The Criminal Alphabet (31 page)

See
Pilchard

A
ponce
is someone who
lives off others because they do not have the balls to put themselves on offer by
committing their own criminal activities; they are held in contempt by ‘real'
criminals. Infamous twentieth-century criminals the Kray brothers were known as
‘thieves' ponces' because they would bully and seriously assault other criminals to
steal their ill-gotten gains. In prison, a ponce is someone who is always looking to
‘borrow' or get something for nothing. The majority of
skagheads
are ponces. Nobody likes a ponce.

Pure mental
is an
expression, mainly used in Scotland, to describe someone who is very ‘hard' or a
particularly violent person. It can also be used as a term of admiration for
someone's fighting prowess.

See
Nutter

Rass claat
is a Jamaican
expression along similar lines to
bumba claat
, also literally
translated as ‘arse cloth'. It's a mild insult or cover-all expression mainly used
by West Indians and
jafakens
.

If someone is described as
Radio
Rental
it means they are not all there mentally (rhyming slang: Radio
Rental = mental). The original Radio Rentals company was popular from the 1930s
(when it rented out radio sets to the public) up through to the 1990s (when it
rented out TVs and video recorders), but it went out of business in 2000, as
electronic goods had become cheaper and people could afford to buy their own.

See
Bread
,
Crank

A
raving iron
is a
flamboyant homosexual (rhyming slang: iron hoof = poof). Before 1998 it was
sometimes shortened to ‘raver', but after the ‘acid summer' when raves became
popular the meaning became blurred as young people
attending raves
were known as ravers. The balance was soon restored, however, when rhyming slang
took up the slack and ravers became known as cheesy Quavers (after the snack), then
as just cheesys, and raving irons went back to being known simply as ravers.

This is a typical insult used for
criminals and prisoners, a favourite with uniformed authority, so also big in the
armed forces. Examples would be ‘Let's get all these
scrotes
banged
up in their cells' or ‘You're nicked, you fucking scrote!'. It originated in America
and came to the UK via US films and TV shows. The word is a corruption of
‘scrotum'.

A
scrubber
is a young
woman or girl of loose or dubious morals; also, classically, a female prisoner, so
called because of the amount of scrubbing done in female prisons. In 1980 a film
called
Scrubbers
was made about the British female
borstal
system in response to the 1977 film about the male borstal system,
Scum
.

A
Si
, or
Sye
, is someone who can't be trusted, is gullible and not very
bright. It comes from the old children's rhyme ‘Simple Simon met a pie man …'
in which Simple Simon basically gets mugged off.

A
sizzler
is a
nonce
or sex offender. It's an evolution of
bacon
, in that bacon sizzles in the pan.

A
skaghead
is someone
who is addicted to heroin and has lost their moral compass. Skagheads are usually
despised and mistrusted in the criminal and prison world. It's thought that they
will do absolutely anything to get their hands on a fix of heroin, so they are
avoided by unaddicted criminals. Heroin is known as skag by a lot of people, hence
the word skaghead; it is also known as ‘tackle', so to be called a ‘tacklehead' is
an insult on par with being called a skaghead.

See
Crackhead

A
skank
is an ugly,
dirty female of dubious sexual morals. The word was originally used for a Jamaican
dance performed to ska music. It's also a word of West Indian origin that means to
cheat someone or take something without paying for it. In Rochester
borstal
in the 1970s the local newsagent who visited the
institution once a week in order to supply tobacco and confectionery that the
borstal trainees could spend their weekly wage on was known as ‘Fred the Skank'. He
gained the ‘skank' tag because he would constantly try to rip the trainees off, for
a penny here and a penny there.

See
Borstal

Slag
started life as a
slang word for a girl or woman of loose or dubious morals. Possibly, it comes from
mining communities in the Midlands and the North where slag is the all-but-useless
by-product of coal, so something extremely cheap. London villains have made the word
an insult that isn't gender specific but usually means a bad, nasty person, as in
‘That slag blew the whistle on the blag'. As a verb, it's also used as a means of
putting something down,
slagging
it
off
, and
similarly, it can also mean to give someone a severe dressing-down, as in ‘I gave
him a right
slagging
!' It's been widely used in prisons since the
1950s.

See
Slapper

A
slapper
is a female of
very loose morals inclined towards sexual promiscuity. The word is believed to have
come either from the amount of slap (make-up) a woman wears when out on the pull,
or, more likely, from the sound of naked bodies slapping together during sexual
intercourse.

See
Slag

A
spaghetti bender
is
anyone of Italian origin. The British seem to have a deep-seated ditrust of Italians
and this can perhaps be traced back to the Second World War, when the Italian
Fascist Party under Benito Mussolini formed an alliance with the Nazis. The Italians
were quick to surrender and change sides when things began to go against them and
this led to the myth that all Italians were cowards
and to a lot
of jokes, for example, ‘What is the smallest book in the world?' ‘
The Italian
Book of War Heroe
s'; or ‘Italian tanks have only got two gears, reverse and
surrender', and so on. The British people were quick to forget that the Roman army,
who conquered a lot of the known world, were of course Italians. But then, racism is
a lot about choosing what to remember and what to forget. It's a form of selective
amnesia.

Spawny
has the same
meaning the same as
jammy
, and is a Northern word that came into
common usage in southern prisons because of a character in the early
Viz
comics called Spawny Bastard. Spawny Bastard, no matter what outrageous
situation he got into, would end up better off and smelling of roses. A lucky,
jammy, spawny git!

Stoolie
is an
Americanism that has found its way into the British lag's lexicon via film, TV and
music; it means a
grass
or informer. It comes from the old practice
of tying a pigeon to a stool and leaving it out in the open (much the same as a
tethered goat) to attract other birds or predators while the hunter waits in the
undergrowth with their gun at the ready. The stool pigeon is considered a traitor
because it's a decoy luring in others, so any criminal who is working for the police
to help them to catch other criminals was labelled a stool pigeon, and this is
shortened to stoolie. It's used extensively by younger British criminals and
prisoners.

See
Grass

There is nothing more guaranteed to
elicit violence from a Scotsman than to be called a
sweaty
to his
face (rhyming slang: sweaty sock = Jock).

See
Jockney

A
sweetgrass
is an
informer who grasses by mistake, or by design disguised as mistake. For example, if
someone in prison goes to the staff in secret and gives them information that
so-and-so has an unauthorized item, say an extra visiting order which he may have
obtained by illegal means, then that person is no more than a
grass
, plain and simple. But if that same person were to speak to
the staff out in the open and within hearing of other prisoners, and say, ‘How come
so-and-so can get an extra visiting order and I can't?', that would be construed as
sweetgrassing. The person would still be informing the authorities about something,
but because they are doing it openly it would be perfectly legitimate in some
people's eyes, although others would see it as being against the prisoners' code.
Sweetgrassing is such a grey area that the sweetgrass will not usually suffer
violence from other prisoners as a result of it but they will, most of the time, be
ostracized by ‘proper' cons – depending on the temperament and capabilities of the
person who has been sweetgrassed. To be known as a sweetgrass is pretty bad, but
it's not as dangerous as being known as a plain
grass
.

When it's used to describe a woman,
tart
usually means a sexually promiscuous girl or woman
(rhyming slang: merry heart = tart), but when it's used to describe a male, it
usually means someone with effeminate tendencies or suspect courage, as in ‘I told
him to smack the fella right in the mooey, but the tart just let him get away with a
slagging
'. It can also be used as a term of endearment towards
a girlfriend, as in ‘Me tart came up yesterday and brought me a pukka
elephant
', though, understandably, it's not usually used within
the hearing of the girlfriend.

A
tiddly
is anyone of
Chinese origin (rhyming slang: tiddlywink = chink). ‘Chink' is an offensive word for
Chinese people and comes from the shape of their eyes, which are said to ‘only open
a chink'; Tiddlywinks is a game played with counters that must be flipped into a
central container.

A
toby
is somebody who
is very gullible and ripe for ripping off (Toby jug =
mug
). A Toby
jug, also known as a fillpot or philpot, is a pottery jug usually in the form of a
seated man. Some people believe they were named after Sir Toby Belch in
Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night
, but the term has come into general criminal
slang through the blurred borders between street traders and criminals. It's usually
used to describe the customers who buy from the former, as in ‘I've got a suitcase
full of pissy water ramped up as designer perfume and a box of brass rings with
9-carat-gold stickers all over them – the tobys will lap them
up.' Sellers of stolen goods and illegal street traders are constantly on the
lookout for tobys.

See
Hedge

Tosser
is old-fashioned
slang for somebody who masturbates, so a
wanker
. It's used as an
insult for anyone who goes out of their way to make life difficult for others; the
implication is that they are too
fugly
or useless to get a
girlfriend.

Some prisons do not have a specific room
for the communal television and so it is placed centrally on the wing and prisoners
must bring their cell chairs to sit on around it during
association
periods. This spread of chairs around the TV is usually known as the
vegetable patch
because it's where the
‘vegetables
'
(those who want to sit, slack-jawed, in front of a
TV watching soap operas) sit. When a prisoner ends up in the vegetable patch they
are classed by other prisoners as a
cabbage
or Cabbage Patch Kid
(after the freaky-looking American dolls of the 1980s), or as a
hobbit
, meaning they have given up and accept their
imprisonment. ‘Real' prisoners never accept their imprisonment.

See
Hobbit hole

A
wanker
is somebody who
masturbates. The terms wank and wanker originated in British slang in the late
nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, and they have been
widely used both in prisons and in the Royal Air Force since at least the 1920s. In
modern usage, it is usually a general term of contempt rather than a commentary on
sexual habits. The sign language for it is to curl the fingers of the hand into a
loose fist and move the hand back and forth to mime male masturbation, usually to an
audience out of hearing range, which is equivalent to saying, ‘You're a wanker.'