Glasgow
55.8611°N -4.2500°W · Q4093
4 English words in this atlas trace back to Glasgow. It sits in United Kingdom.
A city's reputation for violence turned into a euphemism for the act itself.
The joke is sarcasm about Glaswegian belligerence, and Green's Dictionary of Slang records the phrase only from the mid 1980s, much later than the stereotype. The Gorbals district supplies a variant, the Gorbals kiss. Glasgow also gives English the Glasgow smile and the Glasgow salad.
Two different stories explain this fish, and both involve a Glasgow official.
Hotten's Slang Dictionary says a joker hung salt herrings on the carriage of a Glasgow magistrate waiting to receive George IV on his 1822 visit to Scotland. The Scots Magazine instead traced it to Walter Gibson, a Glasgow merchant and provost who made his fortune exporting cured herring in the 1680s. The term is obsolete, and a Glasgow baillie meant the same thing.
A joke about Scotland's diet, told in the form of a menu item.
The humor is the substitution of fried potato for anything green, aimed at the city with the worst health statistics in Britain. It belongs with the deep-fried Mars bar, which was invented in a chip shop in Stonehaven in 1992 and has been a national joke ever since. Glasgow also supplies English with the Glasgow kiss and the Glasgow smile.
The wound is named for the city whose gang reputation was built by a single novel.
The practice is associated with the razor gangs of interwar Glasgow, whose notoriety was fixed by No Mean City, the 1935 novel about the Gorbals by Alexander McArthur and Kingsley Long. London's equivalent phrases are Chelsea grin and Chelsea smile. The cut is designed to scar rather than to kill.