Molly Doran

As dawn rises on Aldersgate Street, small creatures rampage in the trash, and frosty tendrils of winter reach into the London fall. Various occupants of Slough House arrive swearing, as one tends to do if one is seconded to MI-5’s dust heap or, more accurately, reclassified as the very dust. Louisa Guy swears according to the fashion of the day:

“A body’s been dumped in the street. Broad daylight.”

“Here?”

“Central London […] More specifically,” Louisa said, “outside a fuck-off restaurant near the Mall” (RT 143)

Fuck-off stands for ‘you’re too ordinary to be here.’ Roddy Ho’s swearing isn’t about something that happened on the street but instead is merely an interior overestimation of his sex appeal: “Bitch was ripe was how he read it. Bitch was ready” (RT 11). His big mistake, however, is saying the same thing to Shirley Dander, who rightly clocks him — the dangers of thinking aloud.

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The intelligence officers of Slough House, good at everyday profanity, are proficient infixers and interposers, too. An infixing, remember, is when one inserts profanity into the structure of a word, at a stress appropriate point (unfuckingbelievable); an interposing inserts the profanity between words in a fixed or idiomatic phrase (go to hell < go the fuck to hell). Infixings and interposings occur infrequently in speech, but when it comes to any variety of profanity, the slow horses are well ahead of the common herd.

Jackson Lamb infixes and interposes with abandon. As he points out to River Cartwright, whose grandfather had been a powerful spook in his day, “But no, you’ve got a grandfather. Congratufuckinglations. You’ve still got a job” (SH 37). The infixing drips with disdain for both grandfather and grandson, well-earned in the grandfather’s case — if you don’t already know that and why, then you really need to read the books.

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