The Sweeney

I was thinking, for whatever odd reason, about Cockney rhyming slang, and about linguistic regionalisms and vernacular, generally. If you’re not familiar with Cockney idiom, it takes a rhyme, and then clips off the end – the actual rhyme. For example, “lottery ticket” rhymes with “sticky wicket,” or “Lemony Snicket,” so you’d say, I forgot to buy stickies, or Lemonies. I made that up, but the most famous one Americans might recognize is the title of the early John Thaw/Dennis Waterman procedural, The Sweeney. The series is about the London Metropolitan Police robbery-homicide division, the Flying Squad. “Flying Squad” rhymes with “Sweeney Todd.” The usage generally plays off some other common reference, and the disguise factor is only once removed, not impenetrable. To someone born to the sound of Bow Bells, easy currency.

Language, and more specifically, vocabulary, is an evolving enterprise.

The Cambridge Dictionary added 6000 new words this year. Slop made the cut, in the sense of internet filler content, as did intention economy, product that AI designs, anticipating need. Others include loud looking – meaning aggressively trying to hook up – and brain flossing – immersive white noise. Cardboard box index is an economic indicator, based on shipping requirements. Or sanewashing, no explanation necessary. It’s interesting how much of it comes from information technology, an indication of how present data and data management is in our lives, and how much of it comes from processing information, our engagement with that technology. Language reflects the social and political environment.

Here’s the introductory note to Huckleberry Finn on speech patterns.

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

Writers are often advised to avoid dialect, and tricky spelling, to replicate pronunciation that veers off the standard of spoken English.

I’m not sure about this, any more than I’m sure about steering clear of contemporary slang. Speech patterns are native to Down East or the Deep South, the Ozarks or the Upper Peninsula, and they demonstrate the adaption of language to place. Word order. Descriptions based on local diet, or insect life, or hair color – because a pocket of gene pool. The locals don’t remark on it; to them, it is the norm. It’s the way other people talk that’s eccentric. Don Winslow, in City on Fire, uses the term cabinet to mean a milk shake, and this is real inside baseball, trust me. It’s an expression used in Providence, Rhode Island, and nowhere else in New England (or the entire world). Up in Boston, they call a milk shake a frappe. Which, either way, means it’s got ice cream in it. A “milk shake” is just milk and syrup.

The argument, I think, is that regionalisms, or phonetic spelling, or trying to be awkwardly hip, puts too much distance between you and the reader, and there’s some truth to it.

Trudging through Joel Chandler Harris, or Kipling, for that matter, in Soldiers Three, gets old fast. The dialect is tiresome, and over-used. You have to sound it out loud to understand what’s being said. On the other hand, you hear the complaint that Stephen King uses brand names too much, as a shortcut. Eh. I don’t know. The argument for, is that these expressions ground you in specifics, and that’s the way I lean. When you read an older locution, in Twain, or Dashiell Hammett, or Jane Austen, you work out the meaning from the context – or, God forbid, you could look it up.

The sound of Bow Bells

The sound of Bow Bells

It’s said, that in East London, if you could hear the ringing of the bells at St. Mary-le-Bow church, in Cheapside, that you were a true Cockney, born within earshot. It’s a legacy turn of phrase, because the sound of the bells no longer carries as far as it did, drowned out by noise pollution. And like the bells, the metaphor fades. Specific to the place, it becomes received memory, folklore, urban legend, separate from experience.

Lost Language. Orphaned figures of speech. Forgotten devices and designs. A baggage claim of poetic license and clouded hyperbole, the rhymes and rhythms left unheard.