone crackhouse. And there’s hitch up the reindeer, which is a very genteel way of saying you’re prep-ing up the needle for a shot. As we know cocaine (the yip-yap drug as they call it Down Under) leads to logorrhoea; puns too, though powder one’s nose is more recent.  

Various eras have come up with these: blow snow, to inhale the drug; snow white and snowflake, cocaine, snow-cap , cocaine sprinkled onto a pipe of marijuana and smoked; snowcones (usually a US ice-cream brand), cocaine; snow merchant or pedlar, a dealer and snowbird, a cocaine user but also a heroin or morphine addict and in the 1930s a woman involved in the cocaine trade. 

It’s getting warmer. It’s up to -4°. And I’ve found a second sweater. Back next week. Maybe.

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.