Slang and the Queen

Slang is no republican, finds Jonathon Green, but neither does it bend the knee…

Sixty years ago it was happening miles away in Treetops which was in Kenya and if the Queen remembers hearing that the rest of her life had just been realigned on new and seemingly infinite rails then most of us don’t because fifty-nine is what matters for my generation: the Coronation. Fifty-nine years ago I was five and sitting in my grandparents’ sitting room in Birmingham, curtains closed – they had to be to watch the minuscule, walnut-girt and often fuzzy images that comprised that era’s television – and the audience, products of countries where the monarchy tended to a less dependable stability, reverentially hushed. 

The bit I liked best was that day’s variation on the inter-program potter’s wheel, on this occasion a large factory chimney first blown up and then, wot larks, miraculously re-erected by the wonder of reversed film. That and the word ‘Shufflebottoms’ written vastly and elaborately – heavy on the serifs, cocked at a jaunty angle top left to bottom right –and viewed across a gable end as we passed through Brum’s outer suburbs. Seen on every visit it was quite possibly the only thing that made these occasional pilgrimages bearable.  The tiny, inaudible archbishop, the ditto Queen were, in honesty, less thrilling. Did the BBC manage more than a single static camera? I certainly don’t remember any pans across the abbey, let alone close-ups. Did we, for instance, see the choir? If so they still wouldn’t have told us, as I later leant, that each had been equipped with a milk bottle, stowed beneath the surplice,  lest nature call too urgently.

Shufflebottoms is not slang, even if it is perhaps of such stimuli – the sheer beauty of that word, its size, ten times one’s own, its glorious audacity as registered by a five year-old mind – that careers, even unconsciously, are launched. So what does the jubilee give us. Last time around, in 1977 and perhaps influenced by punk but knowing me more likely by puns, I wrote a headline for a music wholesaler’s mag: ‘Jubilee’ve in Profits?’. The sales force complained. Now, older but unlikely to be wiser, I write for another Jubilee, on Sunday still grey despite the bunting which now, such is history or irony or both, suggests bigotry rather than Britannia. One might walk to the river but for the presence of part-time security men, bands of obstructive jobsworths whose presence is now a concomitant of any public event in which it is felt that since, unlike 60 years ago, we know longer know our place, it is imperative that we should insistently, aggressively and above all ignorantly be allotted it.

No matter, celebrate we must and have no choice, the word is queen, once spelt quean, and which is cognate with Old Saxon quān, a wife, and began life meaning an important woman, primarily in her role as the consort of an important man. The King, naturally, being the most important of all, and so too, among women, his Queen. If there was no King, then she ruled and since the OED’s citations are all dated by nothing more precise than ‘Old English’ we cannot say which use came first. They begin with ‘wife’.

Slang’s first use, in 1774, equates queen with a pretty girl, a century on and she graduates to wife and mother. The word can describe a woman’s occupation, e.g. kitchen queen or South Africa’s shebeen queen who runs an illicit bar.  But this is marking time. Slang’s real queen is only feminine in manner. The earliest terms for gay men suggested mythology: Ganymede, or stole from French: bardash. The equation of queen with a homosexual male begins in 1729 in a pamphlet – Hell on Earth – that notes ‘how they assume the Air and affect the Name of Madam or Miss, Betty or Molly, […] and then frisk and walk away to make room for another, who then accosts the affected Lady, with Where have you been you saucy Queen? If I catch you Stroulling and Caterwauling, I’ll beat the Milk out of your Breasts I will so.’  But it is not, strictly, the modern use. Nor is the 1889 report that a witness in the Cleveland Street Scandal was asked in court if he lived with ‘a woman known as Queen Anne in Church Street, Soho,’ the reply was ‘No, it is a man.’  After that it does seem to have caught on, and stayed there, with the term regularly employed as a suffix that denotes one’s preoccupations. In 1972 Bruce Rodgers includes in his dictionary The Queens’ Vernacular: alley queen one who seeks out sex in alleyways, auntie-queen a young man who prefers someone older, Levis queen, a jeans fetishist, buy queen, one who has a desperate compulsion to buy house furnishings, dangle queen, one who likes watching what he’s doing sexually in a mirror, Xerox queen, one who prefers all his partners to be identical, and dozens more. Rodgers also had cleavage queen, but he was a  heterosexual. Drag queen dates to 1949, and drag itself to 1870. Drama queen has been embraced by the straight world for twenty-odd years.

Not all gay men are queens, which is properly used of the older, camper variety, nor all queens gay. The queen’s head is a postage stamp, whereupon its is printed; the queen’s picture (or queen’s images and queen’s portrait) has meant money, the original picture being that of Queen Anne. To draw the queen’s picture was to forge bank-notes. The queen’s gold medal was a shilling, upon which the monarch’s head was inscribed. The Zulu use of queen’s tears to mean alcohol, usually gin, references tears supposedly shed by  Queen Victoria after the defeat at Isandhlwana. Still with the military there is the Queen’s bad bargain or bad shilling, variously defined as a worthless soldier; a malingerer, or a soldier jailed in a civilian prison. In all cases the image is of one whose service does not deserve its pay.

Slang is no republican, but does unsurprisingly stand for egalitarianism. Thus the phrases where the queen goes on foot and where the queen sends nobody. In both cases the answer is of course the lavatory. For those who despair at my lèse majesté I can only note Rabelais’s euphemism of 1653: ‘Cagar. Spanish. To do that which the king himself can’t get another to do for him’.

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 “Slang and the Queen

  1. Worm
    June 7, 2012 at 14:38

    thanks Jonathan! regarding the coronation being devoid of close ups, I think I actually saw someone discussing this on the TV during last weeks build up – words were muttered that close ups were a vulgar new innovation and not to be allowed under any circumstances

  2. andrewnixon@blueyonder.co.uk'
    June 7, 2012 at 21:27

    If they thought close-ups were vulgar, what would they have made of the Beeb’s dismal One Show/Breakfast/Blue Peter micro-celeb fest that was the Jubilee coverage? Wretched.

    Shufflebottom is a champion’s name. All the ‘bottoms are magnificent in fact, I envy their proud bearers.

  3. info@shopcurious.com'
    June 7, 2012 at 21:58

    I’m not quite sure why, but your description of the potter’s wheel and mention of Shufflebottoms made me recall a fascinatingly named TV programme from my childhood called HR Pufnstuf – I don’t think anyone ever knew what the HR stood for – though some curious theories abound.

    By the way, I was recently called the ‘champagne queen’ – obviously something to do with my royal ancestry. For a security-guard-free river experience (with lashings of champagne) you should have visited me, Jonathon.

  4. george.jansen55@gmail.com'
    George
    June 8, 2012 at 01:04

    I first heard the last use as “Where the Kaiser goes on foot”, said to my mother by an old Bavarian-born acquaintance.

    By the way, I had I hard time not reading “heavy on the serifs” as “heavy on the serfs”–I need to keep my reading glasses handy, or lower the resolution on my monitor.

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