1946 Police Slang

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi.

My name is Deborah Horn. I’m calling from Seattle, Washington.

All right. Well, welcome, Deborah. What can we do for you?

How are you doing?

Great. Well, I’m calling because for the last couple of years, maybe three years, I’ve been trying with my friends to decipher this police report that I found as I was looking through the historical records of the Tacoma, Washington Police Department.

And we’ve tried to figure it out, but we feel we’re stumped. So I wanted to ask what you think it means.

So you were at the station going through records for some purpose?

Yes, I’m a television reporter in Seattle, and I was there actually waiting to talk to the public information officer for the Tacoma Police Department.

And he was taking long enough that I actually had time to look through in the lobby of what I consider to be their brand new station. They have the history of the Tacoma Police Department.

And so they have some of the, they tell about the history, but they also have, which was more fascinating to me, some of the old police reports.

And as a reporter, and I’ve been a reporter a long time, I’ve seen a lot of police reports, but I’ve never seen one quite like this one.

Let’s hear it.

Now, this was written July 13th, 1946. And it says, this Jasper picked up a punk on the stem and took him topside of a flicker.

After a bit, he gave the boys pork a fumble. The boy didn’t think that was so hot, so he took it on the lam and made a beef to the boss.

I answered the call, and the boy fingered him at Tenth and Broadway. The manager has several beefs on this same bird and has the handle of the beefer.

So you and your friends have been trying to figure that one out, huh?

So what have you figured out so far?

Have you figured out some of it?

Well, we feel like we have.

I’ve talked to my coworkers who are journalists and some are editors and photographers, and it turns out all of us care about words.

And so some of them had some idea of what they thought it was.

So one of my coworkers said that he thought punk on the stem means that the person is gay.

He’s gay himself, and he said punk was a pejorative and that it was not a positive, and so it was used as a negative about people who are gay.

So whether that’s so, we don’t know.

And then Topside of a Flicker, the only thing we could think of there was that Flicker is a movie theater, and maybe Topside was in the balcony.

And then gave the boy’s pork a fumble where we think he touched him where he didn’t want to be touched.

And then the boy didn’t think that was so hot, so he took it on the lam.

Now, I always think, went on the lam, but I never thought of, took it on the lam.

But then we concluded that meant he ran away and made a beef to the boss.

Well, we got that, so we complained to the boss.

So the manager of the theater, right?

Presumably.

And then he says, I answered the call, and the boy fingered him.

Well, I’ve said that on television myself at 10th and Broadway,

So we know what that is.

And then the manager had several beefs on the same bird,

So we’re thinking he had several complaints on the same person.

And then has the handle of the beefer.

Well, that one was a bit baffling.

We didn’t know whether that was the handle we thought was named

Because we’ve used that.

And then, but is the beefer referring to the kid or to the bird?

I’m thinking maybe not, but we weren’t sure about that.

You’ve got almost all of it.

There’s a couple places where I would translate it differently.

This Jasper picked up a punk on the stem.

Jasper is a rube or a hick or somebody not from town.

And the punk probably just means a young kid.

It doesn’t necessarily have to mean a gay man.

And on the stem is old hobo language for on the main street or the main drag of the town.

So the stem is like the primary artery of whatever the city you’re in.

Oh, my goodness.

That was what we got hung up on, on the stem.

We couldn’t figure out what that was.

Let me do the whole thing for you if I would translate it, all right?

You’ve nailed so much of it.

Just all together, it would translate as this Rube picked up a kid on the main street of town and took him to the balcony of a movie house.

After a bit, he gave the boy’s crotch a feel.

The boy didn’t like it, so he took off and complained to the manager of the theater.

I answered the call, and the boy recognized the offender at 10th and Broadway.

The manager has several complaints about the same dude and has the name of the kid.

So in other words, the last part about the beafer, the handle of the beafer, he knows who the complaining kid is and therefore can tell the police, go talk to this kid if you want information about what this guy from out of town tried to do to him in the theater.

Oh, my goodness. That is amazing. Well, you know what made me so interested in this was, this was just, what, 66 years ago. And so, I mean, I know that language changes, obviously, is constantly evolving, constantly changing, and that we don’t say things that we said in the 50s now. But to have something that seemed so incomprehensible, at least on first reading, was what was so striking to us.

Well, you said something very important when you first spoke to us today.

And you said it’s so different from all the other police reports.

And you nailed it.

This is artificial language.

Nobody has ever written like this without a great deal of effort and trouble and kind of making a stunt out of it.

It’s a little bit of a performance.

Somebody said, I’m going to write this with all the slang that I know and really just pile it on, just spread it on thick.

Lots of icing on this cake, right?

And a few cherries and we’ll do rosettes and candles.

And we’ll put a bride and a groom up there too.

Yeah, sparklers, yeah.

Somebody really laid it on this police report.

Somebody was having a ball.

I’ll tell you, Debra, what it reminds me of most of all is when newspapers and magazines do reviews of slang dictionaries, and I’ve read a million of them, they often have as their very first paragraph something that looks very much like this where they try to horn in as many, just shovel them in there as many words as possible, and they come up with this really unnatural sounding, very dense, opaque passage.

And this looks exactly like that.

I’m 99% sure that this event probably happened, but the police report is probably not real.

Does that make sense?

That this isn’t the one that was actually put into the records.

It was one that somebody probably wrote and then pinned to the bulletin board, you know, above the desk.

Saying, hey, look at this.

And then they wrote the real report that they would go to the sergeant, you know, the duty sergeant.

Well, exactly, exactly.

Well, that’s so interesting.

I’ll have to ask them sometime.

Deborah, let us know what else you find out if you do, okay?

I absolutely will.

Thank you so much.

It’s been such fun having you decipher this for me.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling, Deborah.

Bye-bye.

What language have you come across that puzzles you?

You can ask us about it.

877-929-9673 is the number to call.