A mistake sometimes made by people not familiar with this novel is to believe it is written in Nadsat, as if Burgess's Sovietised slang constitutes a new future-language (as with the future Orwell envisaged for Newspeak, or the idiom of Riddley Walker). But no: Nadsat is a sociolect, not a language. It is the shared discourse of a gang, and amounts to what used, rather charmingly, to be called "thieves' cant". Other characters in the novel do not speak it, and indeed comment upon it as subcultural oddity:
‘Quaint,’ said Dr Brodsky, like smiling. ‘The dialect of the tribe. Do you know anything of its provenance, Branom?’Of course, since the first-person narrator Alex does speak it, we get a fair quantity of it in our reading experience. Michael Adams [in From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages (2011)] summarises:
‘Odd bits of old rhyming slang,’ said Dr Branom… ‘A bit of gipsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda. Subliminal Penetration.’ [125]
Approximately five per cent of the text comprises Nadsat words; so, around one word in twenty is a Nadsat term, with on average twenty-four per page. There is a certain amount of variation, with some pages containing in excess of thirty Nadsat terms, and some fewer than twenty. Burgess estimated that a reader would become accustomed to Nadsat within the first fifteen pages, by which time they would have encountered around 350 instances of Nadsat. The reader should not be able to look Nadsat words up in a glossary or dictionary, because part of the purpose of the book was to act as ‘a brainwashing primer’ (Burgess 1972b, 199) for the reader. The reader was to experience a little of what Alex is subjected to in the conditioning that is applied to him. As a result of reading the book, the reader would be ‘in possession of a minimal Russian vocabulary—without effort, with surprise.’ The process of reading A Clockwork Orange was to be an object lesson in the issues with which the book grapples. [67]Adams offers some specific ру́сский examples:
The Russian noun babushka ‘grandmother’ becomes Nadsat baboochka; dévochka ‘girl’ becomes devotchka; drug ‘friend’ becomes droog; gólos ‘voice’ becomes goloss; golová ‘head’ becomes gulliver; mál’chik ‘boy’ becomes malchick; milícija ‘police’ becomes millicent; rabóta ‘work’ becomes rabbit; vesh’ ‘thing’ becomes veshch; and yaz’ík ‘tongue’ becomes yahzick. The degree of adaptation varies; it is more extensive in the case of gulliver, millicent, rabbit and yahzick, but in those cases Burgess plays on associations of sounds and meanings in English.Not just those ones, either. I like the way a boy is, by buried implication, a bad or evil 'chick', or girl; one of many places in the novel where (here in a small way) the gender assumptions of the world get monkeyed about with. 'Millicent' is another; a rather prim girl's name being used for police officers who, the novel shows, are always men, and only too keen to beat people up. Broadly, there's a good deal that's Queer about this Clockwork Orange. Adams goes on:
Of the non-Russian words some are reduplications, possibly imitating schoolboy slang, such as baddiwad ‘bad’, eggiweg ‘egg’, jammiwam ‘jam’, skolliwoll, ‘school’, and possibly Pee and Em for ‘father’ and ‘mother’. Some are based on rhyming slang, such as charles/charlie ‘priest’, from Charles Chaplin, rhyming with chaplain … a few words in A Clockwork Orange originated from other languages, such as clop ‘knock’ from Dutch kloppen; orange ‘man’ from Malay orang; tashtook ‘handkerchief’ from German Taschentuch; tass ‘cup’ from either French tasse or German Tasse; and vaysay ‘toilet’ from the French pronunciation of W.C. Finally some Nadsat words appear to be Burgess’s own invention: chumble, perhaps a blend of chatter and mumble; filly ‘play around with’; guff ‘laugh’; sharp ‘a female’; shilarny ‘concern’; sinny ‘films’, based on cinema, snoutie ‘tobacco’ or ‘snuff’; ‘staja ‘state jail’ and vellocet ‘a type of drug’ perhaps taken from velocity (compare speed as a slang term for an amphetamine drug). Despite what the doctor at the clinic says, no one has discovered any ‘gypsy talk’ among the Nadsat terms. [69]I think Adams makes heavy weather of these last few. 'Guff' is clearly short for 'guffaw'; 'snout' has been prison slang for tobacco since the 19th-century; and 'sharp' is straightforward, if derogatory, rhyming slang (sharp and blunt meaning cunt). The point is Burgess invents almost nothing. (Also there is indeed 'gypsy' or Romany talk in the book: rozzer for policeman is one example).
It seems a little overstated to suggest that acquiring a vocabulary of a couple of hundred Nadsat words without needing to consult a dictionary amounts to 'brainwashing', of the sort satirised in the novel's disensouling version of the Ludovico technique. Certainly it was strategically canny of Burgess to invent his own teen slang, rather than simply reproducing actual teenspeak of the 1950s/60s; he later claimed to have assembled a large glossary of this latter, but changed his mind about using it when he considered how transient such slang is. It prevents the novel becoming a mere Austin Powers parody.
Nadsat, as a hundred commentators have noted, is simply the Russian suffix for -teen. F. Alexander, the writer whom young Alex assaults early in the novel (the author of the in-text Clockwork Orange), gives Alex shelter after his treatment, not, at first, knowing who he is. He is puzzled by Alex's polari-style natter. 'Oh that is what we call nadsat talk,' Alex explains. 'All the teens use that.' We can't, of course, downplay the importance of Russian to this language. (One in-joke I only noticed this time round: F. Alexander's friends, who rally round to co-ordinate their opposition to the government, includes Z Dolin, 'a very wheezy smoky kind of veck', whose coughing is rendered onomatopoeically in the novel as 'kashl kashl kashl' [175]. A good sound for a cough; but also the Russian word—Ка́шл—for cough). But, nevertheless, I want to suggest a different, more bollocky influence.
One thing a thieves' cant, or subcultural slang like Polari, allows is the expression of obscenity that would otherwise be censored. Look at the front cover of the first edition again. Is there any other mass-market book published in the 1960s that has the word 'testicles' right there, on the front like this?
'Yarbles' ('your balls') and 'blockos' ('bollocks') are both transparent enough. But there are testicles all through this novel. I suspect this is because Burgess understands how large a part 'balls' play in male criminality: testosterone is a dangerous substance to have in one's bloodstream, and the urge to attack and to rape are both, in a sense, testicular. The name 'nadsat' includes within it nads, a standard term for that part of the body. 'Clockwork' has its associations, too: this, fairly short, list of synonyms lists 'clockweights' as referring to wedding tackle; and sex is 'cockwork', the old in-out, in-out. Plus, see how much fruit and veg is pressed into slang usage for this topic (oranges are not listed as testicular euphemisms, but they might as well be: 'apples', 'apricots', 'plums', 'watermelons', 'spuds', 'potatoes' and 'cherries' all are). And one thing that Burgess certainly knew was that the Latin testiculum is the diminutive of testis, witness + diminutive suffix -ulum. It may or may not be true that testimony was accompanied by swearing on one's 'oranges' (so to speak), or holding on to them; but it reflects in interesting ways upon testicular Alex, whose first-person narrative here is testimony in both a legal and a personal sense.
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[PS: one interesting datum from Andrew Biswell's biography that I unearthed when reading around on this topic: ‘Burgess’s own recording of passages from A Clockwork Orange—issued on vinyl by Caedmon in 1973—deliberately reverts to the Manchester accent of his youth. This implies that he was, at some level, associating Mancunian English with yobbery and ultra-violence. It also raises the possibility that, when the author of A Clockwork Orange heard the hero-narrator’s voice in his head, Alex spoke with a Manchester accent, as opposed to the south-of-England RADA accent employed by Malcolm McDowell in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. [Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (Picador 2005), 29] My sense is: I tried reading passages aloud in the accent of my Manchester 'put wood int thole' grandfather, and again in the Estuary English of my school days. It works better in the former, not least because it makes the 'thou' and 'thee' more demotic, less incongruously high-culture Shakesperian. But also, just for the general rhythm of it.]
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