I first became aware of bent as referring to something other than physical crookedness in 1980, when Martin Sherman’s play “Bent” (starring Richard Gere) opened on Broadway, and reviews explained that the title was a Britishism connoting homosexuality. I subsequently learned that it’s also a British adjective meaning crooked in the sense of dishonest or corrupt.
But I didn’t know which sense was meant in today’s New York Times article about the NBC comedy “Community.” The piece had a quote from Jim Rash, and described him as the actor “who plays the bent Dean Pelton on the show.”
To find out, I could have called up my daughter Elizabeth Yagoda, who loves “Community.” But clicking over to Wikipedia was easier. There I read that Dean Pelton
seemingly has a crush on Jeff, and uses him to improve the school’s fledgling extra-curricular programs, pressuring him to join the debate team, edit the school’s newspaper, and convince Troy to play quarterback for the football team. Among other hints at sexual proclivities such as late-night visits to truck stops and public restrooms, he has had a growing fetish for people in dalmatian costumes, which he believes he has pursued in secrecy, but seems to be common enough knowledge to the students and faculty.
So there you have it.
This blog entry prompted me to look up the term, “get bent,” which was a popular dismissive among us innocent but daring high school boys in the 1950s. Sources (e.g., http://ask.metafilter.com/15493/Get-Bent) indicate that the term has had a variety of meanings over time. Curiously, Google’s Ngram Viewer shows it’s use alternately waxing and waning across the years, with a “spikier” history in the U.K. than in the U.S. One may wonder if these ups and downs coincide with new meanings being applied to the term as years progressed.
Hal, that’s a new one on me–is it equivalent to “get lost”? I also neglected to mention a distinctly American meaning for the adjective: drunk, high, etc.
The first verse from ‘Going Straight,’ a UK sitcom about life in jail:
All my life I’ve been..
bent as a corkscrew, bent as an ‘air pin
bent as a figure eight.
Bent as a wish bone, bent as a bed spring
now I’m bent on Going Straight.
The full lyrics are at: http://www.porridge.org.uk/gslyrics.html
The programme was called ‘Porridge,’ a UK slang term for doing time in jail. Has that one made it to the US yet?
There’s also another British idiom (referring to dishonesty I think) in line with what David has written above:
“Bent as a nine bob note.” Or, “As bent as a nine bob note.” (Usually said in context with an individual or item.)
The saying refers to that old note of British currency (pre-decimalization) the “bob”, worth 10 shillings; (the nine bob note, therefore, being false currency indeed.)
No idea how far back it dates from, but definitely before 1971 I’d expect.
I’ve never heard “bent as a nine-bob note” but Frank Shaw and Fritz Spiegl recorded “queer as a nine-bob not” in Lern Yerself Scouse, a not-entirely tongue-in-cheek book about Liverpool slang published in 1965. It drew on Shaw’s experiences of growing up in Liverpool over several decades. They also record “queer as a clockwork orange”, a phrase picked up by Anthony Burgess for the title of a 1962 novel.
‘Bent’ meaning ‘homosexual’ has dropped out of British use in recent years, and is more likely to be used in its sense of dishonesty or unscrupulousness.
‘Bent’ has always meant a form of dishonesty in this country as well as one of the numerous and often humourous euphemisms for male (but not female) homosexuality.
Additionally, a ‘bent copper’ is, obviously, a corrupt policemen. When I was young a deformed penny (old money) was a bent copper, because a ‘copper’ was a copper coin – as well as being a policeman.
Incidentally, in old money a shilling (one 20th of an old pound) was a ‘bob’ – 10 shillings was ‘ten bob’. 5 bob was also a ‘dollar’ (from the far-off days when the exchange-rate gave 4 dollars to the pound). ‘Old’ money British slang is a subject in its own right……. Sadly almost lost now.
Toodle-Pip!
In the 70′s Texan songwriter and one-time Cricket Sonny Curtis wrote a song called “Leavin’ the Straight Life Behind” with the line “Havin’ a Ball on a couple o’ bob”..
I’d say that in England bent is now rather archaic for homosexuals with gay and queer being much more more common (both which can be either positive or negative depending on tone and context – ‘gay’ as used by male schoolboys for instance is almost invariably an insult).
So its primary meaning would now be corrupt as in ‘bent copper’ – a policeman who takes bribes – and in fact I’d say its rarely used outside of that specific context,
As for the nine-bob note I remember queer as being more common than bent but either would work – and suspect that the use of bent for homosexual came about precisely from queer becoming primarily a term for homosexual and bent being cognate to it from that phrase.
But back when we still had shillings and pence and pound notes queer did not always have that sexual connotation and would be as likely to just mean odd, strange, unlikely or peculiar,
Having grown up in south west England, we would always have used “Bent as a nine bob note”, or more commonly, “Bent as a butchers hook”. I had never come across the “Queer as…” version, I wonder if this is a regional thing???
Bender rather than “He’s Bent” was also a more common turn of phrase in our neck of the woods when regarding a homosexual…
Generally I would agree that in more recent years it is more common to use bent in describing a corrupt or dishonest person.
Dusty Springfield sent England into a tizzy when she told an interviewer: “Everyone thinks I’m bent, and I suppose I am.” Hot stuff for 1970!