[Ads-l] Query: Slang "insect promenade"

[Robin Hamilton]

I think "bed" it has to be, via "bugwalk", as Jesse and Douglas suggest.

I'd initially read the poem with the narrator closing his eyes with delight as
the toff whom he has just knocked down is arrested by a passing policeman,.  A
more plausible reading would be that the narrator sees the toff arrested, *then*
goes off to close his mince pies as he sinks back into the comfort of his insect
parade.  

Farmer's gloss of "slop" as "policeman" can be derived via rhyming "slop" with
"cop".

["Cop", originally specifically USAmerican, is recorded as Cant for a policeman
since 1859, with "copper" in this sense appearing earlier in 1838 [GDoS], but
the slop/cop link in the poem may be a nonce usage.]

For what it's worth, a sequence of dates would read as follows:

          1890    Vol. 1 of _Slang and Its Analogues_ published (including the
entry for "bugwalk")

          1892    Marshall poem published in the _Sporting Times_, as by "Doss
Chiderdoss".

          1896 _Musa Pedestris_ published

          1897    A.R.Marshall publishes, under his own name,  _"Pomes" from the
Pink 'un_ (too late, even if the poem is reprinted there, to serve as a source
for _Musa Pedestris_, but Farmer does cite it on occasion in the later volumes
of _Slang_)

________________________

                 Backchannel comment by Jonathon Green:

"I have no simple answer, but fwiw I would draw your attention to the
contemporary dandy (much teased by the Pink 'Un') and his obligatory of uniform
of toothpick and crutch (handled stick).

Thus the pleasing music hall ditty remembered in a Pink Un memoir:

c1885 Nelly Power in Booth Pink Parade (1933) 145: How d’you like the La di Da,
the toothpick and the crutch? / How did you get those trousers on, and did they
hurt you much?


In other words, their trousers had to be very, very tight and legs optimally
thin. Resembling, I suggest, those of insects."

__________________________

A further interpretative conundrum in the previous stanza III:   

         But I fired him out of the Rory quick

Huh???  Again, no gloss in Farmer.  The closest would seem to be "Rory
(O'Moore)" = floor (GDoS) -- i.e. the speaker knocks the toff to the
floor/ground.  

Caveat Emptor:  Some of the Web transcriptions of the poem as given in _Musa
Pedestris_are unreliable (as e.g.
http://www.fromoldbooks.org/Farmer-MusaPedestris/the-rhyme-of-the-rusher.html,
which has a comma after "peaceful beat", and mistranscribes "Rory" as "Roiy").  

Facsimile here:
 https://archive.org/stream/musapedestristh00farmgoog#page/n204/mode/2up 

                        -- Robin Hamilton

> 
>     On 20 January 2017 at 16:48 ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
> wrote:
> 
> 
>     Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>     > I suppose that "insect promenade" = "bug walk" (in Farmer & Henley etc.)
>     > =
>     > "bed".
> 
>     Excellent solution! The author was closing his two eyes while in bed.
>     Garson
> 
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