The Slang of A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess Mixed Russian and Cockney Speech for Alex's Lingo

Jun 17, 2009 Luke Arnott

The "nadsat" slang of A Clockwork Orange is unique. Mixing Russian with English rhyming slang challenges readers, and keeps Anthony Burgess's classic novel fresh.

Anthony Burgess's most famous novel is A Clockwork Orange, not least because it was the basis for Stanley Kubrick's notorious 1971 film. But the novel is a modern classic in its own right, and has been in print since first published in 1962.

Part of the appeal – and the challenge – for readers of A Clockwork Orange is the unique slang of its first-person narrator. While in some ways it is very much the product of Cold War-era Britain, Anthony Burgess's ingenious dialogue ultimately goes beyond its period.

Anthony Burgess's Approach to Slang

When writing A Clockwork Orange in the early 1960s, Anthony Burgess was wary of putting Beat-generation slang in the mouth of his protagonist, the young thug Alex. Some still crept in, such as the unspecific use of "like" as a grammatical modifier – though, interestingly, this is still common in colloquial speech even today.

Burgess felt that dialogue based on that of any current subculture would not age well, considering how quickly slang changes. He decided, therefore, to use a foreign language as the basis of Alex's futuristic lingo.

Russian "Nadsat" in A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess called his new slang "nadsat," a transliteration of the Russian suffix for "teen." The implication was that, in this novel of the near future, the influence of the Soviet Union will have spread into youth culture.

Burgess simply transliterated a number of basic nouns, adjectives, and verbs to make nadsat. In A Clockwork Orange, "gloopy" means "stupid," and "chai" means "tea," just like in Russian.

But Anthony Burgess also combined Russian words with English homophones, making ingenious puns. For instance, the Russian adjective khurasho ("good") becomes "horrorshow" in Alex's nadsat lingo. Likewise, the word for head, guluva, becomes "gulliver," evoking Jonathan Swift's satiric hero – who occasionally got "tolchoked" (from the Russian for "hit") on the head.

In other cases, Burgess used other words as euphemisms, then anglicized them. Yablukuh ("apple") is used by Alex and his "droogs" (from druzhyi, or "friends") as slang for "testicles." But they say "yarblockos," or the more English-sounding "yarbles" for short.

Cockney Rhyming Slang in A Clockwork Orange

But Anthony Burgess didn't completely ignore English slang. The title of the novel comes from the cockney expression "queer as a clockwork orange" – in other words, very strange indeed. Variants on rhyming slang in the novel include "charlie" (from "Charlie Chaplin," meaning a chaplain or priest) and "pretty polly" (meaning "lolly," or money).

Other purely English words are turned into slang through grammatical reduplication – repeating parts of words, as in baby talk. Substituting "appy polly loggies" for "apologies" is one example of this technique in A Clockwork Orange.

Anthony Burgess's Method Has Kept A Clockwork Orange Fresh

His facility with adapting and inventing languages would only become more pronounced in Anthony Burgess's later works. For instance, Burgess went on to invent pseudo-Indo-European dialogue for the caveman film The Quest for Fire (1984), and provided the English translation for Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), starring Gerard Depardieu.

But Anthony Burgess's linguistic tricks in A Clockwork Orange have remained his most famous. Partly, this is due to the notoriety of the novel, but also to Burgess's foresight. By inventing new speech from a real, but foreign, language, and by adding distinctly English riffs on the result, Burgess ensured that Alex's nadsat slang would never sound dated, but would still be intelligible to the savvy reader.

The copyright of the article The Slang of A Clockwork Orange in British/UK Fiction is owned by Luke Arnott. Permission to republish The Slang of A Clockwork Orange in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Moloko From the Milkbar in A Clockwork Orange