The British All-Purpose Verb (Shag)

Lyrics

Right then. You asked.
Pull up a chair. Mind the sticky patch.
This word... this one little verb.
It's got a history, it has.

Before all this...
...before the jukebox and the soggy chips...
it was a dance.
Proper rough, mind. A country jig.
Francis Grose wrote it down, 1785.
Said it was a shake. A tremble.
Something you did with your boots on, mud on the floorboards.
A shag. The Shires knew it.

It started in the fields, a spin and a leap.
A word for the way you shook the dust from your sleep.
From a dance to a cloth, to a look in the eye.
The British all-purpose verb, oh me, oh my.
The meaning just... slips.

And it was a cloth, too.
Nineteenth century. A rough old wool.
The kind of thing that scratches your chin.
Shag cloth. For a working man's coat.
So you see the pattern?
The rough dance, the rough cloth...
The word always meant something... un-smooth.
Something with a bit of... texture.
Like this table. Go on, feel it.

It started in the fields, a spin and a leap.
A word for the way you shook the dust from your sleep.
From a dance to a cloth, to a look in the eye.
The British all-purpose verb, oh me, oh my.
The meaning just slips.

Then the cities got it. The Great War.
Old Eric Partridge put it in his book, 1950.
By then, the dance was long gone.
It was a whisper behind the bike sheds.
A joke shouted over the engine noise.
A boast about the back of a Morris Minor.
The word found its final home.
In a place... just like this one.

So now you know.
It's a verb for... well.
It's a verb for when you haven't got a better verb.
And we usually don't.