How the jailbird got its stripes

19 February 2017 - 02:00 By Sue de Groot
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Sue de Groot
Sue de Groot
Image: Supplied

Believe it or not, fake news (or alternative facts, or post-truth, or whatever you want to call it) was not invented in the Trump era. It is as old as that woman who claimed a snake made her do it.

Some of the words we use today are the result of false news reports. "Jailbird", according to some etymological sites, came into use after England's King Edward I hung cages containing women supporters of his dethroned enemy, Robert the Bruce, outside a castle.

One of the imprisoned women was young Marjorie Bruce, princess of Scotland and no more than a child at the time. The young adult novel Girl in a Cage is about her.

This happened in the early 1300s and many claim that the word "jailbird" (originally "gaolbird") was coined as a result.

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Thing is, the ladies were never hung outside in cages. Myth-busting polymath David Maclaine (who has an excellent blog on Wordpress) investigated and found that the king's orders were to build fairly roomy cages inside a turret in the castle.

Were it not for this exaggerated piece of reporting, we might have ended up calling prisoners jailhedgehogs or jailhamsters. So perhaps fake news is not always a bad thing.

Jailbirds themselves have developed an extensive vocabulary. Prison is referred to by those on the inside as "the cage", but there are many more obscure terms.

A few weeks ago we looked at the word "beef" in relation to squabbles between rap stars. (Read the column.) In prison, however, a beef is a criminal charge. The site Prisontalk.com gives this example: "I caught a burglary beef this time around." Then there is a "bum beef", which is not a juicy piece of rump but a false accusation or wrongful conviction.

Prisontalk is an American site that decodes cellmate lingo. Prisoners in the UK have a language all their own. According to the Guardian's Criminal Alphabet, a popular insult in British prisons is to accuse someone of having "budgie syndrome".

This is used to describe prisoners who spend all their time building muscles in the prison gym while admiring their pecs in the full-length mirrors (the way a budgie in a cage pecks obsessively at its little round mirror). I didn't know prisons had gyms with full-length mirrors. I must be watching the wrong TV shows.

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In both British and American prisons a "fish" is a newcomer who has not been to prison before and is somewhat out of his natural element. In all prisons a "quack" is a prison doctor, or rather a prison officer who dispenses medicine but is not in fact a real doctor.

The Guardian book lists the origin of "quack" (which spread from prison to the outside world) as the Afrikaans kwaksalwer. The Online Etymology Dictionary takes this back to the Dutch kwakzalver, which literally meant "a hawker of salve" and referred to a medical charlatan from about the 1630s.

A US website called Prison Writers (which provides a publishing service for prisoners of literary bent) also has a prison slang glossary. On its list is "duck", which is apparently a gullible prison guard who is easily manipulated by his charges. Perhaps ducks and quacks work hand in glove.

Speaking of gloves, Cockney rhyming slang comes into its own in the British penal system. Gloves, in the argot, are "turtles" (turtle doves = gloves). If you are going to commit a crime, always wear a pair of turtles so you don't leave fingerprints and end up as a fish with budgie syndrome.

E-mail your observations on words and language to Sue de Groot on degroots@sundaytimes.co.za or follow her on Twitter: @deGrootS1

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