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.

Old Yeller Dies

by David Edgerley Gates


I'm prompted to these musings by a post my pal Art Taylor and his wife Tara Laskowski made on FaceBook about their son Dash, and his reading enthusiasms. Dash is a year old, and likes Robert McCloskey's MAKE WAY FOR DUCKLINGS. Art says Dash has already memorized it, when Art reads it aloud to him.

I suggested a couple of other books to add to Dash's reading list, as he gets a little older. I remember a guy named Robert Lawson, who was an author-illustrator, like McCloskey, and told familiar stories from an unfamiliar POV. Ben Franklin's pet mouse, for example, or Paul Revere's horse. No man, it's said, is a hero to his valet.

The grand-daddy, of course, is Kipling, and THE JUST-SO STORIES. It's past time I gave him credit for his abiding influence on my own writing. My dad read those stories aloud to me, when I was sick in bed, at four or five. I still remember the smell of the inhalator, a kind of steam device, with a cup of spice-flavored medication. It was supposed to make your breathing easier. What actually set my mind at rest was the sound of my father's voice. We all have a comfort zone.

At what point do we graduate to more sophisticated stuff? Sake of argument, when we start reading on our own, at six or seven, say. I had an interesting exchange with my pal Johnny D. Boggs a little while back. THE SEARCHERS was being shown at the Lensic theater, on the big screen, and I asked Johnny if he were going to take his son Jack (THE SEARCHERS being one of Johnny's favorite pictures, and mine). Johnny said no. He thought the movie was probably too dark for Jack, who was, I think, eight or nine at the time. Maybe the threshold is our exposure to ambiguity, or a lack of moral certainty, and THE SEARCHERS sure fits.

CHARLOTTE'S WEB. E.B. White was an unsentimental cuss, and he doesn't sugar-coat the story. Charlotte's "web" is of course all the animals
in the barn, not just Wilbur, and death is part of their lives. Wilbur himself barely escapes being turned into bacon. But the book isn't really sad. it's more of an affirmation, that there's rebirth.

On the other hand, OLD YELLER. I think I was ten or eleven when I read it. It was probably on my summer reading list for school. Jeez, what a heartbreaker. The dog, after all, wasn't responsible. The real choice is the one the kid has to make, and in fact there is no choice. He has to do it.

So, what's appropriate, for Dash, as he grows up, or Jack? When do we, as parents, or role models, teachers or even librarians, stop making the decisions for them? I had dinner with some people, a few years ago, and there was a teenager there, with his dad, and the kid was nuts about science fiction. I think we started talking about DUNE, or STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, and his dad interrupted to say it was all crap, and the kid just turtled in on himself, and the conversation dead-ended. I didn't say anything to his father, but it was discouraging. We should all be allowed to read crap, although I don't agree with the guy's description of SF. How many of us have actually ground through MOBY-DICK, or BLEAK HOUSE? I've rediscovered Dickens, in later years, but if he's crammed down your throat in high school, to fatten up your liver, you're like one of those unhappy geese.

Perhaps water finds its own level. Girls of a certain age go from ANNE OF GREEN GABLES to FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC, which is arguably soft-core YA porn. Who's to say? Books lead us on, and one person's despised genre is someone else's delight. I suspect our earliest experiences, or exposure, are a template. I've mentioned Carl Barks, and his duck comics, in the past. I'd add Kipling, and TREASURE ISLAND. The child is father to the man.

One of these days, Johnny will take his son Jack to see THE SEARCHERS. And one of these days, Dash is probably going to read OLD YELLER, and cry at the end, the way I did. Especially when we're young, it seems to me, we inhabit the stories, or they inhabit us, and take on a life of their own, as real as a dime. A spell is cast, and I doubt if we ever break free of it. Innocence is never really lost.