The Cocky Companion (4)
By:
June 3, 2010
Every other Thursday, Patrick Cates (HiLobrow’s Magister Ludi) produces The Sniffer, a compendium of vulpine insight, authorial wisdom, and shower gel tastings that’s mailed to those who’ve pledged at least $10 to support our serialization of James Parker’s novel, The Ballad of Cocky the Fox. (Subscriptions are still available; check in with Cates for details.)
Each edition of The Sniffer features an extract from “The Cocky Companion,” a Rosetta Stone for decoding Cocky’s London vernacular. Today’s Sniffer (#4) includes the following glosses on vernacular from Parker’s Fit the Fourth.
PRINCE NAS: Self-ennobled Prince Naseem Hamed is the greatest British-Yemeni boxer the world has ever seen. In his fighting days, he was a supremely silly sod who would enter the ring on a flying carpet or leap over the ropes dressed as Michael Jackson. But once he got started, Christ: what a talent. His bob, weave and jab would tie the fittest featherweights in tangles. And he’d usually finish them off in a round or two with his crunching left. Eventually he made a bad rap single, got fat and went to jail for running someone over in his Mercedes.
GINSTERS: The packaging of a Ginsters pie or pasty, with its Celtic font and Cornish flag, hints at hearty, natural fare that hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. These meaty confections, we are meant to think, are the same meaty confections that fed sailors and tin-miners of centuries gone by and fuelled long days of heavy labour. What a load of bollocks. Somewhere there is a big factory where they mash up hooves, tails and teeth, slap the resulting paste in a beige, flaky jacket and then ship it out by the lorry-load to petrol stations up and down the land for late-night purchase. Only drunks and stoners eat Ginsters and only when they are drunk and stoned.
HIS NIBS: Be sure to enunciate carefully when using this odd-sounding irreverence or people will think you are talking about a man’s nipples. His Nibs is meant to belittle a fussy and demanding figure of authority (“I suppose His Nibs will be wanting me to wipe his arse for him next.”) but it ends up sounding like a silly archaism. If you ever find yourself tempted to use the term, consider substituting “that cock.”
BLOODY NORA: Q: Who was Nora? A: She was a destitute child of the dropped Cockney “H.” Once upon a time, the gossipy exaggerators who were indigenous to East London would do a lot of exclaiming: “Cor Blimey!” “Gordon Bennett!” “Bloody Ada!” A sibling of these oaths was “Bloody Nora.” She began life as the ill-omened infant “Flaming Horror,” evolved into the grubby tyke “Flamin’ Orror,” became the thieving street orphan “Flamin’ Nora” and ended up in a tuberculotic poorhouse as “Bloody Nora.”
JELLY TOTS: If you ever stop to wonder why British people have bad teeth (or at least why enough British people have bad teeth to give rise to this stereotype), spare a moment to consider the apparently humble Jelly Tot. Small, round, not too garishly coloured, coated with a modicum of sugar. And the kiddy-sized packet holds no more than ten of the tiny buttons. But nobody has ever eaten just one packet. The little bastards are so addictive that a sweet-toothed British child raised, like I was, on a diet of molasses, treacle and sugar cubes, would think nothing of clearing the whole shelf in the local sweet shop (probably without paying if the sweet shop happened to be operated by a visually impaired old lady).
OFF HIS TITS: Tomcats and tods don’t have tits. It doesn’t matter. Anybody, titful or titless, can be off his or her tits. This sibilated synonym for “inebriated” is pleasingly dual-layered. Not only does it mean “fucked,” but in the gobbledygook of its syntax it acts fucked. “Off my tits” is just the kind of muddled phrase a drunkard might use to describe himself after losing his grip on language and peeing his pants.
Each installment of THE BALLAD OF COCKY THE FOX was complemented by an issue of THE SNIFFER, a COCKY THE FOX newsletter written and edited by Patrick Cates. Originally sent only to subscribers, they are now all freely available here.