Cushty, Prat, Cowson… and Other British Terms I Can No Longer Say in America

As an Englishman who moved to the US in 2006 and became a citizen a few years later, I have been through various stages of homesickness. There are the obvious forms—the absence of friends, family and places. For a while, I gravely missed pubs and British beer, but now America brews arguably better ales than my homeland.

I used to miss watching cricket—but there’s an app for that now. I once pined for the ease of taking long walks thanks to Britain’s vast, intricate network of public footpaths. Then I bought a house near the Shawangunk Mountains in New York’s Hudson Valley, where miles of trails have sated my yearning.

Recently, however, I’ve developed a new strain of homesickness. I’ve started to miss the language of my youth. You might be thinking: “I’m fairly sure English is spoken on both sides of the pond.”

But that’s not entirely true.

I’m referring to the aphorism—often misattributed to Winston Churchill—that the UK and US are two nations separated by a common language. There exists a slew of words and phrases I cannot use in the presence of most Americans. Or at least, not if I want to be understood.

That’s partly why, in my first two novels, Black Chalk and Grist Mill Road, I made not a single mention of the place in England where I was raised—the Medway Towns, situated 30 miles southeast of London. And none of my characters hailed from the area. There was a time when I couldn’t wait to escape from my hometown. But, as my age has crept up, nostalgia has crept in.

By the time I wrote my third novel, The Rabbit Club, I felt the irresistible urge to create a character who hailed from my part of the world, someone who used the words I grew up hearing. So I invented aging British rockstar, Gerry McCain, lead singer/hellraiser of The Pale Fires.

Gerry “Gel” McCain comes from the largest of the Medway Towns, Chatham, which locals pronounce almost like a single syllable, Chah’em. He’s an approximate cross between Ozzy Osbourne and Mick Jagger. (Jagger hails from Dartford, 20 miles up the road from where I was raised.)

Gel McCain calls everyone son or sunshine and speaks in a mixture of cockney rhyming slang and other dialectical words that have almost fallen out of use, words like jacksie, for example, meaning ass (anatomically speaking); he calls other men geezers; instead of nothing and perfect, Gel says nuffink and perfick.

I am one of those writers who hear voices in their heads, my characters speaking to me, each with their own distinctive accents and speech patterns. Also, I don’t like to plan my plots too heavily in advance, much preferring to “tune in” to those voices, waiting to see where they choose to take me; or each other, sometimes, as a result of unexpected directions their conversations take while I’m listening in.

As soon as I created Gel, he started rabbiting away to me. (Rabbiting is absolutely a word Gel would use. See below for its meaning if you’re not able to guess it from the context.)

I didn’t need to research how Gel spoke because unleashing him on my imagination opened the floodgates and my memory became quickly filled with words, phrases and speech patterns I haven’t heard for decades. Most of my family moved away from the Medway Towns years ago, meaning that I haven’t spent any time there for a considerable number of years.

But clearly I’ve been carrying the area’s argot with me, buried deep inside my neural networks. Gerry was so delightful to listen to (for me, at least) that I already know I want to somehow shoehorn him into a future novel.

Even on the eve of The Rabbit Club’s publication, I still hear my rockstar speaking both to me and other people. I keep a file on my computer filled with the new lines he’s been planting in my mind, more words and phrases that belong to a distant country, a bygone age. It seems my sense of nostalgia has not yet been sated.

The main character in The Rabbit Club is Gel’s third (acknowledged) son, Ali/Alistair, who grew up in California, where his mother moved after Gel abandoned them both. Ali leaves his homeland to study English Literature at Oxford, partly because he hopes to reconnect with his father. But it’s not only his father who seems to speak a different language, it’s everyone in Britain. Ali spends a good chunk of time confused by the strange words whirling around him.

Below I’ve listed a number of such words and phrases, all of them guaranteed to confuse most Americans. Perhaps readers would be good enough to memorize them. And then one day, if you bump into me in a bar, we can have a good old—chinwag!

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Chinwag: A gloriously evocative word for a chat.

Rabbit: Given the name of my novel, it would have been remiss of me not to deploy this slang word above or include it here. It means talk. For instance, if you’re discussing a man who speaks too much, you could say: “He never stops rabbiting on!”

Cowson: A very 1970s British insult, suggesting that someone is the son of a heifer.

Heifer: another insult, implying that someone is the size of a cow.

Glasgow kiss: A humorous description of a headbutt! Californian Ali gets tripped up by this one on his first night in Oxford, assuming it’s something romantic.

Leave it out: Nothing to do with an omission. The American version of leave it out would be: “get outta here.”

Pavarotti: A ten-pound banknote. Pause a moment and see if you can work out why… It’s because ten pounds is known as a tenner! Sounds like tenor, right?

Brolly: A very British word for a vital everyday carry in Britain—an umbrella.

Cushty: All good, excellent. If a Brit asks you how you’re doing, feel free to respond: “Cushty, mate!”

Scooby: The following dialogue from The Rabbit Club explains this. It begins with Gel McCain talking about his soundproofed cinema room: “I could chop you up with a chainsaw down here. No one’d have a Scooby!”

“What’s a Scooby?” said Ali.

“Scooby Doo, rhymes with clue. Keep up, son!”

Prat: A prat is an idiot. In the novel, an aristocrat’s daughter, Beatrice Orpington-Brice, who goes by the name “Bob” (her initials) is dissing her cousin William: “He’s always been a spiteful little prat!”

Knackered: Exhausted. Or, if you want to show off your cockney rhyming slang skills, instead of saying you’re tired, you could say: “I’m cream-crackered!”

Moreish: I don’t understand why Americans haven’t adopted this wonderful word. If something is moreish, it’s addictive, you want more of it. It’s usually used to describe food. “This truffle popcorn is incredibly moreish.”

Chuffed: Happy and proud. “She was chuffed with herself for winning the Pulitzer.”

Muppet: If a Brit calls you a muppet, they’re not saying you’re as cute as Elmo, or a diva of Miss Piggy proportions. They’re calling you a buffoon!

Tanked: Just as the Sámi people have many words for snow, the Brits have a heap of words for drunkenness: turnt, squiffy, hammered, pissed, trolleyed, wankered, mullered, rat-arsed, arseholed, blootered… It’s even claimed there exist five hundred and forty-six “drunkonyms” in the UK.

As an elderly rockstar, Gerry has mended his ways. No more illegitimate children, no more hellraising or drug-taking, and a stable marriage to his seventh wife, a Brazilian. He has, however, retained one vice: “Arantxa, babes, you gotta give me the sauce. I’m now ninety-nine percent eunuch, love. And that’s okay, as long as I’m tanked up half the time.”

And if you don’t believe Britain has a more fearsome drinking culture than the US, I have four words for you. Leave it out, mate.

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The Rabbit Club by Christopher J. Yates is available via Hanover Square Press.