When my husband wants to do something I won’t like, such as getting tickets for Henley, he hangs about, plucking up courage, while I’m busy in the kitchen. Normally he sits idly by. It’s the loitering that is unsettling. He might get a job, if he could fly, as a loitering munition. These drones hover or circle until they detect a target. In 1988 an article in the American Air Force Magazine mentioned unmanned aircraft being developed to ‘loiter on high and then swoop down’. In 2022, Britain declared it would send ‘hundreds of loitering aerial munitions’ to Ukraine.
Loitering, in use since Chaucer’s day, comes from a Dutch word meaning ‘to wag about (like a loose tooth)’. The Vagrancy Act, 1824, penalised petty chapmen, common prostitutes, idle and disorderly persons, fortune-tellers, vagabonds and incorrigible rogues. The Penal Servitude Act, 1891, applied the 1824 provisions to ‘every suspected person or reputed thief loitering about… with the said intent’. Alf, hero of The Hooligan Nights (1899), explained: ‘If you ’ang abart you draw suspicion, and you get lagged for loiterin’ wiv intent to commit a felony or some dam nonsense… P’r’aps it’s a ’awse and cart you see as’ll do you fine. Jump up and drive away as ’ard as you can, and ten to one nobody’ll say anyfink… But ’ang around, and you mit jest as well walk into the next cop you see, and arst ’im to ’and you your stretch.’
Talking of cops, John Aston of Thirsk (Letters, 11 April) wonders why police are called slop. In Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit Wodehouse wrote that the trusted valet ‘had occasion to bean a policeman … and the smitten slop had dropped as the gentle rain from heaven.’ The slang lexicographer Jonathon Green gives examples from 1857 to 1959. By 1873 it was noted as backslang in the form esclop, with the c silent. Slop also served as rhyming slang for cop. The comic Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday (1884) gives slop beside bobby, copper, unboiled lobster. Ally Sloper himself would slope off down an alley if he saw a creditor coming, with no loitering.
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