I was having a cup of tea with my friend M in my kitchen, I hadn’t seen her for a while so was explaining the problem I was having with slugs gaining access from the yard. She looked thoughtful for a few seconds and then said “Are they like that?” pointing. I turned round my mug and there was a MASSIVE slug climbing up the side. And it was my Birmingham City one.
I’d never heard of it.
She couldn’t stop laughing and I was tempted to either give her a slug to the jaw or find a glass for a calming slug of whiskey. Actually I did neither, as my main concern was to get rid of the thing outside and then rescue my mug. But I couldn’t do it. Well, I could get rid of the slug but I had to chuck out my Blues one as well. Luckily, I had several others.
So slug is a funny type of word. When I envision the creature my image is of a soft, squelchy sort of thing making slimy tracks across concrete but a slug to the jaw is hard and a slug of Jameson looks smooth in the glass but packs a punch.
The problem with the kitchen slugs has gone so I suppose I now think of slug as in American hardboiled detective fiction. Here’s Raymond Chandler from ‘The Long Goodbye’:
She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache...Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial.
She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache...Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial.
As for the Jameson, I remember back in the ‘80s when I was living in Hammersmith. I had the day off to watch a Test Match on the tv. A pal had given me a bottle of the stuff and told me to try it. I poured myself a slug and it looked quite attractive and was so smooth going down. I didn’t look so attractive when I stood up and went down after half the bottle.
By this time in the writing I thought I’d better look up the origins of slug and if there were any other meanings of the word as I’d remembered it could also be something to do with a bullet and blow me there are at least another 15 meanings of the word.
Here are a few:
A slow lazy person (probably from the Old Norse)
A solid block or piece of roughly shaped metal.
A black screen (television editing).
A counterfeit coin, especially one used to steal from vending machines (from 1880s).
The last part of a clean URL, the displayed resource name, similar to a filename.
A discrete mass of a material that moves as a unit, usually through another material.
A title, name or header, a catchline, a short phrase or title to indicate the content of a newspaper or magazine story for editing use (from 1920s)
But this is my favourite:
The imperial (English) unit of mass that accelerates by 1 foot per second squared (1 ft/s²) when a force of one pound-force (lbf) is exerted on it. Rarely used now.
Synonym: geepound
The average slug has a mass of around 0.00002 slugs.
A slow lazy person (probably from the Old Norse)
A solid block or piece of roughly shaped metal.
A black screen (television editing).
A counterfeit coin, especially one used to steal from vending machines (from 1880s).
The last part of a clean URL, the displayed resource name, similar to a filename.
A discrete mass of a material that moves as a unit, usually through another material.
A title, name or header, a catchline, a short phrase or title to indicate the content of a newspaper or magazine story for editing use (from 1920s)
But this is my favourite:
The imperial (English) unit of mass that accelerates by 1 foot per second squared (1 ft/s²) when a force of one pound-force (lbf) is exerted on it. Rarely used now.
Synonym: geepound
The average slug has a mass of around 0.00002 slugs.
I’d never heard of it.
The poem has been chosen solely because I can then use the words used by Tr: ‘slugs are homeless snails’.
Slugs
Who could have dreamed them up? At least snails
have shells, but all these have is—nothing.
Small black antennae like fat pins wave
as if they could take in enough to get them through.
Turn them over, they’re the soles of new shoes,
pale and unmarked as babies. They flow,
the soil itself learning how to move and, moving,
almost staying still, their silver monorail
the only evidence of where they’d been.
And they die quiet, or at least (thankfully)
out of the human ear’s range, between two stones,
under heels, shriveling in salt or piss, at the tips
of sharp sticks. Fight back, I hear myself say,
do something. Don’t just take it. But they die
as they had lived, exuding slime, like
the smaller boys, who’d just
stand there, miserable in short pants,
school socks down to their ankles,
school tie unknotted and askew, and flowing
from noses slow cauls of snot that
from time to time they’d lick or sniff back up
part way, until it flowed again, coating
the upper lip, falling into the mouth, mixing
with tears before anything had been done,
the fear itself enough, so even if we wanted
we couldn’t let them off. Sometimes it was
the knee “where you daren’t show your mother,”
other times the kick in the shins, the stick over
the head, the punch in the mouth, while they
just stood there, or double up, gasping
for breath, and we did it again.
Slugs
Who could have dreamed them up? At least snails
have shells, but all these have is—nothing.
Small black antennae like fat pins wave
as if they could take in enough to get them through.
Turn them over, they’re the soles of new shoes,
pale and unmarked as babies. They flow,
the soil itself learning how to move and, moving,
almost staying still, their silver monorail
the only evidence of where they’d been.
And they die quiet, or at least (thankfully)
out of the human ear’s range, between two stones,
under heels, shriveling in salt or piss, at the tips
of sharp sticks. Fight back, I hear myself say,
do something. Don’t just take it. But they die
as they had lived, exuding slime, like
the smaller boys, who’d just
stand there, miserable in short pants,
school socks down to their ankles,
school tie unknotted and askew, and flowing
from noses slow cauls of snot that
from time to time they’d lick or sniff back up
part way, until it flowed again, coating
the upper lip, falling into the mouth, mixing
with tears before anything had been done,
the fear itself enough, so even if we wanted
we couldn’t let them off. Sometimes it was
the knee “where you daren’t show your mother,”
other times the kick in the shins, the stick over
the head, the punch in the mouth, while they
just stood there, or double up, gasping
for breath, and we did it again.
Brian Swann
Source: Poetry (July/August 2012)
Source: Poetry (July/August 2012)
Thanks for reading, Terry Q.
