For those who won’t – who can’t – wave the white flag, this Last Man Standing has returned to The Main Stage!
I was listening to The Who’s “Magic Bus” the other day and it occurred to me that I first learned the word queue while grooving to this song. To this point, who knows how many British terms and slang I’d learned from The Beatles and The Stones, but I distinctly remember becoming aware of this queue word thanks to “Magic Bus”. I was probably 13 or 14. In coming years I’d learn many more British terms and slang through rock songs. I’m sure you did too. In this week’s Last Man Standing, I ask that you recount British terms/slang and the specific rock songs that first exposed you to these words. It’s all right if more than one of you were first exposed to the word lorry, for instance, by two different songs.
Townspeople from outside the US are welcome to share the converse, American expressions first learned through specific rock songs.
The Stranglers – I Feel Like A Wog
What is a wog, anyhow???
I always knew it as a derogatory slang term for Italians, but the InterWeb tells me it applies to all sorts of other Mediterranean swarthy types as well.
Re: tonight’s election results: woo-hoo!
So a wog is a synonym for a wop?
Artic Monkeys – With their trilbies
Slade were self-described “football yobs”, which i think means soccer hooligans.
“Saturday’s Kids” has all sorts of stuff in it I had to research to understand — and I had just spent three years in a former British colony! These included the following, most of which are commercial brands:
Lightabye/Light-a-Bite — *still* not sure about this one; a down-market cafe of some sort, I think
Babycham — cheap sparkling wine
Tescos — down-market grocery store
Capstan non-filters — cigarettes
Selsey Bill or Bracklesham Bay — down-market beach destinations. I hadn’t figured Selsey Bill out until just now!
Council houses — subsidised housing units
Hrrundi and Rick, remember the extensive collegiate use of “ha ha, charade you are” from Pink Floyd’s Pigs?
British colonials called the dark-skinned natives wogs. The Stranglers song seems to suggest that modern Britons call dark-skinned immigrants wogs as well.
“Saturday’s Kids” is a great source for this stuff. Good call! I think I first learned “council flats” from a Clash song. I can’t recall which one, though.
Penny Lane is probably the first time I heard the term ‘mac’ for raincoat and knew what it meant.
The dual threat of both Costello and the Undertones having a song I liked called ‘Wednesday Week’ drove me to find out what that expression meant – ‘a week from Wednesday,’ if I remember now.
There’s also that reference to ‘council tenancy’ in Anarchy in the UK.
Maybe that’s where I first decided to look up the term, BigSteve.
Speaking of Costello, his “Secondary Modern” first exposed me to a part of the British school system. I was just listening to Get Happy!! over the weekend (no surprise there), so I looked it up again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_modern_school
First I heard of bird for a girl was in Norweigian Wood.
Speaking of the British educational system, I can’t think of any lyrical references, though there must be some, but what’s with all that A-level and O-level stuff? I never understood that.
Anyway I had to look up the actual wording, but this is from Get Off My Cloud:
“In the mornin the parkin tickets were just like flags stuck on my windscreen. “
Needless to say “He likes his fags the best” in Well-Respected Man was quite confusing when it came on the radio. In fact there are other terms in that song I didn’t understand till years later, like “while his father pulls the maid” and “when Pater passes on.”
Hey, I HAVE “O” Levels — eight of them, in fact! I don’t think they exist anymore. The “O” stood for “Cambridge Ordinary,” the “A” for “advanced.” Being the lazy sod I am, I never bothered with the “A” levels (kind of like 12th and 13th grade). I figured (correctly) that a bunch of O Levels and some good standardized test scores would get me into an American college of my choice.
The weird thing about “O” Levels was that *everything* hinged on one set of test scores, on exams that took place at the end of a two-year curriculum. So if you were good at “swotting up” your Os at the last minute, and had a brain with good short-term recall, you could do pretty well after goofing off for two years. I wasn’t quite that bad (I had parents who cared about my meaningless grades along the way, and I was just mediocre enough to keep them from sending me to military school), but there’s no doubt my work:grades ratio was lower than most over the course of my O Level academic career.
My brother has his “A” Levels, and a fat lot of good it did him. Nobody gets to skip freshman year of college just ’cause you slaved through two *more* years of tough academics, followed by another excruciating exam process.
I only found out years later that doing eight O Levels was academic overkill; most British kids did four or five.
Half-kidding and half serious here, but: “whiskey woman.” Mott the Hoople; Nazareth; Judas Priest; others.
I don’t think any U.S. band ever uses the phrase, but it’s all over 60s and 70s Brit rock.
Thanks for the explanation hvb.
The Kinks’ Willesden Green was probably the first time I learned the term “semi-detached.”
I should point out that O Levels were given on a per-subject basis. So, for example, when you say you “have” or “took” four of them, it means you took, say, Geography, Maths, History and Art. I don’t remember any subjects being compulsory, but I could be wrong about that.
I probably didn’t know what a village green was before the Kinks sang about it.
“She’s Got the Jack,” AC/DC. Not sure if that’s an Australian phrase. In any case, Bon Scott helpfully yelps at the end of the first chorus of the song (on the live “If You Want Blood” LP) to explain what it is:
She’s got the jack
She’s got the jack
She’s got the jack
She’s got the jack
She’s got the jack, jack, jack, jack, jack, jack, jack
She’s got the jack
GONORRHEA!
Speaking of Magic Bus there’s also:
“Thruppence and sixpence every day
Just to drive to my baby”
To me that’s one of the weird things about O/A levels. People seem always to say how many they or someone had, but not what subjects.
I’m going to stop just going through the Kinks songbook in a moment, but there also Second-Hand Car Spiv from Preservation.
PS. That song also has the line “Once he sold old worn out heaps to the punters on the street,” though I may have heard the term ‘punters’ before that.
From Back in Judy’s Jungle on Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain:
Back in Blighty, there was you
There were milkmen every morning
But these endless shiny trees, never used to be that way.
more Kinks, rhyming sland – harry rag for a fag, for a cigarette
“A four of fish and finger pies” from Penny Lane. Actually I’m still not quite sure…..Hey Mod, mind if I pinch a fag?
Go right ahead, northvancoveman. Can you chuck me a couple a’packies? (First learned from the pharmacy break-in scene in the Clash movie Rude Boy, not a song, although I can’t recall if “Protex Blue” refers to packies.)
I must Pince Nez myself: I’m recalling the pharmacy break-in scene from Quadrophenia, not Rude Boy, right? I don’t think Rude Boy had a break-in scene.
Via “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” I learned that National Trust is British slang for the toilet.
Quadrophenia is a good one for mod slang, like “ticket” being a fake mod.
My understanding is that “finger pie” refers to what was known in my high school as “fingerbanging.” I trust I need explicate no further.
My understanding of Elvis Costello and Squeeze lyrics went up immensely when I bought a copy of Eric Partridge’s UK slang dictionary during my senior year. One that had puzzled me no end prior to that was “the one over the eight,” from “From A Whisper To A Scream.” Basically, that’s the one drink too many.
I think (thought?) that “donated to the National Trust” would have been specifically implying public defecation.
McCartney’s “The Other Me” (off Pipes of Peace, the album where even I walk away from his solo career) was the first time I ran into Cockney Rhyming Slang, with “acted like a dustbin lid” supposedly meaning “acted like a kid.”
To this day, I believe the whole rhyming slang thing is just an elaborate practical joke set-up for earnest anglophile music fans.
The Cockney rhyming slang thing reminds me of one of my fave David Brent moments from the original “Office” series, where he cannily (at least in his own mind) asks what he’s to be paid for some management training he’s been asked to deliver. He asks: “What’s the bunsen?” The trainers look confused. Brent clarifies: “The bunsen burner.” They’re still baffled. Brent explains: “It’s Cockney rhymin slang, innit? Bunsen… bunsen burner… little earner… (sigh) how much does the job pay?”
“Sally Army” in XTC’s “Everyday Story of Smalltown” — meaning the Salvation Army.
Besides the ones already mentioned
“Dial 999” – calling the fire dept in “London’s Burning”
“Take away” meaning “take out” from The Jam’s “Down In The Tube Station At Midnight”
Never looked in up, but I assume “Git” from I’m So Tired means a moron.
From numerous teenage punk songs, “spotty” means pimple laden, as in spotty-faced git.
I also like lot meaning all as in “You Lot!, What?” from The Clash, or David Watts who took his exams and “passed the lot”.
Quango – Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization – from Blur’s “Mr. Robinson’s Quango”. Had to look that one up after I heard the song the first time. Same song also includes the use of “biro” for ballpoint pen, though I’d heard of that before hearing it in the song.
From “Laughing Boy,” a Pulp b-side: “Who is this laughing boy who ladders your tights?”
I could never figure out what it means to ladder your tights, until someone commented on my (currently on-hiatus) Pulp blog. It apparently means “to snag a a pair of pantyhose, tearing a hole in them.”
“Bed sit” from Capital Radio by the Clash. I still only have a vague idea what it means.
What’s up with Hedgerow? Is it just a row of hedges? Do we call it that in the US? I only ever seem to hear Brits say it.
“helter sketer”. its one of those spiral slides at a fair,
“When I get to the bottom
I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and turn
and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again”
Gotta love Sunshine jumping in long after others have given up. Sunshine is currently the last Townsperson standing!
UB40
Another Blur one, from “Jubilee” on Parklife. “Jubilee slouches in the settee/He losing all will to move/He gone divy, too much telly…”
Settee isn’t specifically British, I don’t think – though you don’t hear it too often over here – but divy is British slang for stupid or slow, it turns out.
“I’m a lazy sod”
Total tanget but the great 48 said..
My understanding is that “finger pie” refers to what was known in my high school as “fingerbanging.” I trust I need explicate no further.
About 15 years ago or so a group of friends and friend’ of friends got together and played Pictionary. Alas, I was not there. One guy (who I really don’t know well) was making a guess at what was being drawn. In complete sincerity to identify the picture yelled out “FINGERBANGING”.
This still get’s brought up from time to time for the absolute absurdity and/or idiocy of the guess. Fairly or not, he will forever be known by a few for this moment.