Mr Slang has a new toy, and he intends to play with it…
I have a new toy. Given that my imminent birthday (Saturday) will bring me a scant five years from the Biblical prescription, this worries me. The idea, that is, of a toy. Or, were I not still wondering quite what the term ‘grown-up’ means, it should do. However it does not. Unashamedly, self-indulgently, I am reveling in it.
I know, I can hear you all asking: what is it, this soul-improving divertissement? Dope? Sex? Rock ’n’ roll. The proceeds of a belated sale of what passes for Mr Slang’s soul to some unobservant devil? It is true: what do you give the man who’s got 125,000 slang words and phrases and six hundred and whatever thousand citations to back them up? And what might he want? What indeed.
The word toy, is anyone especially surprised, pushes a good proportion of slang’s buttons. For the late 16th century it meant the penis. For the mid-17th a mistress. The same century offers the vagina, a use that hangs in there until the late 19th century, thus permitting me to offer a balladeer’s philosophy (but not mine, since while we all love comments, some are distinctly less loveable than others, and as I say, slang’s buttons are being energetically pushed), ‘You may gain her Female toy, / If once you Bung her Eye Sir.’ That the ballad in question is entitled ‘They All Do It’ is drearily predictable. From the vagina to its purveyor, and toy means a whore around 1821 when Pierce Egan, in a footnote to one of Life in London’s adventures notes: ‘Dirty Toys: Logic’s phrase for the unfortunate peep o’day women of the town, who wander about from one coffee-shop to another.’ We might expect better from the green-spectacled Bob Logic, regularly apostrophized as ‘the Oxonian’, but here at least his love of the bottle, which before too long will bring him first low and then terminally subterranean, has obviously overcome his taste. (It is of course the author’s own obeisance to taste, which must have run contrary to his experiences among the games of the sporting world, that ensures that although his text offers a range of terms for brimstones, bunters, fancy pieces and other commercially minded women, including his heroine Corinthian Kate herself, nary a physical act is enjoyed, or at least not ‘on stage’). One last nod to the physique is the awning over the toy shop, a fine Australian coinage that refers to the beer belly and beyond that to the first of the senses I have listed.
The flesh suborned, the toy has more to offer. It is a watch, and as toy and tackle a watch and its chain. A red toy is a gold one and a white toy silver. Keen to lay his hands on either is the toy-getter, a thief specializing in stealing watches. The toy boy is attributed to Madonna, but her own label (was it on a belt?) boy toy goes back to the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, in 1952. It is unlikely that he was offering a perfect facsimile of the popstrel’s usage, but with Winchell one never knows. A toy soldier is an officer cadet. All these toys play on the standard English, where the word, in common with so many apparently ‘simple’ terms, frustratingly appears to defeat etymology. We must wait for the revised OED to come up with an answer, if answer there is.
Standard English, since the OED does not offer it as a homonym and thus the proof of an alternative etymology, appears to bear responsibility for another kind of toy: obsolete now but once widely available: a small container, approximately one inch in diameter, used to hold prepared opium. It was also know as a pin yen toy (pin or pen yen being opium, from Cantonese nga pun-yin), hop toy or hen toy, as well as a hop toi. Each hints at the mystic and depraved East, but nothing is proven. The hop toy in turn makes up a part of the layout, the smokers’ kit, which one breath-bated newspaper, using another synonym for the box, described as comprising the ‘Yen Tsiang (opium pipe), Ow (opium bowl), Yen hock (a thin wire used for dipping out the opium and holding it over the light while cooking), Yen Hop (a box containing opium).’ There was also a lamp for heating and a box to hold the ashes which could then be resold to the very poor and desperate. Hop does have a suggested etymology: a pidgin Chinese term taken from Mandarin ho ping (or again the Cantonese nga pun-yin) and meaning tranquillity, bliss, and peace. Whether this is no more than psychotropic reverse engineering, I lack the Sinology to say. Some experts have even suggested that many of the words that agglomerated around the opium ritual were about as genuinely ‘Chinese’ as ‘chop suey’ a term, and dish, invented for American clients and itself an anglicized version of shap sui, ‘mixed bits’. True or not the muddy intoxicant generated a mini-vocabulary and gave pleasure not merely to smokers, who probably used nothing more exotic than ‘Gimme another pipe’ but to the press who then as now were so appreciative of their drug paraphernalia.
None of which pertains to my new toy, though those who infer something addictive are on the right track. I shall explain. Thanks to those wonderful folks who write my research database I have been gifted with the ability not merely to search on dates and authors and citations, but to put the three together and ascertain, even the thought bring tears of joy to my eyes, which authors may be credited with which linguistic inventions. I will admit, this has always been available the hard way: call up every cite, say 1000 for James Joyce, and then, slowly, oh so slowly, make one’s way through a mass of output – since Joyce’s cites are surrounded by many others – and see for which words, or definitions the master was the first past the citatory tape. It took hours. Or could. I shied away. Now I can enter the pertinent string and..bingo! The answer is 147. And Shakespeare’s first uses? 283 (out of nearly 500 terms used). And Dickens? 190 out of 724. And Irvine Welsh? 266 of 1,270. OMG, as the young may or may not still say, this is fun. It’s also wholly mutable, and research will change everything, but that’s the name of the game today.
Of course this is my toy. Mine. I’m not sharing. Not lending. But then, and you are quite welcome to make this point, who in hell else would want it?
So does this new toy mean you’ll have to go through all your books and re-do them?
That’s the on-going research, which has to date revised, corrected, expanded and in one or way or another improved over 20% of what’s in the print GDoS. Mainly due to internet newspaper databases (some going back to 18th century) which did not hitherto exist. The toy simply gives me a new and to me interesting way of manipulating and perhaps exploiting the material.