From Roter, beggar, vagabond, and wälsch, foreign. See Dictionary
of Gipsy language in Pott’s Zigeuner in Europa und Asien, vol. ii., Halle,
1844. The Italian cant is called Fourbesque, and the Portuguese Calao.
See Francisque-Michel, Dictionnaire d’Argot, Paris, 1856.
The word Slang, as will be seen in the [chapter] upon that subject, is
purely a Gipsy term, although nowadays it refers to low or vulgar language
of any kind, other than cant. Slang and Gibberish in the Gipsy language
are synonymous; but, as English adoptions, have meanings very different
from that given to them in their original.
“The vulgar tongue consists of two parts; the first is the Cant
language; the second, those burlesque phrases, quaint allusions, and nicknames
for persons, things, and places, which, from long uninterrupted
usage, are made classical by prescription.”—Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar
Tongue, 1st edition, 1785.
It is but fair to imagine that cheat ultimately became synonymous with
“fraud,” when we remember that it was one of the most common words of
the greatest class of impostors in the country.
We are aware that more than one eminent philologist states that the
origin of “queer” is seen in the German quer, crooked,—hence strange and
abnormal. While agreeing with this etymology, we have reason to believe
that the word was first used in this country in a Cant sense.
Gipsies in Spain, vol. i. p. 18. Borrow further commits himself by
remarking that “Head’s Vocabulary has always been accepted as the
speech of the English Gipsies.” Nothing of the kind. Head professed to
have lived with the Gipsies, but in reality filched his words from Decker
and Brome.
This is a curious volume, and is worth from one to two guineas. The
Canting Dictionary was afterwards reprinted, word for word, with the title
of The Scoundrel’s Dictionary, in 1751. It was originally published, without
date, about the year 1710, by B. E., under the title of A Dictionary of
the Canting Crew.
Mayhew (vol. i. p. 217) speaks of a low lodging-house “in which
there were at one time five university men, three surgeons, and several sorts
of broken-down clerks.” But old Harman’s saying, that “a wylde Roge is
he that is borne a roge,” will perhaps explain this seeming anomaly. There
is, whatever may be the reason, no disputing the truth of this latter statement,
as there is not, we venture to say, a common lodging-house in
London without broken-down gentlemen, who have been gentlemen very
often far beyond the conventional application of the term to any one with a
good coat on his back and money in his pocket.
Sometimes, as appears from the following, the names of persons and
houses are written instead. “In almost every one of the padding-kens, or
low lodging-houses in the country, there is a list of walks pasted up over
the kitchen mantelpiece. Now at St. Albans, for instance, at the ——,
and at other places, there is a paper stuck up in each of the kitchens. This
paper is headed, ‘Walks out of this town’ and underneath it is set
down the names of the villages in the neighbourhood at which a beggar may
call when out on his walk, and they are so arranged as to allow the cadger
to make a round of about six miles each day, and return the same night.
In many of these papers there are sometimes twenty walks set down. No
villages that are in any way ‘gammy’ [bad] are ever mentioned in these
papers, and the cadger, if he feels inclined to stop for a few days in the
town, will be told by the lodging-house keeper, or the other cadgers that
he may meet there, what gentlemen’s seats or private houses are of any
account on the walk that he means to take. The names of the good houses
are not set down in the paper, for fear of the police.”—Mayhew, vol. i.
p. 418. [This business is also much altered in consequence of the increase
in the surveillance of the kens, an increase which, though nominally for
sanitary purposes, has a strong moral effect. Besides this, Mr. Mayhew’s
informants seem to have possessed a fair share of that romance which is
inherent among vagabonds.—Ed.]
This term, with a singular literal downrightness, which would be
remarkable in any other people than the French, is translated by them as
the sect of Trembleurs.
The Gipsies use the word Slang as the Anglican synonym for Romany,
the Continental (or rather Spanish) term for the Cingari or Gipsy tongue.
Crabb, who wrote the Gipsies’ Advocate in 1831, thus mentions the word:—“This
language [Gipsy] called by themselves Slang, or Gibberish, invented,
as they think, by their forefathers for secret purposes, is not merely the
language of one or a few of these wandering tribes, which are found in the
European nations, but is adopted by the vast numbers who inhabit the
earth.”
The word Slang assumed various meanings amongst costermongers,
beggars, and vagabonds of all orders. It was, and is still, used to express
“cheating by false weights,” “a raree show,” “retiring by a back door,”
“a watch-chain,” their “secret language,” &c.
North, in his Examen, p. 574, says, “I may note that the rabble first
changed their title, and were called the “mob” in the assemblies of this
[Green Ribbon] club. It was their beasts of burden, and called first mobile
vulgus, but fell naturally into the contraction of one syllable, and ever since
is become proper English.” In the same work, p. 231, the disgraceful
origin of SHAM is given.
This latter is, as I take it, an error, as the sign was originally intended
to represent the king’s head and cross guns, and may still be seen
in parts of the country.—Ed.
Savez-vous cela?—[I fancy this is from the Spanish sabe. The word is
in great use in the Pacific States of America, and is obtained through constant
intercourse with the original settlers.—Ed.]
At page 24 of a curious old Civil War tract, entitled, The Oxonian
Antippodes, by I. B., Gent., 1644, the town is called Brummidgham, and
this was the general rendering in the printed literature of the seventeenth
century.—[This must have been the first known step towards the present
vulgar style of spelling, for properly the word is Bromwich-ham, which has
been corrupted into Brummagem, a term used to express worthless or
inferior goods, from the spurious jewellery, plate, &c., manufactured there
expressly for “duffers.”—Ed.]
This was more especially an amusement with medical students, after
the modern Mohocks had discarded it. The students are now a comparatively
mild and quiet race, with very little of the style of a generation ago
about them.
A preacher is said, in this phraseology, to be “owned” when he makes
many converts, and his converts are called his “seals.” This is Cant in its
most objectionable form.
“Swaddler” is also a phrase by which the low Irish Roman Catholics
denominate those of their body who in winter become Protestants, pro tem.,
for the sake of the blankets, coals, &c., given by proselytizing Protestants.
It is hard to say which are the worse, those who refuse to give unless the
objects of their charity become converted, or those who sham conversion to
save themselves from starving, or the tender mercies of the relieving officer.
I am much afraid my sympathies are with the “swaddlers,” who are also
called “soupers.”—Ed.
“All our newspapers contain more or less colloquial words; in fact,
there seems no other way of expressing certain ideas connected with passing
events of every-day life with the requisite force and piquancy. In the
English newspapers the same thing is observable, and certain of them contain
more of the class denominated Slang words than our own.”—Bartlett’s
Americanisms, p. 10, edit. 1859.
When this appeared, “all serene” was one of those street phrases
which periodically spring up, have their rage, and depart as suddenly as
they come into popularity. These sayings are generally of a most idiotic
nature, as their latest specimens, “I’ll warm yer,” “All serene,” and
“I’ll ’ave your hi”—used without any premonitory notice or regard to
context, and screeched out at the top of the voice—will testify. I suppose
we shall soon have another of these “ebullitions of popular feeling.”—Ed.
The terms “leader” and “article” can scarcely be called Slang, yet it
would be desirable to know upon what authority they were first employed
in their present peculiar sense.
The Morning Herald was called “Mrs. Harris,” because it was said
that no one ever saw it, a peculiarity which, in common with its general
disregard for veracity, made it uncommonly like “Mrs. Gamp’s” invisible
friend as portrayed by Dickens. But the Herald has long since departed
this life, and with it has gone the title of “Mrs. Gamp,” as applied to the
Standard, which is, though, as impulsive and Conservative as ever.—Ed.
This is rhyming slang, and is corrupted into “lord” only. “Touch-me,”
a common term for a shilling, is also derived from the same source, it
being short for “touch-me-on-the-nob,” which is rhyming slang for “bob”
or shilling.
Since the first edition of this work a great alteration has taken place in this respect.
Though topical ballads are now often sung, the singers confine themselves to low neighbourhoods,
and as soon as a policeman approaches, if ever he does, they make themselves
scarce. The practice is singular. One man gets as far through a line as he can, and
when his voice cracks his companion takes up. For this reason the business is as a
rule conducted by a man and woman, or sometimes by a woman and child. The writing
of these ditties is generally work of a character for which even 7s. 6d. would be a high
rate of pay.—Ed.
Eurasian is not a child of mixed race, but one born of European parents in an Asiatic
clime. A similar error exists with regard to the word creole, which is generally supposed
to mean a man or woman in whom white and black strains are mixed. I need not say
how wrong this is, but the vulgar error is none the less current.—Ed.
There is something so extremely humorous and far-fetched about this explanation,
that though it is utterly unworthy of its place in a dictionary, I, finding it there, have not
the heart to cut it out.—Ed.
Of course by those who don’t know the scientific way used in “canine exhibitions”
and dog-fights—of biting their tails till they turn round to bite the biter.—Ed.
The writer, a street chaunter of ballads and last dying speeches,
alludes in his letter to two celebrated criminals—Thos. Drory, the murderer
of Jael Denny, and Sarah Chesham, who poisoned her husband,
accounts of whose trials and “horrid deeds” he had been selling. Here is
a Glossary of the cant words:—