You dumb crud. What took you so long?

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

I'm quite excited to have found something out tonight, via A Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 1989, Ed. Paul Beale, Routledge. (From A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English by Eric Partridge, 8th ed. 1984), and prompted by various comments to look something up. Cos I should be working, so... *g* Anyway, I've noted this in the comment thread, but it's come up so often over the years, that I'm going to give it its own post.

It's about "crud", as used by Doyle in Man Without a Past. Most speculation I've seen over the years has been along the lines of its being an American word, adopted by Clemens in a script to help "Americanise" the show to sell to that market. Turns out, it's totally not... *g* Here's what the dictionary of slang tells me. (The names in brackets are references in the dictionary, just for accuracy of my quoting).

"1) 'Equals turd as an expression of contempt for another person. 'What a silly little crud Harry is!'" (Leechman)
Can.: since ca. 1930. Ex Can. (and US) dial., itself ex-English dial., crud, a survival from Middle English crudde.
Also, since late 1930s, common in Aus. (BP); and in Brit. Forces, esp. in the 1960s for 'second-rate, inferior, spoiled' (Towler, 1979).
2) Dried, spilt semen: low: adopted, ex US, mid-C20. (PB)"

So - it started out as a survival from old English, whizzed itself away around the various colonies, was adopted as British army slang in the 1960s - and I'd guess from there to Doyle... *g*

I do love words! And our lads! *g* Speaking of which... (From Bob Rocca's Pros book).

Comments

[msmoat.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's cool! Thanks for sharing this information. Ahh, reference books! *g*

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Isn't that so cool! And it makes total sense for Doyle - he would have grown up, post-WWII, surrounded by ex-army types, and then surrounded by blokes doing their national service, and eventually surrounded by ex-military types via CI5. Maybe he picked it up from Barry Martin... *g*

Love reference books - and especially dictionaries! *g*

[jessebee.livejournal.com]

Must get that reference book! *g* And ooo for that pic of Doyle, always like that one. Didn't MS once say somewhere that he didn't think of himself as sexy/a sex symbol? Not doing a very convincing job of that.... *g*

all roads lead to Bodie and Doyle...

[paris7am.livejournal.com]

I have been thinking about the question of “dumb crud” for a while, since it came up in another Reading Room discussion. Thank you for this new clarifying information! (And one of the definitions is about semen? what a surprise!) For some unknown reason, when I think "Dumb Crud,” I hear it being said by Charlie Brown, the Peanuts character. But I didn't know if he actually said it so I googled. It wasn’t Chuck, (Charlie Brown said “good grief”) BUT, proving it is a very small world, the 8th and 9th results are Pros stories!

Ama me Fideliter by Zoe and Nic
http://www.thecircuitarchive.com/tca/archive/14/amame.html
"Bodie took him back to his bedroom, but Charlie refused to lie down. ..... Soft brownnipples stood out on his almost hair free chest, and Ray reached out and ..... How was he ever going to put things right if the dumb crud wasn't even here?"

My Favourite Work of Art by Melanie Athene
http://www.thecircuitarchive.com/tca/cgi-bin/convert.cgi?filename=19/myfavourite.html&wraplen=75
"Plain brown paper, tied with a ratty bit of string. ... "Small chance of that, you dumb crud," I whispered, brushing a hand against the front of his trousers, rejoicing in the .... "Still looks spry enough to give Macklin a decent run," Charlie chipped in.”

Neither have anything to do with Charlie Brown, but somehow “dumb crud” has really worked its way into our stories… I don't really know what to make of it. I thought it was just my biased perception of the world that connected absolutely everything to Bodie and Doyle, but evidently not!

Here is my tl;dr story about crud… My mother would say “Oh Crud!”“only in the direst circumstances, when others (I gather) would have been swearing like a sailor. I distinctly remember a trip to the movies to see “Born Free” and my mother saying “Oh Crud!” about something the lions were doing, and trying to cover my eyes… It made a big impression on me! The only time she ever really swore was when she saw my nose ring for the first time when I was 14? and she said, “Oh Sh*t!” That was the only time…

[paris7am.livejournal.com]

Eta - Realizing that this may just be google analytics and algorithms... oh well, I prefer to keep my rosy view...

[unbelievable2.livejournal.com]

Really interesting, thank you! I too always thought it was an attempt at Americanisation (and a rather unconvincing one!) but not at all, it seems!

Now, can we get a good, British explanation for why Cowley calls crisps "potato chips?" ;)

[constant-muse.livejournal.com]

Are they 'potato chips' in Scotland? Crisps are also 'chips' in Australian.

[unbelievable2.livejournal.com]

Idly googling "crisp in scotland" to find this out I discovered this:

http://www.mackiescrisps.co.uk/local/pages/story.php?storyID=49

Surely just right for Cowley? ;)

[jessebee.livejournal.com]

That one actually is an Americanism. I'd never heard of potato chips being called "crisps" until I started meeting you British folks! *g* And what you call "chips", we call "fries." Word usage is so much fun!

[unbelievable2.livejournal.com]

And leads to such confusion! I always admire you icon every time I see it, BTW. :))

[jessebee.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much! *g*

[constant-muse.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. Maybe it's an 'oh bother'-style polite form of "you turd"?

In Australia at one time we always used "cruddy" for "second-rate, inferior, spoiled". I'd never heard of someone being called a "crud" before MWAP, though.

[murphybabe]

I vaguely remember 'cruddy', but I can't remember when I remember it, if that makes sense. It was used to mean dirty, crappy, nasty, but it wouldn't have been used as a noun, from (a flaky) memory. This was me growing up in Yorkshire and arriving in Derbyshire in the mid-Eighties. However, although I love the research, I suspect we're doing what we do with everything about the eps: picking on one word and analysing it to death, when Clemens (or whoever that particular scriptwriter was) never thought twice about it and had probably been watching Starsky and Hutch the night before *g*

[solosundance.livejournal.com]

Good research!

Like MB I remember 'cruddy' as a descriptive of something a bit yuck - like my son's bedroom... I'm also thinking that it was used as a noun in the same way, ie 'cleaning the crud' out of something. For me the 'Americanisation' issue was also the use of 'dumb' in this context.

[unbelievable2.livejournal.com]

For me the 'Americanisation' issue was also the use of 'dumb' in this context.

So agree on that!

And contrast that with "you great clown", from the same ep, IIRC, which I always think of as classic Brit (and can't help but regard it as an ad-lb...)

[jessebee.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating *g*. Crud has pretty much the same meaning over here, and is usually heard as describing something nasty and caked-on, such as the crud at the bottom of the drain bend, or the crud on the bottom and sides of the oven. But I've never heard it used as a descriptor for a person, in the way the writer has Doyle using it. And certainly not paired with "dumb." The whole phrase struck me, the first time I saw that ep, as something a nine-year-old boy would say, not a rough-and-tough adult.

[unbelievable2.livejournal.com]

And certainly not paired with "dumb."

How very interesting... ;)

[heliophile-oxon.livejournal.com]

Always known it as a word for dirt/rubbish - cleaning out the crud in the U-bend under the sink ... and never as an insult for a person.

I always assumed that its use in the ep was simply because they weren't allowed to use most "swear-words".