From the London Times:

You calling my egg racist?



by philip howard

Denham, Home Office Minister, is speaking: “To get down to the nitty-gritty . . .”

Chris Jefford, Metropolitan Police constable, interrupts him from the floor: “That phrase is banned. If I used it, I would face a discipline charge.”

The police apparently believe that “nitty-gritty” refers to the debris left at the bottom of a slave ship after a voyage. That is, pullulating mounds of lice and eggs of lice. That is deemed to be offensive to the descendants of slaves. To which the only possible reply is: “Pull the other one, Flatfoot: it’s got lice on.”

This is not just politically correct nonsense. It is politically moronic nonsense with stilts on. Mastery of the English language may not be the most important qualification for our police force. Few policemen, apart from fictional ones such as Adam Dalgleish and Roderick Alleyn, have been much good at English. But somebody in Scotland Yard must have access to a good dictionary. Westminster Library is just across the street. Let us try to help them, if anybody there reads the papers.

“Nitty-gritty” is one of a huge number of rhyming jingles that occur particularly in English and other Germanic languages. They proliferate in our oldest literature, such as Chaucer and “Piers Plowman”. Linguists call them reduplicative words, and the propensity of English to create them “reduplication”. Others call them ricochet words or Siamese-twin words.

Scholars categorise them into groups, such as “onomatopoeic” (bow-wow), “contrived” (Handy-Andy), “intentional” (gruesome twosome), and “accidental” (picnic). The first appearance of “nitty-gritty” in print was in Time magazine in August 1963: “The Negroes present would know perfectly well that the nitty-gritty of a situation is the essentials of it.”

It bubbled to the surface in the States in the Sixties as part of the new groovyspea, such as “right on”. Cautious lexicographers describe its etymology as “unknown”. Less cautious ones opine: “US Negro origin. Semantics obscure, but probably referring to unpleasant (‘gritty’) but basic realities.” In reduplicatives, one half is the semantic driver, the other half is the jingle-jangler. Stuart Flexner in I Hear America Singing (Princeton, 1976) attributes the phrase to the black militants of the 1960s, and the prevalence of “grit-like nits”.

The origin of slang, like the origin of nits, is seldom capable of proof. But new slang passes by word of mouth for only a very short period before somebody writes it down or otherwise records it.

It is inconceivable that the phrase “nitty-gritty” lay dormant in Black American for a century after the last slave ship sailed without somebody like Harriet Beecher Stowe writing it down. If you insist on an origin, the best bet is that the “gritty” is the leading half of the reduplication, and the “nitty” is the jingle. The phrase had a great vogue in American and among those in British business and managerial circles who were keen to appear “right-on” and groovy. It became a thundering cliché. And died of shame. It is now very vieux jeu and used only jocularly.

To assert that “nitty-gritty” is racist is as moronic as saying that “niggardly” is an insult to black people. It is namby-pamby, niminy-piminy, airy-fairy mumbo jumbo.

As for the police ban on the phrase “good egg”, because of its supposed rhyming slang association with “egg and spoon”/coon, words fail us. The murderer of Macduff’s son in Macbeth cries: “What you egg! Young fry of treachery!” Bishops and curates were fussing about bad eggs being good in parts a century ago. “Good egg” became popular slang at Oxford University while P.G. Wodehouse was up there. Hence the proliferation of good eggs, beans and crumpets in the Master’s work.

We cannot allow the English language to be kidnapped by ignoramuses in the race relations industry or wimps among Chief Police Officer Plods. Of course, it behoves us all, including the police, to use sensitive language and not to cause offence.

The Behove is a very rare beast. Some say it is a mythical creature. The fault, dear police constable, lies not in our vocabulary, but in our canteen culture.