Argot of Addicts from the 1930s

The tree is up and lit, the presents neatly wrapped. Lights are glistening from the mantlepiece and a faint smell of Holiday greens wafts through my house. The kids will come soon, and I can hardly wait to see them. But I have a confession to make. All this attention to the wholesome side of life has just been too much for me. So, I found myself returning to insult words and, through insult words, to the subject of today. I don't recall precisely when it was that I decided to plunge into the historical language of drug addicts, but I found an article from 1938 in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology ("Argot of the Underworld Drug Addict") by Prof. Alfred Lindesmith, and that stimulated my interest. The purpose of this and the next essay, then, is to bring you into the evolution of some words and phrases which had their original home in the "drug underworld," some of which also have morphed into mainstream culture.

Getting our Bearings

Before providing us with a lexicon of 1930s-style drug addict terminology, a terminology which he attests was checked and cross-checked "with addicts for authenticity and correct definition," Prof. Lindesmith describes the early evolution of drug addict terminology. It arose in the United States after the Civil War. The impetus for its development was the ready availability of opium, brought to the States by Chinese workers, who themselves had become addicted to opium in China through the wiles of the British. The smoking of opium remained relatively unchecked in the US until the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. That law regulated the production, distribution, importation and use of opiates, and thereby drove its use underground. In addition, since smoking opium was much more easily detectable than ingesting or injecting it, other modes of taking it in developed. These additional modes of consumption led to a development in "addict argot," as we will see below. The most evident change was from use of the word "pipe-fiend" to describe a drug addict to "dope-fiend." I bet you didn't know that. In any case, let's see how some words evolved and were used.

A Yen--for More than Pasta

We need to begin with the word "yen." We use the word all the time, but if we knew its history, we might not do so. Lindesmith's 1938 article simply defines it as "the desire for narcotics." The phrase "to get one's yen off" meant to obtain relief from the "withdrawal illness" by using narcotics again. The OED tells us that the most likely origin of the term is from the Cantonese yan, meaning "a craving." It was first attested as a verb in English in 1876: "Chinamen ask if an opium-smoker has the yin or not; meaning thereby, has he gradually increased his dose of opium until he established a craving for the drug." The word could also be spelled "ying," as in this 1922 quotation: "When 'the black candle' is ready for lighting and the smoker has the ying upon him..that is to say the made longing for indulgence--the procedure is..." Five years before he published his mini-lexicon, Prof. Lindesmith described the word "yen" as follows: "The drug user does not ordinarily find that his efforts to explain what he means by 'yen' (which signifies both withdrawal symptoms and desire for opiates) are very successful." By the 1920s, the word "yen" was also used as a noun to mean opium: "[Servant enters with..opium..] Here's the yen!"

Already in the first decade of the last century, however, the verb "yen" expanded its meaning to mean any kind of craving, yearning or longing. From 1906: "He had a yen to gamble and bet high." Or, from 1928: "The kid..had a burning yen for champagne and poker." A Google search yielded more than 40,000 hits for the phrase "have a yen for" on the Net. A brief survey of some of them shows that almost all of us use "yen" in this expanded meaning. We have yens for "drive-time discussions," for "anything from gambling to horticulture," for "victories," or for "something drenched in chocolate or caramel." Perhaps our unconscious adaptation of the word "yen" to describe almost anything which we crave is a tacit recognition of the addictive potential in all of us. We are creatures who yearn, who long, who crave, who desire. Even the title of my first book was Longing for God (1993).

A variety of other "yen"-related terms are attested by Lindesmith from the 1930s. A "yen-hock" was a large needle used to prepare opium for smoking, while "yenshee" was the residue or ash which forms inside the bowl when opium is smoked. Apparently the smoking of opium frequently causes constipation (believe me, I just learned that today!); thus the term "yenshee baby" meant "a difficult bowel movement after a period of constipation caused by the drug." I guess that you are not being cute if you call your date your "yenshee baby." Let's finish this essay by providing terms used to describe addicts.

Junkers, et al.

Well, once you have yielded to your "yen" for opium, what do you become? The "underground" world of drug addicts 70 years ago had words for you. You could be a pipe-fiend, dope-fiend, junker, gowster (the sound "gow" was another Chinese sound that relateed to opium), hop-head, smecker, user, gow-head, cookie, dope-hop and yenshee quay. As mentioned above, the "pipe-fiend" was the original term: "fiend appears to have been employed to designate the habituees almost from the very begining." Junker, meaning a drug user and not the Germanic soldier, was only first attested in 1922: "One must...be known as a 'junker' or addict to make the purchase."

Well, what would you do? You would "laugh and scratch," which meant that you would "use drugs." It was called "laughing and scratching" because large doses of drugs, especially if taken intravenously, caused an itching sensation. If you smoked opium you were laying on the hip or kicking the gong around, puffing or rolling the log."

Conlcusion

But my favorite phrases for injesting drugs, at least the drug of cocaine, were "hitching up the reindeers" and "to go on a sleigh ride." I wonder if they felt like Santa's helpers when they were doing this.

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