Mind your language
`CAN I have the stamps?' my daughter asked when a letter arrived from New Zealand. It was from Mr Peter Wheen of Portobello, who asks: 'You don't do slang, do you? Toe-rag has bugged me for ages.'
Well, I do do slang if it's not too obscene for a family magazine such as this. Toe-rag or toe-ragger is a peculiarly antipodean term. Indeed, it has been claimed that it comes from a Maori insult, tau rika rika, meaning a slave. If so, I think it has been assimilated with toe-rag, meaning 'the rags that tramps wrap around their feet to stop blisters, for want of socks'.
Partridge in his Dictionary of Slang also gives the meaning 'a London dock- er who works bulk grain ex-ship', but then Partridge is rather random, and, though he specialises in New Zealand and Australian derivations, gives tua instead of tau rika rika. Perhaps some kind Maori could elucidate.
Anyway, since then I think toe-rag has, at least in. London, become widely recognised as rhyming slang for slag. Mr Ian Duly, the clever lyricist, has, if I have heard correctly, these lines in his song 'Billericay Dicky':
I know a lively old toe-rag, obliging and noblesse, Kindly Charmaine Shagg from Shoeburyness.
But I don't think he originated toe-rag in this sense. Have any of you printed sources of-it earlier than the 1970s?
Dot Wordsworth
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