Visit theallusionist.org/beesknees to hear this episode and find out more about the topics therein
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, accuse language, in the billiard room, with the lead pipe.
Today’s episode is solving some mysteries, mysteries of vocabulary, posed by listeners of the Shedunnit podcast - I appeared on an episode a few weeks ago with host Caroline Crampton doing some investigative work into words and phrases that people had been perplexed by in golden age detective fiction. If you haven’t read the books concerned, no problem! The terms are no more comprehensible within context than out of it.
Content note: anal discharge.
On with Shedunnit’s Mysterious Glossary with Caroline Crampton.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: The first word or phrase that we're going to try and define for you today is this pair of 'ack emma‘ and 'pip emma', which, my understanding is that it's something to do with time. It comes up - I think Peter Wimsey says it a fair amount as a kind of stylized way of referring to a rendezvous, the time for. But it is also in Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced, where there are actually characters with names that reference these particular phrases. So Helen, is this something that you'd come across before?
HZ: I didn't retain it if I had, but once I read what it meant, I thought, "Oh, that is obvious." Ack emma is a.m., as in morning, and pip emma is p.m., as in afternoon. And it was early 20th century signalers' names for the letters A, P and M.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: So sort of signalers as in military?
HZ: Yes, British army. They didn't yet have the NATO spelling alphabet that we have now, you know, the alpha bravo. But it was like a precursor to that from the late 19th century. And I think in 1898, the War Office issued it but they didn't have words for every letter yet. They only had ones for letters that were easily confused, so ack; beer or bar for B; but then nothing until emma for M, And then pip for P, esses, toc, and vic. And then they developed that during the First World War, and after that they had words for every letter, but still not the ones we use today. I suppose now you wouldn't have 'emma' for M, because people will be confused because they'd be expecting the letter M to be represented by a word that begins with M. But in 1898, they weren't held back by that kind of expectation.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yeah, I'm also imagining - I could be wrong - that this might stem from a time when you were using the voice more in communications like this. So it was more people saying stuff over the radio, rather than spelling it out in Morse or whatever. I don't know if that's right, but that's what I'm imagining. But I suppose that makes sense with with Peter Wimsey then, who famously has this backstory of having served and being very traumatised by his time in the trenches, and in the First World War, so he's still peppering his conversation with phrases that would have been common then.
HZ: Yeah, although conversationally, you could just say 'afternoon', which is harder to mess up. Also, I just think that outside of the mystery novels of that period, reading children's books from 1940s 50s 60s, that were still using this kind of world war military slang. So I guess kids picked it up, because war fiction would have been very heroic and all of that. I don't know how long people were saying 'pip emma' for. But as a genre of things people dropped into conversation rather than in just military context, it seems to have had decades of use.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Okay, so this next one I know is one that you know about, because I think I've heard you talk about it on Answer Me This, your podcast, a very long time ago.
HZ: Doesn't mean I'll remember it!
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: But this is a word that I had never come across before seeing it in the Agatha Christie short story collection The Thirteen Problems: 'banting'. From context, I'm going to say it's a kind of diet, someone is described as 'banting' when they won't eat pudding, I think?
HZ: It was basically what people used to say, at the time before they would say 'dieting' to me what you weren't eating, rather than just diet as in foods you did eat. It's an eponym, named after William Banting, who was a big deal in undertaking in the 19th century; he had the royal warrant for undertaking. He also wrote a booklet in 1863 called Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public, which was an open letter, like an infomercial for a diet that he had done, and he was saying, "I did all these unsuccessful fasts and regime and spa breaks and exercises, and this is what worked." So he didn't invent it; he was bestowed this by someone else. But it was essentially a popularisation of low carb dieting: it was eating meat,and vegetables and fruit and dry wine, and avoiding starch, fat, and sugar. And it was very popular diet for a long time. And people are still doing spins on it.
HZ: That's so interesting, because the story that it comes up in is one that's concerned with poisoning.
HZ: Bad part of any bant regime.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Bad part of of any bant. There's three people who eat the meal that is poisoned. But then the detectives are able to say, "This person didn't eat this element of the meal because she was banting." And that's sort of the explanation as to why she didn't get sick when the others did, if I remember rightly. And without knowing what that word meant, it's a little hard to follow. But no, that's really interesting. So there was in fact a Mr. Banting.
HZ: It's interesting that this that he wrote, in his 60s, overshadowed the work he did for decades in undertaking. But I suppose you don't remember the celebrity undertakers of any era, do you?
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: I can't think of a single one.
HZ: And he donated all of the profits of his best selling diet book to charity. I guess good for him. Bonus Banting fact: he is distantly related to Frederick Banting, the Canadian physician who jointly won the Nobel Prize in 1923 for work on insulin.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Okay, so then the next two, I think they go together. And this again is something that I can't point to a single story or book where it comes from, I just think it's everywhere. And this is 'bee's knees'/'cat's pyjamas'. If I was going to use it in a sentence, I would say, "Helen is the bee's knees."
HZ: Aw! You're very sweet. I can't find the specific origin because - well, that's often the way with slang, just people are saying it long before it is written down, particularly pre-internet where people now write a lot more like they talk. But this probably comes from the late 18th century, bee's knees - bee's knees was first. It meant something very small and insignificant, because a bee has small knees, right? Many people would interpret this to mean something that doesn't exist, like 'chocolate teapot'; it was that kind of slang category at the time. 'Canary's tusks' was another one; 'flea's eyebrows'. But bees do have knees. They have leg joints. I think bee's knees stuck more than canary's tusks because it rhymes, and we're simple people that like patterns in things. It was initially something that didn't exist, and then something that was very, very small; but then in the 1920s it became part of this sort of fanciful slang of the people of the roaring 20s, meaning things that were great; so that's like the cat's pyjamas as well. 'The snake's hips', 'the kipper's knickers'.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: That's my favourite.
HZ: A little smelly, maybe. 'The monkey's eyebrows'. So those all meant 'excellent things'. I wonder why cat's pyjamas though? Because I would imagine few, if any, cats have pyjamas.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: And if they do, they deeply resent being made to wear them. It's now, in that sense, a hyperbolic expression for something being really good. So I suppose maybe the what you're getting from the hyperbole is the unlikeliness of the pairing in the phrase: "your greatness is only one one removed from this fanciful object" or something.
HZ: 'Cat's pyjamas' might have stuck a bit more because 'cat' was also flapper slang for a fashionable young woman. And then you get 'cat' becoming a jazz term, like 'hepcat'. Still doesn't explain the pyjamas, it could be anything, couldn't it? It could be the cat's gloves or other all the clothes that cats don't wear. There are so many options.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Cat's… brogues. I think every time I read that now, I will think: "flea's eyebrows, kipper's knickers; why didn't you say that instead?"
Okay, so this next one: 'bad hat', which I think comes up all over the mystery fiction from 1920s, 30s, 40s. But I particularly noticed it when I was reading Death on the Riviera recently by John Bude, in which a character is referred to - sort of on sight he makes a bad first impression, and then he is a bad hat throughout. So yeah, what can you tell us about that one?
HZ: Well, I'm not familiar with this phrase. But it's not the only example of a whole human being represented by their top, you know, like doing a headcount, or referring to people as scalps happens more than never. Polling: polling was referring to a person as their hair. So while I don't know 'bad hat', it does seem like you could just represent a human by their headgear linguistically. It's a bit reductive, of course.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yeah, I tried looking into this, and sadly could not confirm my instinctive theory, which is that it's a kind of exterior representation of an interior flaw. So a bad person would wear a bad hat. But I would like that to be the case.
HZ: It is possible. People took hats very seriously then.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yes: as a class and maybe moral signifier.
HZ: Maybe to our modern eyes, all the hats look like good hats, though, because they were just a lot more dapper and formal looking. So it might be hard for us to crack that hat code.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: True. Yeah, wearing a hat just seems smarter than not wearing one. But when everyone's wearing one, there are more gradations.
HZ: We just don't have the vocabulary, hatwise. Some things just last a time, aren't they?
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yeah, I wonder with a lot of these that they were obviously well known enough that an author wrote it, gave it to a character to say, and then an editor read it and went, "Yes, this will make sense to the reader. I pass this." And yet now we're kind of in the dark.
Our next word, which is 'creature', to refer to a woman. And this is one that I've really struggled to work out whether it's positive or negative, or neutral, or some mixture, because sometimes it's quite a throwaway comment, you know, "Oh, she's a silly creature." And sometimes it seems very loaded, someone calling someone "Oh what a creature she is," that kind of thing, it seems like it's a pejorative description for someone. So perhaps it's just flexible. But yeah, it certainly strikes the modern ear oddly, I think.
HZ: Although, thinking about it with my modern brain, is this a word - because it essentially just means a living being just mean - maybe it's a word we need for a genderfree way to refer to a person, without the complication of man or woman or girl or whatever.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yeah, that's a good point. It may be it could be where you need a word to say, "I met this person," because you don't yet know them well enough to know how they like to be described or identified. Yeah, perhaps we do need a word for that. Or more words for it.
HZ: You're right that the use of it for humans does seem a little bit like you're talking about Gollum or someone like that.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yeah, I think that's maybe why it's sticking in my brain. It's things like Lord of the Rings, and also I recently reread Frankenstein. Frankenstein's monster in the original Mary Shelley book I think gets referred to a lot as 'the creature' or 'my creature'. I think that's perhaps where I'm getting the oddness from.
HZ: And it also meant whiskey in the 1630s.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: 'Creature' meant 'whiskey'?
HZ: Yeah, well, I think this was a sort of early 1600s joke. Because in the Book of Timothy in the Bible, there's the phrase "Every creature of God is good." So people took that to mean "every enjoyable thing for humans is good." So they took the word 'creature' to mean 'booze' and things like that. And 'creature comforts' is from around the same era, meaning food and clothing and so forth.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Love an early 16th century joke.
HZ: But I wonder whether in the early 20th century, it's usually men talking about a beautiful creature, isn't it, or "she was a strange creature," whether it just suggests the otherness of women to the men of the period.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yeah, it's definitely another one where I cannot think of an example where anyone's ever said of a man, young or old, "Oh, oh, he's a silly creature."
HZ: No, they'd probably call him a cove or something like that. Or a bad hat. Maybe a good hat, I don't know. Does it ever just strike you in these books that people sound so uncomfortable just talking about anything?
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yep. Yes. And I think sometimes that's just because the exposition you have to do as a novelist doesn't sound right coming out of a real person's mouth. But I think some of it is just deep depression and anxiety about saying anything. Yes.
Let's move on to ‘ha ha’. This is actually from the title of a novel by the writer JJ Connington, and the title of the book is The Ha Ha Case. Which, if you saw that on the front of a book, you might think it's about comedy or musical hall star, or it's funny in some way. But no, a ha ha is, I believe, actually a landscape feature.
HZ: That's right, yes. It's a ditch. And it was designed to keep livestock grazing in a certain area of your massive estate, without building a wall that would interrupt the view. So it was often a ditch with a wall built into the ditch, where they couldn't really leap out. And it's frustrating to me whenever etymology of terms is unclear, or people have a lot of different explanations and all of them are disputed. Unfortunately, this is one of those, and some people say, "Well, it's an abbreviation of half and half because it's half a wall and half a ditch," which, I don't buy it. Some say that it's because the son of Louis XIV of France was stopped from going near the ha ha by his governess, because it was dangerous. And then he saw it he said, "Haha, I'm supposed to be afraid of this?" That's not good enough to me. It does seem to be a French term. And there's still a town in Quebec called Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, which apparently has the Guinness World Record for most exclamation marks in a town name. Which is two.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yeah, I agree with you. I don't think any of those explanations are especially satisfying or plausible, and disappointing. But I was reminded when I was asking around a few friends to see if they'd ever come across this phrase just to try and gauge how unusual is it, do people generally know what it means? And one of them reminded me that once we went to the opera at Glyndebourne, and we were having our picnic in the grounds beforehand, and one of our group got very panicked because they thought a sheep was about to charge over and start eating our sandwiches. And then upon greater investigation, we realised that no, because there was a haha in the way, and we had just been deceived by the landscaping.
HZ: Wow. See, not interrupting the view.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Exactly. Yeah. And it worked so well that, we thought that the sheep would just be able to sort of toddle over and tuck in; but no, there was a big ditch in the way.
HZ: Apparently, they also used ha has in some asylums, so that the patients could see a view, but couldn't get out.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Right, the idea being that the sight of a massive wall would be too depressing?
HZ: The other thing I learned is that ice houses were often embedded into ha has because the ground around them was good for insulation.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Right, so this is pre refrigeration means of keeping your stuff cold.
HZ: It's a multipurpose feature in your estate.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: If you've dug a massive ditch purely for aesthetic reasons, you might as well get some use out of it.
HZ: Keep your sheep out, keep your patients in, keep your food cold.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: So this next one, I think I actually first came across in a PG Wodehouse novel. But it then also comes up in lots of Golden Age detective fiction from the 1920s and 30s. And this is 'make love' used in senses where it's quite clear it's not our modern use of that phrase.
HZ: Yeah, I think it has been in use way longer to mean courtship. I was familiar with it from books to mean 'to woo' even if it was ardent, "ardent making love", which I assume was maybe some kind of mild but non-penetrative touching, plus sweet talk. It's a English version of a French term, 'faire l'amour'. Interestingly, that is dated from the 1500s, but it meant 'sexual intercourse' by the 1620s. Whereas it stayed in English till the 20th century just to mean wooing, I suppose because French, and French romance poetry was considered romantic. And then I think American English developed the sexual meaning in the late 1920s, presumably independently. The first written known example is from the 1927, played by Mae West called Sex.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: The play's just called Sex. That's a good crossing over point. That's interesting, though, that at least in American English, and some of the British Golden Age authors that I talked about a lot on the show had really big American readerships: it's interesting that it was crossing over in American English right at the time, so American readers might have had the same experience I do reading how some character's saying, "If you don't stop that, I'm going to take you and make love to you in this bush." And I'm sort of like slightly giggling, like, well, that doesn't seem quite right with the atmosphere of that novel.
This next one is again, a bit of a mystery to me, although I've read it a lot of times in Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers, and this is the word 'goop'; not to mean gluey substance, but rather to describe a person. And I think again, I'm working from context here because I didn't turn up a huge amount when trying to search for this. I think it just means slightly pathetic individual, a bit wet, as by the the phrase might have gone a few decades ago.
HZ: Yeah, the dictionary says a bad mannered or inconsiderate person, or a boor.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: It comes up particularly in the context in Gaudy Night is the character Harriet Vane, who's a crime novelist, she is really struggling with her current work in progress. And she's got a character called Wilfred, who just no matter how hard she tries, just comes across on the page is really pathetic. And she is describing this problem to another character, and she's saying, "He's just such a goop, I don't know what to do about it."
HZ: There was a book published in 1900, called Goops and How to Be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Children. So it was about juvenile virtue. I suppose it's a humorous way of terrorising your children into into good behaviour. Oh, in fact, there were 50 years of the books, and there were comic strips and so on. And they were in children's newspapers. Wow. So there were lots of rhymes about disgusting children and how you shouldn't be one of those.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: And a disgusting child was a goop.
HZ: And a disgusting child was a goop.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: This next one, which is again from Josephine Tey, a pivotal phrase in her novel Miss Pym Disposes, but it also comes up in a slightly later novel called The Singing Sounds. And this, again, is a descriptor for a person's character, I think, or for their behaviour. And it's "I wouldn't call the king my cousin", or "they wouldn't call the king their cousin".
HZ: Yeah, there's a few variants of this: there's "I wouldn't call the Queen my aunt" as well. Substitute any royal for any relative, but the meaning is the same, it basically means that you're happy with your station. And even becoming a cousin of a royal or the nibling of a royal wouldn't be an improvement. That's how happy you are.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: So I suppose this is predicated on the belief that being royal is the best thing you could be?
HZ: Yeah, well, I suppose in the 19th century, where this phrase seems to have appeared, certainly being royal would give you a lot of financial advantages, and probably your life expectancy was a lot better.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: This next one, which I came across in Bats in the Belfry by ECR Lorac: 'playing possum'. Did your research turn up anything about this? Because I am in the dark about this one.
HZ: Fascinated by this. To play possum means to pretend to be dead. Because opossums are unusual creatures, in that when they are in danger from predators, they fall into an involuntary coma. So they look dead: they lie there with their teeth bed with like foam around their mouth, the eyes half closed, and a foul-smelling discharge from their anus. And I suppose the predator is like, "That's probably going to be a rotten possum. I won't eat that." But it seems like quite a high risk defence strategy. And they might be unconscious for a few minutes or a few hours.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Wow. And it's involuntary? It's not like a possum can go, "Oh, under attack, hunker down"?
HZ: No, apparently it is not voluntary. Which could be inconvenient if they think they see a predator and actually it was fine. Then they've ruined their own afternoon.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yeah, I'm fascinated to know how that made its way into late 1930s detective novel by London-based writer. But yeah, that does make sense. I think it does come up in a setting where they're trying to work out whether I think someone has disappeared and friends are speculating, is he just lying low or has actually something bad happened to him?
HZ: Or has he faked his own death?
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Exactly. I think that is the sense there. That would make sense with the plot. But I did not get that from 'playing possum' upon my first reading.
HZ: No. Again, idioms: they rely on some knowledge of the current context that we don't have 100-odd later. I think this phrase came in in about the 1820s. And in the 19th century in Britain, unusual animals from countries that the Brits had plundered were quite the fashionable thing so maybe that is how it entered the vocabulary, because it was stuff of great intrigue wasn't it, foreign creatures - as in animals rather than lovely women.
CAROLINE CRAMPTON: Yeah, I can't use that word now without -
HZ: No. Ruined it.
The Allusionist is an independent podcast made possible by you, thanks for listening, thanks for patreonising at theallusionist.org/donate. In return for which you receive:
a. the pure glow of satisfaction at helping fund this show;
b. Fortnightly livestreams with me, where I answer your pressing questions and read tranquillusionistically from one of my dictionaries;
c. a discord community with your fellow patrons! This week we’ve had discussions about how the Canadian province of Alberta has no rats, and about which syllable of the word ******* you’d bleep out. Join us at patreon.com/allusionist.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
bunt, 1. noun: the baggy centre of a fishing net or a sail.
2. noun: a disease of wheat caused by a smut fungus, the spores of which smell of rotten fish.
3. verb,
[concentrate because it’s about to get trickier]
1: baseball (of a batter) gently tap (a pitched ball) so that it does not roll beyond the infield. 2. Butt with the head or horns. Noun, baseball: an act of bunting a ball.
Try using ‘bunt’ in an email today; plenty options.
This episode was originally produced by Euan McAleece and Caroline Crampton for Shedunnit podcast which you can find at shedunnitshow.com and in the pod places, and if you love mysteries then the Shedunnit book club is for you. Allusionist music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com and the podcasts Neutrino Watch and Song By Song.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor an episode of the Allusionist, contact them at multitude.productions/ads.
Stay in touch with me @allusionistshow on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send me any portmanteau words you see around. And to hear or read every episode, see the full dictionary entries for all the randomly selected words, browse a lexicon of all the words ever covered in the show so you can find the relevant episode about it, and get more information about the topics within each episode, visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
