The Culture Blog For Connoisseurs Of Everything

This week Mr Slang discusses family values…

I have noticed, may I assume that I am not alone, a new linguistic abomination that must now be listed among the many repellent inventions that have come with the Olympics. For this neologism we can presumably thank the PR company that coined the term, and for its seemingly unassailable proliferation the ranks of governmental agencies and sporting bodies — indeed all of those who have forced this month-long grotesquerie of physical jerks upon the national capital. Sew crap, reap profits as runs the fine old equation. Or as the great H.L. Mencken put it: No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the public.

The abomination? The phrase ‘The Games Family’. Competitors, administrators, functionaries, and all others who have clambered aboard the five-wheeled bandwagon. It is to be noted that the paying public are not among them. Or rank as the poorest of poor relations (rhyming slang, by the way, for railway station; bedstead relations are the in-laws), far too embarrassing to receive the embossed and glistening stiffy. (There are other meanings of stiffy but I shall resist; they lead to puns on shafted). They may get sent some cake, perhaps a link to a Facebook assemblage of expensively commissioned pics, but breaths should not be held.

The family. I have said it before; with ‘wholesome’ and ‘earnest’ vilest of all words. They think happy. They think MomDadBuddy&Sis. I think the opening line of Anna Karenina. I think sub-aqueous naps and offers that transcend refusal. I think Charles Manson. ‘A commonwealth of malignants,’ said Swift. Strindberg was wordier: ‘The supposed home of all the virtues, where innocent children are tortured into their first falsehoods, where wills are broken by parental tyranny, and self-respect smothered by crowded, jostling egos.’ Wilde pithier: ‘A tedious pack of people who haven’t the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.’ Mencken, for once, was lost for words. Or perhaps unwilling to waste them.

Some of you may remember: 1974. TV. The family gathered to watch The Family. Various Wilkinses, week upon week, in every sense of ‘close-up’. Reality TV in embryo apparently. At the time I recall the word ‘dysfunctional.’ Chavs though they had yet to be christened. A Richard Billingham photograph come to life.

I am not impugning your children. I have them too. Am indulgently fond. Even, perhaps, to excess. But that was choice and this PR fantasy is infliction. A VIP lane fast-tracking to the banal. Fines for those who don’t join in. Who don’t play the Games.

Slang knows the family. The Brown or Browning Family who represented an old and coarsely stereotyped equation of sodomy and homosexuals. The John or Johnson Family, who stood for the world of pro criminality and took their name either from the commonness and thus potential anonymity of the name or from the railroad jargon johnson bar, the reverse bar of an early 20^th century locomotive and which, on the wrong side of the tracks, might be used as a weapon. The family, no given name, also refers to crime and has done since the mid-18^th century, two hundred years before, established across the Atlantic, it was adopted by Don Corleone and his relations. We are not surprised, then, that family hotel once described a prison, family people thieves and robbers and family man or woman a criminal or a receiver. There is also the African-American play in the family which is not incest, but something quite antithetical: a bout of ritualized name-calling, based on insulting each other’s mother; it is better known as the dozens and lies among rap’s various cultural roots.

On we go. A family disturbance is whiskey, and draws its name from the supposedly deleterious effects of alcohol on family life. The family pound (from SE pound, an enclosure) was a family grave. As for the rest, we must submit to puns and sniggers. The family jewels, often found as the matching ‘three-piece set’, are the male genitals and the phrase has been used for a good century; the doubly punning family organ is merely the penis. The Caribbean’s family ram sleeps with two or more female members of the same family. This is not necessarily incestuous, although those who still worry about that Victorian nightmare, ‘marriage to deceased wife’s sister’ may find themselves shocked. Family-style is a prison term for man-to-man intercourse which, so the coiner claimed, mimics a ‘normal’ heterosexual embrace.

Family, more recently, has been abbreviated to fam. This is not to be confused with the much older fam, again an abbreviation – this time of famble (in turn from SE fumble) – which canting term meant a hand, thus the fam-grasp, a handshake, fammer a pickpocket and fam-squeeze, the act of throttling. This fam was launched in the 1970s and has been largely corralled by rap where as a generic it means one’s gang, and in the singular a friend.

Last of the group is the  family of love which, romantically perhaps, is a generic for prostitutes when considered as a group or prostitution as an occupation. The term comes from The Family of Love or Familists, a proto-Quaker, post-Anabaptist 16th–17^th century religious sect. Founded in Holland and very popular in England, its main tenets were that religion could best be realized through sex; at the same time, and preached by the same voices, was the credo  that all governments, however tyrannical, must be obeyed. It may be assumed that such tyranny began at home and one returns, dare I suggest, to Charlie Manson and his harem of dune-buggy doxies. Yet, again, I may be unfair: the Family attracted the creative elite, such as the cartographer Ortelius and printer Plantin. They kept to themselves and did as they were told. None were martyred but their quietism seems to have been inimical to long-term success. Far too good, for a religion, to be true.

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.