It was at the signing ceremony at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland that the new King, sharp with grief and exhausted from travelling around the UK, got frustrated by a leaking pen. “Oh God I hate this!” he said, as he offloaded the offending object to his wife. “I can’t bear this bloody thing!” he moaned, wiping his fingers on a generous handkerchief. “Every stinking time!” he exclaimed, as one of his minders hastily ushered him away from the cameras.
It was not his short temper that caught my attention, but rather his use of “stinking”. Stinking was a term very common in the 14th to 17th centuries. A vague epithet connoting intense disgust or contempt, the word was first used in the Ancrene Riwle, a guide to monastic living for anchoresses of the 13th century. Stinking in this sense was used steadily over the centuries until the late Victorian era, when it began to take on a more colloquial tone and morphed into an intensifier, similar to the King’s use of “bloody”: he could easily have replaced “every stinking time” with “every bloody time”.
Although born in 1948, King Charles is more Victoria-nik than he is Beatnik
There is a theory—with too many exceptions to be really true—that says that our language, especially our slang, is often frozen in time to when we were teenagers. If someone uses the expressions wild, with it, swinging, or far out, chances are they were young Baby Boomers when these terms were coined in the 1950s and 60s.
But King Charles III proves this theory wrong. Although he was born in 1948, his slang is far from the prototypical Boomer. He is more Victoria-nik than Beatnik. For royalty, it seems, slang is frozen in time to when their nannies, or their parents’ nannies, were teenagers. Our King was nursed by nannies who were born in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, and it shows in how he speaks. Considering his use of stinking, we might also expect him to blurt out other expletives popular when his nanny Helen Lightbody (born in 1908) was a teenager: bleeding, ghastly, God-awful, dashed, sodding, ungodly, soddish. She probably muttered some of these under her breath when she was reportedly fired for refusing to follow the Queen’s request to give the eight-year-old prince a particular pudding. Time will tell if my theory is correct. The King is sure to face more stressful scenarios than a leaking pen, which will bring forth his outdated, blasted, damnable, woeful, frightful slang.
