Page 211 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

they did twenty years ago. The slang changes together with
the accent. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the
‘rhyming slang’ was all the rage in London. In the ‘rhyming
slang’ everything was named by something rhyming with
it—a ‘hit or miss’ for a kiss, ‘plates of meat’ for feet, etc. It
was so common that it was even reproduced in novels; now
it is almost extinct*. Perhaps all the words I have mentioned
above will have vanished in another twenty years.
[* It survives in certain abbreviations, such as ‘use your
twopenny’ or ‘use your head.’ ‘Twopenny’ is arrived at like
this: head—loaf of bread—twopenny loaf—twopenny]
The swear words also change—or, at any rate, they are
subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the Lon-
don working classes habitually used the word ‘bloody’. Now
they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still repre-
sent them as using it. No born Londoner (it is different with
people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says ‘bloody’, unless
he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved
up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the
purposes of the working classes. The current London adjec-
tive, now tacked on to every noun, is ——. No doubt in time
——, like ‘bloody’, will find its way into the drawing-room
and be replaced by some other word.
The whole business of swearing, especially English
swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as
irrational as magic— indeed, it is a species of magic. But
there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our inten-
tion in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by
mentioning something that should be kept secret—usually

10 Down and Out in Paris and London