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Slang loves sport, but Mr Slang does not. As he prepares to flee the Olympic-blighted capital, Jonathon fires a parting shot…

‘The Country Squire New Mounted’

The Country Squire to London came,
And left behind his dogs and game;
Yet finer sport he has in view,
And hunts the hare and coney too.

T. Rowlandson Pretty Little Games With Pictures of good old English Sports and Pastimes. (pub. J.C. Hotten 1845)

If, at a loss for better occupation, you google the phrase ‘I hate the Olympics’ you will be rewarded by some 15.6 million hits. (Whether or not this figure changes with a selection of alternative pronouns I cannot say, nor whether a substitution of ‘disdain’, ‘despise’ or ‘abominate’ nor even ‘this in the that of’ works more fruitfully, nor indeed whether replacing the O-word by ‘Games’ has any effect). This would be reassuring if only on the grounds of a proof that one is not alone, but Mr Slang does not seek the cheap and delusory comforts of companionship. Mr Slang stands solitary alongside his convictions (but would stress that the one for possession of cannabis in 1973 gained a conditional discharge. The then fashionable ‘John Lennon defence’, i.e. if you convict me I shall not be able to pursue my career in America – being efficacious, even if the mulcted ‘costs’ outweighed in sum any possible fine). Nonetheless,  it is good to see that it is not a matter simply that ‘Londoners are whining ingrates who never cease complaining about everything’ – a rare lapse in The Dabbler’s otherwise estimable diaries – but one of vast, wide-ranging and gratifyingly wide-proclaimed taste. Ton, as Egan would have had it.

Egan of course loved sport, though not of the synchronised swimming variety. His was of the anapostrophised group: huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, though his favourite was of course boxin’ which he called millin’. Do not fear, I am not rehashing Joe Liebling’s literary deity. Merely approaching a topic that slang also loves and indeed celebrates: sport.

Rowlandson’s Country Squire – what a feast of double-entendres that quadruplet is to be sure (for the text of all the Pretty Little Games see here) – understood that if you sought out sport in London, you could abandon the usual necessities – though rods and guns doubtless came in handy, and of course riding was the occupation of choice. Slang loves sport, as noted, but neither muddied oaf nor flannelled fool need apply. The word ball in particular has many meanings, as do other items of equipment, and of course the rhyming department nods its nut to various heroes, but the best-loved sport is that pursued by Tom Jones rather than by Squire Western.

The equation, some might suggest euphemism is well in hand by the 16th century. The first use of sport = sex is as a noun and comes in 1512; the verb follows, at least as yet recorded, in 1533. Those who contemporaneously chased after such exercise were ‘fydlaris, rutouris, huremasteris, & sportouris’. Personnified, as a playboy, a man-about-town, it arrives in mid-19th century with the weaker version, typically a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ sport following in the 1890s and presumably influenced by the rash of worthy public school fiction that predated it. It would require Wodehouse’s Psmith – ‘Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is Led Astray and takes to Drink in Chapter Sixteen?’ – to start dealing with that one. Sport as a term of address is a 20th century coinage and if my citations are correct, established a good 30 years before finding a home amid Down Under stereotypes. Old sport is… older, noted in the 1870s. Sporty, now reminscent of muscled thighs and worse, meant sexy, and might be paired with ‘frisky’.

Having started with sex sport as a verb moves on to a variety of pleasant profligacies. As the decades then centuries pass it can mean to show off, to wager, to spend extravagantly, to wear stylish clothes and, coming back to the beginning, to live a promiscuous life. In human form the sport‘s earliest – 1740 – incarnation is as a gambler, perhaps the nearest the word touches on actual competition. Prior to that the word had been sportsman, and in 1700 the literary publican Ned Ward talked of ‘Butchers groping their Ware, with as much Caution to know whether they were sound and wholesome, as a Prudent Sports-man would a new She-Acquaintance of a loose Conversation.’ That the sportsman’s gap was the vagina c. 1890 should surprise no-one.

The adjective sporting, coined around 1820, referred to every sort of dissipation, notably in the sporting house (or crib, mansion, resort or room), a brothel. The sporting man pursued the sporting life (later metonymized as a pimp) indulged himself, with among others, the sporting woman (or lady and girl and indeed sportswoman), who, in common with others who see sport’s commercial potential, required that he pay for admission. The era’s equivalent to ‘tits out for the lads’ was to sport blubber or sport the dairy, both playing on the use of sport to mean display. More recent compounds include sporting equipment, a condom, and sporting goods, a rent-boy.

And there I must leave it. As was once the sportsmen’s well-trodden way I am off to Paris. Not for sport – since as my perusal of Maigret makes clear, le tout tapin procedes south to the more lucrative pastures of the Riviera for the holiday season – but for refuge. You may disagree – and far be it from me – and it is true that Armand, in the words of the great N. Molesworth, may in some ways be an utter weed and a wet, but he does not jump to the tunes of the purveyors of two of the most repellent comestibles on the planet, nor yet in tones of menacing condecension of which Orwell’s O’Brien would be proud, subjugate his fellow-citoyens to their jack-booted self-aggrandisement. I am going outside, my little cauliflowers. I may be some time.

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.