Censors and secret codes

[Page Stephens]

One of the ways people have gotten away with making culturally inappropriate
comments has been to disguise them by quoting the last line of jokes. Thus
at an early age I learned such sentences and phrases as "It's my day in the
barrel.", "smooth talking son of a bitch." and another phrase which means
the same thing "silver tongued devil".

They appeared to be fairly innocuous unless you knew the joke to which they
referred and as a result they would pass over most people's heads especially
those of women who were outside men's jpking circles.  Kris Kristofferson
even wrote a song entitled as I recall, "The Silver Tongued Devil and I",
and The Goon Show, a BBC comedy starring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and
Harry Secombe used this technique in order to get beyond the BBC censors as
per the time when Bluebottle is asked to go on a suicide mission in "The
Case of the Lone Banana" and opts out on the grounds that it is his day in
the barrel.

In a similar vein people would disguise their remarks by using obscure
references.

I happened to think of this last night when I was watching a biography of
Willie Nelson in which the director said he was amazed that Willie got away
with saying that he was going to go out with a girl who could suck the
chrome off a trailer hitch.

The most notorious example of a person who used this strategy was Dashiel
Hammet who once said that he would use a slang reference which was totally
innocent and then slip in a seemingly innocuous word which had an obscene
reference. I don't know where I read this so I would love to know if any of
you can find the reference. In any case his most notorious use of this
strategy ended up giving an entirely new meaning to the word "gunsel".

This word meant in the slang with which Hammett was familiar a "punk" or a
"queer". In The Maltese Falcon he used it for the wimpy Wilmer, the heavy
who carried not one but two guns at least in the movie. Thus, and I was one
of them, most of the movie goers assumed that it referred to a person who
carried guns and the new meaning took off.

In rodeo cowboy slang of the 1940s and 1950s btw a gunsel was a person who
was totally incompetent and who could not find his ass or saddle with both
hands.

Godfrey Daniel!

Page Stephens