The Cocky Companion (8)
By:
July 29, 2010
Every other week, Patrick Cates (HiLobrow’s Magister Ludi) produces The Sniffer, a PDF newsletter 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. This week’s Sniffer (#8) includes the following glosses on vernacular from Parker’s Fit the Eighth.
TINFOIL: Known to The American as “aluminum foil,” tinfoil is the stuff British people use for wrapping a decapitated turkey before roasting it, for keeping a cheese and pickle sandwich fresh until lunchtime, and for “chasing the dragon” (otherwise referred to as “smoking the heroin”). Americans may, however, know “tinfoil” in its adjectival sense. The tinfoil hat, anecdotally worn by paranoiacs who want to stop governments, God or Hitler controlling their minds via satellite, is now the dunce’s cap of the conspiracy nutjob. If you are asked where your tinfoil hat is, you are probably being ridiculed for disbelieving that man landed on the moon in 1969.
SALT-AND-VINEGAR CRISPS: Finish a bag of salt and vinegar crisps, pour the remaining crumbs into your hand and then vacuum them up all at once with your mouth. You will not be able to do this without contorting your face, sticking your tongue out, clenching your anal sphincter and stamping your foot. This last residue of potato-shard-drenched-in-acid-and-salt distills the economically devious essence of Britain’s favourite pub snack. So osmotically mouth-parching and tongue-punching are these addictive nibbles, that you need to buy at least three pints of beer to accompany each pack.
CREAM-CRACKERED: Knackers, and their recruitment into a metaphor for tiredness, have been discussed before in the Companion. But lest anybody begin to decipher what the blazes a Cockney is talking about, the shrivelled, hairy and humble knacker has been encrypted in another level of East London blather. Cream crackers, the square, dry, no-frills accompaniment to a British cheese plate, are the nom de rhyming slang for knackers. And, by extension, when a Cockney mumbles into his dish of jellied eels that he’s “cream-crackered,” he’s telling you, if you’re still listening — and bully for you if you aren’t — that he’s knackered.
TRAMP: Allow yourself to consider this tautological teaser: Some tramps are probably tramps, but not all tramps are tramps. The lexical ocean that separates ex-colonizer from ex-colonized is responsible for the confusion. US tramps tend to be saleswomen of the body, be they call girls to Governors, crack cluckers turning tricks for rock, or both. UK tramps are walkingmen of the streets, tatterdemalions who snuggle up in cardboard boxes and beg for change with outstretched fingerless gloves. There has been and always will be some crossover between the two populations. But not much.