Billingsgate

I used to watch The Tonight Show in my college days. One night, Johnny Carson interviewed an English professor who specialized in etymology. Among the word origins the professor discussed was "billingsgate," which means "coarse, vulgar, and abusive language."

It came from Billingsgate Fish Market in London. Fishmongers had a reputation as notoriously ill-tempered and foul-mouthed.

Fast forward a couple of years to the summer of 1979. I took a trip to the U.K. to visit an MSU buddy completing his master's degree at the University of Sussex. He was wrapping things up when I got there. So while he wrote his dissertation during the day, I took the train to London to take in the sites. It was in the course of one of these excursions that I stumbled on the historic Billingsgate Fish Market.

I had long fancied myself a logophile, so you can imagine my delight. When I met my buddy and his three graduate school classmates at the pub in Brighton that evening, I had to tell them the news. I'd laid eyes on Billingsgate, the fish market that had given birth to a colorful 25-dollar word!

All four of my hopelessly hip, highly educated, hyperarticulate interlocutors--the American and three Brits--stared back at me blankly. "Billingsgate? What does it mean? It's a fish market?!"