In George
Orwell's novel, _A Clergyman's Daughter_, a schoolteacher
inadvisedly presents "Macbeth" to her students. They reach the words
"Macduff was from his mother's womb/Untimely ripp'd," and a student
asks the fatal question, "Please, Miss, what does that mean." She
explains "haltingly and incompletely--but she did explain," and the
following evening she is confronted by angry parents who feel "it is a
disgrace that schoolbooks can be printed with such words in them; I'm
sure if any of us had known that Shakespeare had that kind of stuff,
we'd have put our foot down at the start.... If I had my way, no
child--at any rate, no girl--would know anything about the Facts of
Life till she was twenty-one."
You have to look at that book carefully, too. He wasn't talking about
imaginary stuff. The published edition of Clergyman's Daughter (1931)
uses the "------" for the word fuck, and vagrants gathering in Trafalgar
Square to spend the cold night say things like "Come on, less ’ave a drum
of tea while we got the chance. Last we’ll get tonight—coffee shop shuts
at ’ar-parse ten." There is no such thing as a "drum of tea", but there
is "a dram", which is a measure of liquor. The *pubs*, which did not
serve tea or coffee, were closed at 10:30pm by law. The contemporary
readers knew this; sometimes translators and people born in later years do
not all know that and will probably not understand the passage.
We probably shouldn't be in that branch of the censorship business, lest
some future historian should have to explain our weird euphemisms to a
future public.
Eric Partridge's "Dictionary of Slang" does refer to a
"drum" as having
developed the meaning of a tin for making tea in tramps' cant from the
1890s. In the 20th century the term also became used among railwaymen.
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