American Language Supplement 2 (138 page)

This vocabulary has its local variations, but most of it seems to be in general use in American prisons, for the same malefactors move from one to another. A large part of it is identical with the table talk of soldiers and sailors. Milk is
chalk;
macaroni,
dago;
eggs,
cacklers, cackleberries
or
shells
, or, if fried,
red eyes;
potatoes,
spuds;
¹
onions,
stinkers
or
tear-gas;
butter,
grease;
catsup,
red-lead;
soup,
water;
bread,
duffer
or
punk;
sugar,
sand
or
dirt;
roast beef,
shoe-sole, leather
or
young horse;
veal, lamb or mutton,
goat-meat;
coffee,
gargle, suds
or
black soup;
sausage,
beagle, dog
or
balloon;
tea,
dishwater;
sauerkraut,
shrubbery
or
hay;
a meat loaf,
mystery
or
rubber-heels;
biscuits,
cat-heads
or
humpers;
bread and gravy,
poultice;
tapioca,
fish-eyes
or
cats’-eyes
, and a sandwich,
duki
(from
duke
, the hand). Meat as a whole is
pig
and food in general is
swag, garbage, scoff, chow, chuck
or
peelings
. A waiter is a
soup-jockey
. The prison functionaries all have derisive names. The head warden is
the big noise, the ball of fire
, or
the Man;
the guards are
shields, screws, hooligans, roaches, hacks, slave-drivers
or
herders;
the chaplain is a
frocker, goody, psalmer, buck
(if a Catholic priest),
Bible-back
or
the Church;
the doctor is a
croaker, cutemup, sawbones
,
²
pill-punk, iodine, salts
or
pills;
the barber is a
scraper, chin-polisher
or
butcher
.

A new prisoner is a
fish;
a letter smuggled out of prison is a
kite;
a crime is a
trick
or
caper;
a cell, when not a
bird-cage
, is a
drum;
a drug addict is a
junker, junkie, hype, whang, hophead
or
snowbird
. A prisoner who goes crazy is said to be
on his top, conky, footch, guzzly, beered, loco, blogo, buggy, woody
or
meshuga
. To die is
to go down
or
to slam off
. To escape is
to gut, to mouse, to have the measles, to take
(or
cop
)
a mope, to hang it, to be on the bush, to lam the joint, to go over the wall, to get a bush bond
(or
parole
) or
to crush out
. To finish a sentence is
to get up
. A sentence is a
trick, knock, rap, hitch, bit, stretch
or
jolt
. If short it is
sleeping time
, if for one year it is a
boffo
, it for two a
deuce
, if for five a
five-specker
or
V
, if for twenty a
double sawbuck
, if for life the
book
, the
ice-box
or
all
. The prison is the
big house
, the
college
or the
joint
. A pardon or commutation is a
lifeboat
. An arrest is a
fall
, a man is a
gee
, a bed is a
kip
, and the prison morgue is the
greenhouse
. Many euphemisms are in use. At Sing Sing, for example, the death-house is
Box Z
, the section for insane convicts is
Box A
, and the place where dead inmates are buried is
Box 25
. Not a few of the terms reported smell of the lamp, and certainly did not emanate from the common run of prisoners,
e.g., last mile
for the march to the gallows or electric chair,
Cupid’s itch
for venereal disease,
pussy bandit
for a rapist,
gospel-fowl
for chicken,
sleigh-bells
for silver, and
toad-hides
for paper money.
¹

Between the world of professional criminals and that of honest folk there is a half-world of part-time, in-and-out malefactors, and to it belongs the army of hoboes, beggars, prostitutes, drug addicts, and so on. Most juvenile delinquents are part of it and remain so, for not many of them can ever hope to be promoted from neighborhood gangs to touring mobs. Indeed, the average bad boy of today, alarming his parents and feeding the fires of editorial writers, is very apt to end tomorrow, not in prison, but upon a clerk’s stool in some petty government office, and the girl who abandons her virginity at fifteen is far more likely to celebrate her twentieth birthday on her honeymoon than in the gutter. To the layman all the species of the genus
hobo
look pretty much alike, but there are actually sharp divisions between one and another, though all are
alike enemies of bourgeois cage-life. In the same
jungles
near a railroad-yard there may be camped at the same time migratory workers wandering from job to job,
yeggs
fleeing the police, genuine
tramps
who go no further than minor thieving but never work at all, and a miscellaneous rabble of temporary wanderers. The average intelligence of these public nuisances is probably even lower than that of habitual criminals. At the top are the congenital vagabonds, sometimes smart and amusing fellows, who choose to eschew what passes for civilization among us; at the bottom are the incurable drunkards, the drug addicts, the chronic out-of-works and beggars, the fugitives from unendurable jobs or wives, the runaway boys and girls, and the swarms of psychopaths. Some of these persons conduct themselves in a reasonably orderly manner according to codes of their own devising, but the great majority of them are incurably anti-social and teeter precariously upon the verge of crime. Most of the females are either harlots or ex-harlots, and many of the males are homosexuals. At the bottom of the pile are the poor wretches, mainly aging, who find road life increasingly insupportable, and so gravitate dismally toward the big cities, to become beggars and
mission-stiffs
.

It will be recalled that the first investigation of underworld speech in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries had to do with the talk of such vagrants rather than with the cant of more daring criminals. That speech still excites the interest of the curious, and there is a large literature upon it.
¹
In part it is made up of borrowings from criminal cant, in part of loans from the argot of railroad men, and in part of what seem to be original inventions. Many of its terms
are familiar to most Americans,
e.g., jungles
(usually plural), the camp of vagabonds outside a city, sometimes occupied for years;
blind
, the front of a baggage-car, directly behind the engine-tender;
flop
, a place to sleep (
flop-house
, a cheap lodging-house);
mulligan
, a stew made in the jungles of any food the assembled hoboes can beg, borrow or steal;
slave-market
, an employment agency;
main stem
or
drag
, the main street of a town;
crummy
, lousy;
¹
to mooch
, to beg;
²
hand-out
, food begged at a house-door;
³
to panhandle, to ride the rods;
⁴
hoosegow
, a jail;
⁵
bughouse
, crazy;
⁶
barrel-house
, a low saloon;
⁷
to pound the ties
, and
to rustle a meal
.
⁸

Among the more esoteric terms recorded in the literature are
to go gooseberrying
, to rob clothes lines (
gooseberries
);
filling-station
, a small town (once a
tank-town
or
whistle-stop
);
bindle
, the hobo’s roll of clothes and bedding (if he carries one he is a
bindle-stiff
);
scissors-bill
, a law-abiding citizen;
⁹
rattler
, a freight-car;
red-ball
, a fast freight;
stash
, a hiding-place;
¹⁰
clown
, a rustic policeman;
gay-cat
, a newcomer to the road;
jungle-buzzard
, one who partakes of a meal in a jungle without contributing anything to it;
¹¹
skid-road
, a city street frequented by hoboes;
tourist
or
snow-fly
, a tramp who goes South in Winter to escape the cold weather;
lump
or
poke-out
, a hand-out (if unwrapped it is a
bald-lump
);
locust
or
sap
, a policeman’s stick;
to be fanned
, to be awakened by having it
applied to the soles of one’s feet;
gandy-dancer
, a section hand;
hairbin
, a housewife;
pie-card
, a union card used as a credential in begging;
shark
, an employment agent;
man-catcher
, an employer seeking workers;
stew-bum
, a drunkard;
sit-down
, a meal in a house;
hump
, a mountain;
tin cow
, canned milk;
Peoria
, soup;
¹
drag
, a train;
reefer
, a refrigerator-car;
shack
, a brakeman;
to put it down
, to get off a train, and
to carry the banner
, to walk the streets all night, lacking money for lodging.

The
bums
who congregate in cities and live by panhandling have special names to designate men whose appeals to charity are helped by various disabilities, real or imaginary. A blind man is
Blinky
, a man who holds out that he is deaf and dumb is
D. & D
. (if he claims to be only deaf he is
Deafy;
if only dumb,
Dummy
), a one-legged or legless man is
Peggy
, a one-armed or armless man is
Wingy
or
Army
, a paralytic is
Crippy
, an epileptic is
Fritz
, a man with tremors is
Shaky
, and one pretending to be insane is
Nuts
. Those who exhibit sores, usually made with acid, are
blisters;
those who throw their bones out of joint are
throwouts
or
tossouts
, those who cough dismally are
ghosts
, and those who squat in front of churches or other public buildings and pretend to be helpless are
floppers
.
²
Cripples in general are
crips
. Those who repair umbrellas at street-corners are
mush-fakers
(an umbrella is a
mush
).
³
Those who make and sell objects of wire,
e.g
., coat-hangers, are
qually-workers
. Those who gaze longingly into restaurants or bake-shops while they gnaw at prop bread-crusts are
nibblers
. Those who dig into garbage-cans are
divers
. Those who pretend to have fainted from hunger are
flickers
. Those with hard-luck stories are
weepers
. Those who practise minor con games are
dingoes
.
⁴
Those who pick up cigar and cigarette butts are
snipe-hunters
. Homosexuals are common among hoboes, and have a vocabulary of their own. They are called
wolves
or
jockers
and the boys accompanying them are
guntzels, gazoonies, punks, lambs
or
prushuns
.
⁵
There are generally recognized hobo nicknames for most towns and many railroads. Chicago is
the Village
, Cincinnati is
Death Valley
, Richmond, Va.,
is
Grantsville
, Pittsburg is
Cinders
or
the Burg
, Spokane, Wash., is
the Spokes
, Walla Walla, Wash., is
the Wallows
, Kalamazoo, Mich., is
the Zoo
, Columbus, O., is
Louse Town
, Little Rock, Ark., is
the Rock
, Joliet, Ill., is
Jolly
, Salt Lake City is
the Lake
, Toledo is
T. O
., Butte, Mont., is
Brass
, Kansas City is
K. C
., Cleveland is
Yap Town
, Minneapolis is
Minnie
, Washington is
the Cap
, Terre Haute, Ind., is
the Hut
, and New York is simply
the City
.
¹

Webster 1934 says that the origin of
hobo
is unknown. The DAE says that the suggestion that it comes from “Hello Beau” or “Ho, beau,” an alleged greeting of railroad brakemen to tramps and of tramps to one another, “perhaps deserves special attention,” but goes no further. Many other etymologies have been proposed. Jack London undertook, without evidence or plausibility, to derive the word from
oboe;
others have suggested that it comes from “Homeward bound,” a slogan of soldiers returning from the Civil War; from
Hoboken;
from
homus bonum
, a good fellow; from
hoe-boy
, a California farm-hand of Gold Rush days; from “Ho, bo” or “Ho, bub,” a greeting to boys; from “Ho, boy,” the cry of mailmen along the Oregon Short Line in the 80s; and from a Japanese word meaning everywhere. All these sound improbable to me. The DAE’s first example of the word comes from one of the magazine articles of Josiah Flynt, and is dated 1891. It came into wide use soon afterward.
²
Tramp
has been traced in England to 1664, but it was not in general use in the United States until the 1880s.
Bum
, which is usually assumed to be derived from the German
bummler
, of the same meaning, first came into use in San Francisco, in the form of
bummer, c
. 1855. Applied to predatory soldiers, it was widely popular during the Civil War, but was not shortened to
bum
until
c
. 1870.
³