The Criminal Alphabet (30 page)

Kappa slappa
is a mainly
northern term for a female of loose morals who will invariably be wearing a cheap
tracksuit or any other item of clothing by the sports clothing company Kappa. Kappa
clothing is considered the cheap and tacky end of ‘designer name' wear. It's a very
common term, particularly in the north-east.

Knobhead
, meaning
complete idiot, is a common insult in criminal and prison circles but has also come
into popular usage in some sections of straight society. If you clench your fist and
place it on your forehead, that is the ‘sign' for a knobhead.

A
knob jockey
is a
homosexual, the term fairly evidently taken from the action of riding a penis. It's
used frequently as an insult in prison, particularly in the Northern nicks.

A
knocker
or
Tilbury
is someone who does not pay their debts (rhyming slang:
Tilbury docker = knocker). Tilbury was once a thriving port with many huge container
ships, and the dock workers employed there were known as Tilbury dockers. ‘Knocker'
for someone who does not pay their debts comes from the game of dominoes, where a
player will knock on the board or table if they aren't able to take their go. If a
player knocks, they miss a go, and their opponent gets the chance to lay their
domino. If a
debtor misses a payment, particularly in prison, then
they become known as a knocker, but instead of missing a go they might be assaulted,
sometimes very seriously, as a ‘lesson' to pay their debts promptly. Once a prisoner
has a reputation as a knocker, no one will allow them to bet or gamble on anything,
which can be a problem, as gambling is a big part of life in British jails. Gambling
in prison is officially banned, but it is so endemic that prison staff find it
impossible to enforce this and usually turn a blind eye.

A
lag
is a convicted and
serving prisoner, from the nineteenth-century word meaning to steal and be caught,
as in ‘He's done about a twenty-stretch in shovel; he's an old lag now'.

See
Lag Boat

Having a
lag boat
means
having a tired, grey, haggard face, as though you had spent years in prison. It's a
combination of
lag
and the rhyming slang for ‘face' (‘boat
race').

As with the majority of slang words,
lemon
has more than one meaning. The first dates from the old
borstal
system. Fred Lemon was a confirmed criminal who served
many prison sentences before, apparently, meeting God Himself in HMP Dartmoor in the
early 1950s. He then dedicated his life to preaching the Gospel and wrote a book
about his experiences,
Breakout
. This book was heavily pushed on borstal
trainees by the chaplain's department as a sort of
‘guide to going
straight', and Fred's surname became slang for a
mug
, for someone
gullible, or someone who professed a belief in religion. If you were called a lemon
in borstal, it meant that you weren't very bright and you believed in fairy tales.
The second use in criminal slang is to describe the face people pull when they are
annoyed, that is, as though they have been sucking a lemon, as in ‘Don't get lemon
with me or I'll give you a smack in the jaw'. It's also slang for cocaine, or
charlie (lemon barley = charlie). These days, the most common use of ‘lemon' is the
second one, a facial indicator of displeasure.

At one time, back in the 1950s and
'
60s,
lolly
was used by criminals to describe
the loot or money they had stolen, but that use has now fallen out of favour. These
days, a lolly is someone who has been giving information to the police or prison
authorities (rhyming slang: lollipop = cop). To be called a lolly in the criminal or
prison world is a serious matter and can mean that your health and well-being is in
imminent danger.

See
Cat's arse
,
Grass
,
Midnight

Lucozade
is rhyming
slang for ‘spade', meaning a black person.

Between the First and Second World Wars
there was an influx of Maltese citizens into the UK, and many of them settled in
London. Crimes that the Maltese criminal was
particularly
attracted to were gambling and prostitution. Some Maltese criminals became pimps,
but were known as
ponces
, because what they were doing was seen as
poncing off women. Poncing was frowned upon by a lot of the more macho and violent
London criminals, so the Maltese were held in contempt by them. In the 1950s and
'60s
Malt
was an offensive word on a par with ‘nigger' or
‘Paki'.

If something or someone is considered
manky
it means it is or they are dirty or unwashed. The word is
believed to be a corruption of the Italian word
mancare
, meaning to be
lacking something (in this case, hygiene). It came into usage via Polari, the secret
language of homosexuals, in the 1950s.

Matey
is south-coast
slang (particularly in Portsmouth and Southampton) for any male whose name you don't
know, as in ‘I just about had the patio doors open when some matey stuck his head
over the fence and said he'd called Old Bill' or ‘I was minding my own business when
a couple of mateys jumped me'. The word has a naval connotation, which is probably
why it is more popular in coastal towns.

See
Mush

A
melt
is an idiot who
cannot be trusted – as thick as cow shit (cow's melt) and liable to
grass
you up at the earliest opportunity. Melts are to be
avoided for your own safety.
It's mainly a South London word,
though it is also widely used elsewhere.

Mickey Mouser
is mainly
used by Londoners for someone from Liverpool (rhyming slang: Mickey Mouser =
Scouser).

If someone accuses you of being a
midnight
, they are calling you a
grass
or an informer
(rhyming slang: midnight mass = grass). It's a word that was used a lot in the
1960s, and is also currently used in Irish prisons (where the prison population is
more religiously minded, and the accent works better).

See
Cat's Arse
,
Grass
,
Lolly

A very common insult meaning that someone
is not the brightest spark in the fuse box. It's a corruption of both ‘mongol',
which used to be used in connection with people who have Down's Syndrome, and
‘mongrel', meaning a mixed-breed dog, not a pedigree. The meaning of
mong
depends entirely on the context of its use.

See
Monged out

A
mug
is anyone who is
not a criminal and some people who are! Mugs are targets for criminals, and being a
mug generally means you'll get no respect from those who commit crime. The original
meaning of the word was ‘face',
because of the popularity of Toby
jugs, which featured short-bodied figures with over-large faces, but these days
boat
is more commonly used for ‘face', and ‘mug' has become a
person who doesn't deserve respect.

See
Toby

Once a commonly used casual insult in the
criminal world to describe anybody who was stupid or strange-looking, as in ‘That
fucking
muppet
forgot to cut the main wire to the alarm'. It has
fallen out of favour because it's now overused by straight-goers, having been
featured in director Guy Ritchie's mockney gangster films. Once a word comes into
common public use it usually falls out of the criminal lexicon. The original Muppets
were created by Jim Henson, who coined the word ‘muppet', a mix of ‘marionette' and
‘puppet'.

A
mush
, a Gypsy word for
a man, is any male person whose name you don't know, as in ‘I was just about to set
me jook on a hare and some mush pulled up in a jam jar' or ‘You know that mush with
the twin lurchers, him from Lonesome Depot?'. It can also, however, be used as slang
for the face, as in ‘I hit him right in the mush with a right hook'. It was very
common in the 1960s and '70s but has now rather fallen out of vogue except for
Travellers and Gypsy folk.

See
Matey

A
nark
is someone who
will get busy around your business in the hope of finding information about you
which they can sell to the police, so it's a paid police informer. The word comes
from the Romany word
nak
, meaning nose, so by extension it's a nosey
person. In America, the word is connected to the police narcotics (drugs) squads who
would harass hippies in the 1960s and go undercover on college campuses and at music
festivals in order to catch them using or dealing drugs.

A
numpty
is a complete
idiot. It's Scottish in origin but came into criminal usage via the many ex-armed
forces bods who take up crime or end up in prison for violence after they are
discharged. It's used not only by criminals and prisoners but also by the majority
of prison officers, a high proportion of whom are also ex-armed forces
personnel.

A
nut job
can be a
mentally ill prisoner, a seriously violent criminal or a method of execution. The
‘nut' is the head. In the first case, the word refers to the odd behaviour of
mentally ill prisoners – they are
nutters
,
or nut jobs. An active
criminal who is referred to as a nut job is someone who is very violent and willing
to commit violence for money, as in ‘I want this bloke taught a proper lesson – get
one of the local nut jobs to pay him a visit.' In the world of professional
assassins, a nut job is a bullet in the head. Once again, context is everything.

See
Double tap
,
Nut
nut

A
nut nut
is how young,
crazy people are described, meaning that there seems to be something wrong in their
heads. ‘Nut' being slang for head and also for being mad, a nut nut is someone who
is not right in the head.

See
Nut job

A
nutter
is somebody who
isn't quite right mentally but, in the context of prison, it can also be a very
violent or ferocious person, someone who will do anything and fight anyone just for
the fun of it.

See
Nut job

In criminal circles an
odd
mark
is somebody strange or not quite right, either because of
something to do with their appearance or the way they act. It comes from the world
of confidence tricksters and scam artists, who call their victims
marks
.

Were someone to call you a
paraffin
, they would be intimating that you are a
dosser
, or tramp, or someone scruffy and not very well dressed (rhyming
slang: paraffin lamp = tramp). It's a mild insult in criminal and prison
circles.

Pig
is an offensive word
for the police which was very widely used in the 1970s but isn't so much these days,
having been largely replaced by the more offensive ‘filth'. It was used a lot in
Northern Ireland during the Troubles, not only to describe the police (who are also
commonly known as
black bastards
, because they wear black uniforms)
but also for the Saracen armoured vehicle used by the police and the British
Army.

In the sixteenth century ‘pike' meant ‘to
go away from', as in ‘You had better pike or there will be trouble', and was
connected to the words ‘turnpike' (a toll road) and ‘pike-man' (the man who
collected the tolls). It is not until the publication in 1847 of J. O. Halliwell's
Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words
that
pikey
is applied to Gypsies. In general, a pikey was ‘a turnpike traveller; a vagabond;
and generally a low fellow'.
Pikey
in the twenty-first century is
usually used to describe any group of people or individuals who are deemed an
underclass of thieves, tramps or Travellers. Romany Gypsies use the word to describe
Irish Travellers and non-Roma Gypsies. It is classed as an insult to most people but
particularly to Roma Gypsies. In the criminal world, the word is used to describe
petty thieves and
ponces
in the lower reaches of the criminal
underworld. East London gang boss Ronnie Kray once described his South London rivals
the Richardson gang as ‘just a bunch of South London pikeys'.

See
Ponce

Pilchard
is old cockney
slang for someone who is not very bright, ‘not the full shilling', because pilchards
are classed as particularly stupid fish who will swim straight into a net in great
numbers.

To be labelled a
Plum
in
the old borstal system was to be a stupid person of very little importance. It
originally came from the
Beano
, in which there was an American Indian
character called Little Plum who was as thick as they come. Borstal boys usually
came in three categories:
chaps
, the top tier; saps,
run-of-the-mill middle dwellers; and plums, the victims at the bottom of the pecking
order.