Mind your language | 23 October 2010

The squeeze that the middle classes are enjoying in this frenzy of cuts and taxation is not what the middle classes once liked to mean by the word.

The squeeze that the middle classes are enjoying in this frenzy of cuts and taxation is not what the middle classes once liked to mean by the word. In mad King George’s golden reign, a squeeze was a thronged party. ‘The heads of all the Norwich people are in a whirl, occasioned by the routs which have been introduced amongst them this winter,’ wrote the bluestocking Anna Laetitia Barbauld in a letter to her brother in 1779. ‘Do you know the different terms? There is a squeeze, a fuss, a drum, a rout; and lastly, a hurricane, when the whole house is full from top to bottom. It is a matter of great triumph to me that we enjoy the latter for ten months in the year.’

She hadn’t made all that up. Even hurricane was in use for half a century or more. In her time, too, a squeeze was a hug, though it was to take another 200 years until, by synecdoche or possibly metonymy, a squeeze meant one’s boyfriend or girlfriend. Once, if the waist wasn’t available, the hand would do. ‘I gently squoze hur ’and,’ says a character from a comic tale of the 1870s. I had only previously heard the old-fashioned past tense squoze in a ribald monologue that my husband rather too frequently quotes from the so-called Sods’ Opera that his old naval chums used to perform. You may know it.

All along, squeeze had monetary associations. Thomas Fuller wrote that the Turks controlling the Holy Sepulchre in the 17th century, ‘not content with their yearly rent, squeeze the friars here on all occasions’.