Writers' "sneaking through" of dubious items

[silenus]

@Colibri

I find it impossible to believe that a British writer like Adams was unaware of the significance of “wog,” and used it unaware of its meaning, especially since the canine was supposed to be from the East. (However, in his autobiography Days Gone By he refers to his trying to stop British soldiers in Palestine from calling the Arab laborers "wog bastards.)

As the old English saying went - “wogs” begin at Calais.

[CalMeacham]

@Sangahyando

According to one explanation (probably nonsense), the word “wog” originated as an acronym of “wily oriental gentleman” – which could be seen as quite complimentary, in its way !

I’ve heard “Westernized Oriental Gentleman”. I assume that this, like most acronym-based “explanations” of word origins (COP, POSH, FUCK) is a later rationalization.

I’ve assumed that “wog” is back-derived from “golliwogg”

Golliwog

The golliwog, golliwogg or golly is a black fictional character created by Florence Kate Upton that appears in children’s books in the late 19th century and usually depicted as a type of rag doll. It was reproduced, both by commercial and hobby toy-makers as a children’s toy called the “golliwog”, and had great popularity in the UK and Australia into the 1970s. The doll is characterised by black skin, eyes rimmed in white, red lips and frizzy hair. Though home-made golliwogs were sometimes female, the golliwog was generally male. For this reason, in the period following World War II, the golliwog was seen, along with the teddy bear, as a suitable soft toy for a young boy.

The image of the doll has become the subject of controversy. Whilst some people see the doll as an innocuous toy,[1] its depiction of African people is characterised as racist,[1] along with pickaninnies, minstrels, mammy figures, and other caricatures. The golliwog has been described by the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia as “the least known of the major anti-Black caricatures in the United States”

the first use of that is 1895. The book and character were immensely popular in Britain, so “golliwogg” would be VERY well-known.

https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/golliwog/

The first use of “wog” in its derogatory sense is listed as 1929, which would’ve given time for the term to derive from “Golliwogg”

Wog

(This page notes that many sources agree with my derivation from golliwogg)

as for “golliwogg” itself, Florence Kate Upton clearly made that up herself, but I strong suspect it came from polliwog, the term for an immature from or tadpole.* It might have been meant as a sort of term of endearment, ironically.

*The name means “wiggling head”. “Tadpole” comes from “toad head”. Both suggest that the creature is basically just the head of what will become the mature frog or toad.

[Colibri]

@Sangahyando

I think you and I have exchanged opinions on this point before. I tend toward the view that in the first novel of the series, Flashman is extremely young – IIRC, he’s just short of twenty years old when he gets his Army commission and is sent east. It’s well-known that the very young human male is liable to be pretty obnoxious, even if in most cases he stays on the right side of rape, and violence toward women. I incline to see the changes as the series goes on: as organic, rather than made by the author for a purpose. IMO Flashy remains as wicked as ever – but as he gets older, his ability for self-control increases; and / or his skills improve, for hiding his bent for evil from people who he would have think well of him (he can still frequently be violent to helpless underlings and menials). No more rape by him, it’s true – but that can be ascribed to his deciding that it’s really not all that much fun (the business is more agreeable with the woman’s consent), and can have unpleasant consequences for the perpetrator.

He’s 17 when he beats his father’s mistress. He’s 20 at the end of the first volume and at the start of the next one, Royal Flash. The first five volumes are more or less sequential but after that they jump around wildly in time. It’s been a long time since I read them, but I think the transformation occurs between the first and second volumes, rather than as a gradual mellowing with age. (This said, by the time of the last story, set in his seventies, he seems almost benign. But that’s also one of the last volumes.)

[Kimstu]

@Colibri

I find it impossible to believe that a British writer like Adams was unaware of the significance of “wog,” and used it unaware of its meaning

I didn’t suggest either of those things: in fact, I explicitly mentioned that “maybe Adams considered the syllable ‘wog’ to sound extra ludicrous because of its familiarity as a term of disparagement”. I’m just not convinced that he really meant the name “Wogdog” to be read as “the dog who’s a wog”, rather than as a generic “doggy”-sounding epithet.

[Colibri]

@Kimstu

I didn’t suggest either of those things: in fact, I explicitly mentioned that “maybe Adams considered the syllable ‘wog’ to sound extra ludicrous because of its familiarity as a term of disparagement”. I’m just not convinced that he really meant the name “Wogdog” to be read as “the dog who’s a wog”, rather than as a generic “doggy”-sounding epithet.

As has been said, this isn’t really tenable considering the character’s origin in the East:

“Oh, Fairy Wogdog!’ cried Rowsby Woof, dribbling and piddling all over the gravel. 'Ah, what elegance! What aristocratic distinction! Can that really be decayed cat that I smell? With a delicate overtone of rotten camel! Ah, the gorgeous East!”

[Sangahyando]

@Colibri

As has been said, this isn’t really tenable considering the character’s origin in the East:

" ‘Oh, Fairy Wogdog !’ cried Rowsby Woof, dribbling and piddling all over the gravel. ‘Ah, what elegance ! What aristocratic distinction ! Can that really be decayed cat that I smell? With a delicate overtone of rotten camel ! Ah, the gorgeous East !’ "
Not relevant to this thread – but, speaking as a WD addict who clearly ought to get out more, I love the bit that follows:

" ‘What on earth’s “camel”?’ Bigwig interrupted.

‘I’ve got no idea,’ replied Dandelion, ‘but it was in the story when I heard it. I suppose it must be some kind of creature.’ "

[Yodalicious]

Animaniacs fingerprints/finger Prince.

[Sangahyando]

@GreysonCarlisle

Click the QuotePlus button for every post except the last that you want to multiquote. For the last item, click the regular Quote button.

Thanks !

@CalMeacham

as for “golliwogg” itself, Florence Kate Upton clearly made that up herself, but I strong suspect it came from polliwog, the term for an immature from or tadpole.* It might have been meant as a sort of term of endearment, ironically.

*The name means “wiggling head”. “Tadpole” comes from “toad head”. Both suggest that the creature is basically just the head of what will become the mature frog or toad.

Going off at a tangent, if you’ll forgive me, re “polliwog” (kind-of returning to fiction with a nautical / martial background) – I’ve encountered “polliwog” used in the sense of the “Crossing the Line” ceremony beloved of ships’ crews: when the ship crosses the Equator, everyone on board who has not previously travelled across same, is subjected to various rather humiliating antics at the hands of King Neptune and his court. Such a “first-crossing” victim is called, by the old hands, a “polliwog”: logical enough, I suppose – their undergoing the ceremony, matches a tadpole’s metamorphosis into a frog.

(Will admit that I have mostly come across this usage, in novels by Harry Turtledove in his “TL191” or “Southern Victory” AH series – Confederacy wins the Civil War and secedes in 1862, whence a century of North American history which is pretty nasty compared to what took place in reality. Various episodes on naval vessels, involved. Have to wonder just slightly, whether this “polliwog” use is all an invention of Harry’s, peculiar to just this novel series.)

@Colibri

He’s 17 when he beats his father’s mistress. He’s 20 at the end of the first volume and at the start of the next one, Royal Flash. The first five volumes are more or less sequential but after that they jump around wildly in time. It’s been a long time since I read them, but I think the transformation occurs between the first and second volumes, rather than as a gradual mellowing with age. (This said, by the time of the last story, set in his seventies, he seems almost benign. But that’s also one of the last volumes.)

(Thinks – if at university I had studied serious literature as was supposed to be doing, and absorbed it as successfully as I seem to do with crap about rabbits, and Victorian villains: I’d have got a decent degree and enjoyed far greater earning power, than was actually the case in my working life :o .)

Agreed, the first five volumes are basically sequential; but except for the first few chapters of Royal Flash, his age is from 25 in 1847, to 36 in 1858. I’m prepared to “buy” that he grows up, and acquires some self-mastery, significantly during his early twenties.

I really like the final glimpse of Flashy, in the IMO otherwise mostly awful Mr. American. In conversation with the American hero: the nonagenarian General Flashman – in his last months of life, but as sharp, malicious, and immoral / amoral as ever – discourses on the utter stupidity of the recently-commenced First World War, and advances the view that by far the most sensible and least painful thing that Belgium could do in the situation obtaining, would be to yield and comply to the German armies marching through it: a brief and mild-ish ordeal, preferable to years of war hellish in one way or another.

[Slow_Moving_Vehicle]

@Colibri

He’s 17 when he beats his father’s mistress. He’s 20 at the end of the first volume and at the start of the next one, Royal Flash. The first five volumes are more or less sequential but after that they jump around wildly in time. It’s been a long time since I read them, but I think the transformation occurs between the first and second volumes, rather than as a gradual mellowing with age. (This said, by the time of the last story, set in his seventies, he seems almost benign. But that’s also one of the last volumes.)

He’s also softened by his real love for his wife, Elizabeth. Doesn’t stop him from attempting the “Flashman cross-buttocking” on every attractive woman he sees. But his affection for and devotion for her becomes very evident throughout the series.

@Sangahyando

(I’ve forgotten how the multi-quote function works. Could some kind person please remind me?)

The “getting stuff past” re Flashman and Fraser, I see mainly as a “quarantining” ploy, rather than – in this case – doing it by stealth: as we concur, I think, Flashy’s assholery is on a huge and flamboyant scale, and from him, thus, “anything goes” because there’s agreement throughout – including from him – that he’s a monster. One example: the N-word is used very copiously in the books, and is present there today – hard to imagine any other kind of circumstance, in which many would not be outraged and clamour for its removal. I’ve not heard of anyone of a liberal and progressive turn of mind, being upset by this word’s occurring thus in “Flashman” – maybe that happens, but with me being unaware.
Colibri writes: “Even so, Fraser softened Flashman a good deal from the first book. He was utterly nasty in that one, for example attempting to rape and beating his father’s mistress when she wouldn’t give him another go after an initial romp. I think Fraser came to realise he couldn’t have his antihero be quite so hateful if he was going to sustain a series. In the latter books he’s still an asshole but not so much a sadist.”

I think you and I have exchanged opinions on this point before. I tend toward the view that in the first novel of the series, Flashman is extremely young – IIRC, he’s just short of twenty years old when he gets his Army commission and is sent east. It’s well-known that the very young human male is liable to be pretty obnoxious, even if in most cases he stays on the right side of rape, and violence toward women. I incline to see the changes as the series goes on: as organic, rather than made by the author for a purpose. IMO Flashy remains as wicked as ever – but as he gets older, his ability for self-control increases; and / or his skills improve, for hiding his bent for evil from people who he would have think well of him (he can still frequently be violent to helpless underlings and menials). No more rape by him, it’s true – but that can be ascribed to his deciding that it’s really not all that much fun (the business is more agreeable with the woman’s consent), and can have unpleasant consequences for the perpetrator.

He also owed his life to a rape he didn’t commit; in Flashman and the Redskins (speaking of things that wouldn’t fly anymore), he refuses to rape a captured Apache woman.* Later, when the group of white buffalo hunters he’s reluctantly traveling with is captured by the vengeful Apaches, the woman has his life spared while all his companions are slaughtered horribly.

*Of course, he does seduce her. He’s Flashy, after all.

[Voyager]

I snuck one through myself. For my column in a computer design magazine, I did the what if famous writers wrote the Windows manual bit. The first was Jake Barnes and Lady Brett installing Windows. The last sentence noted that Jake still felt something missing.
The English major editors got it, I think, but no one else seemed to notice.
If you don’t get it, read “The Sun Also Rises.”

[GreysonCarlisle]

@Yodalicious

Animaniacs fingerprints/finger Prince.

First thing I thought of!

[kenobi_65]

In the first Avengers film, when Black Widow is interrogating the captive Loki on board the Helicarrier, he calls her a “mewling quim.” As most of the audience (and, presumably, the censors) weren’t familiar with the archaic term, he essentially gets away with calling her a “whining cunt.”

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Lamoral

They’re probably only “hidden” to modern audiences because of the arcane language. Shakespeare’s contemporaries probably would have understood most of them.

Yeah. And we’re supposed to get these modern examples.

Or at least the hip would.

Groucho appeared as S. Quentin Quale in Go West. The name derives from San Quentin Quail, slang for underage girls that could get one sent to jail.

I don’t even want to think about the connotations involved in naming Ward Cleaver’s son Beaver Cleaver.

[RealityChuck]

@Sangahyando

(Will admit that I have mostly come across this usage, in novels by Harry Turtledove in his “TL191” or “Southern Victory” AH series – Confederacy wins the Civil War and secedes in 1862, whence a century of North American history which is pretty nasty compared to what took place in reality. Various episodes on naval vessels, involved. Have to wonder just slightly, whether this “polliwog” use is all an invention of Harry’s, peculiar to just this novel series.)

It’s not. I saw it being portrayed on TV in the 60s and it looks like the ceremony dates back to the 19th century in the US Navy.

[Dr.Strangelove]

I read Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon–ostensibly a children’s fantasy novel–a long time ago, and had the vague recollection that it used the euphemism of “placing an iron in the forge” for sex.

Well, I looked it up–and my recollection was correct, but there was nothing remotely sneaky about it. The character is standing there naked and calls his penis the iron. Not gonna fool too many elementary school librarians with that one…

[silenus]

@kenobi_65

In the first Avengers film, when Black Widow is interrogating the captive Loki on board the Helicarrier, he calls her a “mewling quim.” As most of the audience (and, presumably, the censors) weren’t familiar with the archaic term, he essentially gets away with calling her a “whining cunt.”

Word of God is that they caught it, gave Joss a stern talking to, and let him keep it in the film anyway.