American Language Supplement 2 (135 page)

The common slang of the United States, as I have noted, is a catch-all for the inventions of various quite different classes of wits, though most of them have the common quality of being more or less disreputable. A neologism coined by a smart Harlem wise-cracker today may be raging in all the fashionable finishing-schools tomorrow, and there is a constant infiltration from the argots of innumerable lawful occupations and the cants of innumerable rackets. We owe many common words and phrases, for example, to the circus folks,
e.g., guy, ballyhoo, three-ring
and
to shoot the chutes;
many more to the hobos,
e.g., jungle, hand-out, panhandler
and probably
hobo
itself; and yet more to downright criminals,
e.g., bull
(for policeman),
third-degree, to gyp, to bump off, to take for a ride, to shake down, to hi-jack
and
once-over
. We have borrowed
by a head, to scratch
and
to tout
from the race-tracks;
nineteenth-hole, to stymie
and
birdie
from the golf-links;
dope, coke, hop
and
to needle
from the drug-addicts, and
understudy, barnstormer, star, angel, box-office, to ring down the curtain on
and
full house
from the stage. In addition, large numbers of terms that belong to argot or cant are understood and occasionally used by Americans, though they have not yet entered (and perhaps never will enter) the common slang of the country.

The cant of modern criminals began to be formulated in western Europe in the early Fifteenth Century, when roving bands of a strange, dark race of petty thieves appeared from the mysterious East and were presently intermingled with the native tramps, beggars and other fly-by-night rogues. These newcomers, at the start, were assumed to be Egyptians, which explains our English name of
Gipsies
for them, but later studies of their history and language have demonstrated that they actually came from northwestern India. They were in Germany by 1414, in Italy by 1422, in France by 1427 and in England by the early 1500s. Two of the largest classes of indigenous vagabonds that they encountered were those of the begging friars and the displaced Jews. Both of these borrowed words and phrases from them and in turn reinforced their language with home-made inventions, and by the end of the Fifteenth Century there had developed in Germany a rogues’ jargon that was based
on German, but included many Hebrew and Gipsy terms. Some of these survive to the present day, even in the United States,
e.g., pal
from the Gipsy
¹
and
ganov
from the Hebrew.

The first writings in and on this jargon were done in Germany, and the earliest of them that have been preserved seem to have been based upon reports of a series of criminal trials at Basel in Switzerland, prepared by John Knebel, one of the clergy of the cathedral there.
²
This was in 1475, but it was not until 1512 or thereabout that Knebel’s material got into print. It then appeared at Augsburg in the once-famous “Liber Vagatorum,” which ran through many editions during the ensuing half century, including one edited at Wittenberg in 1528 by Martin Luther. All the Englishmen who wrote about thieves’ cant during the Sixteenth Century seem to have made use of it, but there was no English translation until 1860, when John Camden Hotten brought out one in London under the title of “The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars, With a Vocabulary of Their Language.”
³
Hotten, in his introduction, put the chief blame for the growth of vagabondage in the later Middle Ages, not on the coming of the Gipsies, but on “the begging system of the friars.” He said:

But the German authority, Schreiber,
²
laid more stress upon the influence of the Gipsies, thus:

“Liber Vagatorum” lists the twenty-nine principal varieties of German rogues of the time, and provides a glossary of their
Rotwelsch
, or cant. I transcribe some specimens, with explanations:

575. [The earliest English reference to the subject are in Robert Copland’s “The Hye Way to the Spittell Hous,” 1517, a dialogue in verse between the author and the porter at the door of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London.] Burke says in “The Literature of Slang,” that this book was probably not actually published until
c
. 1535. Copland was a printer who once worked for Wynken de Worde and maybe also for William Caxton. “The porter in ‘The Hye Way to the Spittell Hous,’ ” says Burke, “talks the language of rogues, and there are passages entirely in cant.” But Copland’s source does not appear to have been “Liber Vagatorum”; he borrowed, rather, from a French translation of Sebastien Brant’s “Das Narrenschiff,” a somewhat earlier work which also included some thieves’ jargon but was not a formal treatise on the subject. Brant (1457–1521) wrote a great deal of Latin poetry and also a number of legal and theological works, but he is chiefly remembered for “Das Narrenschiff,” which appeared at Basel in 1494. “It was,” says George Madison Priest, in his “Brief History of German Literature,”
¹
“the first German work that achieved fame abroad. After the manner of the humanists it ridicules the weaknesses and crimes of the age as unreasoning, absurd follies; the ‘fools’ are adulterers, unbelievers, usurers, and the like.” Brant, continues Priest, “studied the classics, and thus received a humanist’s education,” but he “did not accept the humanist ideal of pure humanity, and remained true to the medieval doctrines of the church. Indeed, German humanism in general, in contradistinction from that of Italy, never became wholly detached from religion. It was for the most part limited to scholars who despised the common people.” Brant’s book was given over chiefly to the follies of the upper and middle classes; what he added about rogues and vagabonds seems to have been derived from the same Basel records that have been mentioned as the probable sources of “Liber Vagatorum.” Alexander Barclay’s “The Ship of Fools,” first printed in 1509, was a very free rendering
of “Das Narrenschiff,” with most of Brant’s classical pedantry omitted and many additions of purely English material. Like its original, it had an enormous success, and is still pored over by the learned.
¹

Copland’s “Hye Way to the Spittell Hous” was followed by many other books embodying specimens of English criminal cant, and among their authors were such remembered writers as Thomas Dekker and Robert Greene, but the first formal glossary did not appear until nearly two centuries later. This was “A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, in its Several Tribes of Gipsies, Beggars, Thieves, Cheats, Etc., With an Addition of Some Proverbs, Phrases, Figurative Speeches, Etc.,” published in London in 1698. Its author concealed himself behind the initials B. E., and has never been identified. “From his dictionary,” says Burke, “one gathers that he was an antiquary. Some of his words and definitions bear no relation to slang and cant, but merely gratify his whim for curiosa.… [His] is perhaps the most important dictionary of slang ever printed, since it had such an influence upon later compilations.” It was reprinted in John S. Farmer’s “Choice Reprints of Scarce Books and Unique MSS.,”
²
and there is a later facsimile reprint, undated, which often bobs up in the second-hand bookshops. The vocabulary runs to 176 double-column pages, and prefixed to it is a preface of six pages. In that preface the author confines himself mainly to discussing the origin of Gipsies and beggars. Beggars appeared in the world, he says, when slavery was put down. He goes on:

The English here is somewhat thick, but the meaning is plain enough. In England, continues B. E.,

B. E.’s glossary shows a number of terms that are still more or less in vogue. In the following list of specimens those that appear in the Berrey-Van den Bark “American Thesaurus of Slang” are marked with asterisks, and in all cases the spelling, punctuation and capitalization are modernized: