In our days Eugène Sue, Balzac, and Victor Hugo have introduced argot in some of their works, taking, no doubt, Vidocq as an authority on the subject; while more recently M. Jean Richepin, in his Chanson des Gueux, rhymes in the lingo of roughs, bullies, vagabonds, and thieves; and many others have followed suit. Balzac thus expresses his admiration for argot: “People will perhaps be astonished if we venture to assert that no tongue is more energetic, more picturesque than the tongue of that subterranean world which since the birth of capitals grovels in cellars, in sinks of vice, in the lowest stage floors of societies. For is not the world a theatre? The lowest stage floor is the ground basement under the stage of the opera house where the machinery, the phantoms, the devils, when not in use, are stowed away. Each word of the language recalls a brutal image, either ingenious or terrible. In the jargon one does not sleep, ‘on pionce.’ Notice with what energy that word expresses the uneasy slumbers of the tracked, tired, suspicious animal called thief, which, as soon as it is in safety, sinks down and rolls into the abysses of deep and necessary sleep, with the powerful wings of suspicion constantly spread over it—an awful repose, comparable to that of the wild beast, which sleeps and snores, but whose ears nevertheless remain ever watchful. Everything is fierce in this idiom. The initial or final syllables of words, the words themselves, are harsh and astounding. A woman is a largue. And what poetry! Straw is ‘la plume de Beauce.’ The word midnight is rendered by douze plombes crossent. Does not that make one shudder?”
Victor Hugo, after Balzac, has devoted a whole chapter to argot in his Misérables, and both these great authors have left little to be said on the subject. Victor Hugo, dealing with its Protean character, writes: “Argot being the idiom of corruption, is quickly corrupted. Besides, as it always seeks secrecy, so soon as it feels itself understood it transforms itself.... For this reason argot is subject to perpetual transformation—a secret and rapid work which ever goes on. It makes more progress in ten years than the regular language in ten centuries.”
In spite of the successive revolutions referred to, a number of old cant words are still used in their original form. Some have been, besides, more or less distorted by different processes, the results of these alterations being subjected in their turn to fresh disguises. As for slang proper, it is mostly metaphoric.
A large proportion of the vocabulary of argot is to be traced to the early Romance idiom, or to some of our country patois, the offsprings of the ancient Langue d’oc and Langue d’oil. Some of the terms draw their origin from the Italian language and jargon, and were imported by Italian quacks and sharpers. Such are lime (shirt), fourline (thief), macaronner (to inform against), rabouin (devil), rif (fire), escarpe (thief, murderer), respectively from lima, forlano, macaronare, rabuino, ruffo, scarpa, some of which belong to the Romany, as lima. The German schlafen has given schloffer, and the Latin fur has provided us with the verb affurer. Several are of Greek parentage: arton (bread), from the accusative αρτον; ornie (fowl), from ορνις; pier (to drink), piolle (tavern), pion (drunk), from πιεῖν.
The word argot itself, formerly a cant word, but which has now gained admittance into the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, is but the corruption of jargon, called by the Italians “lingua gerga,” abbreviated into “gergo,” from which the French word sprang,—gergo itself being derived, according to Salvini, from the Greek ἱερός (sacred). Hence lingua gerga, sacred language, only known to the initiated. M. Génin thus traces the origin of argot: lingua hiera, then lingua gerga, il gergo; hence jergon or jargon, finally argot. Other philologists have suggested that it comes from the Greek ἀργός, idler; and this learned derivation is not improbable, as, among the members of the “argot”—originally the corporation of pedlars and vagabonds—were scholars like Villon (though there exists no evidence of the word having been used in his time), and runaway priests who had, as the French say, “thrown the cassock to the nettles.” M. Nisard, however, rejects these derivations, and believes that argot comes from argutus, pointed, cunning. It seems, in any case, an indubitable fact that the term argot at first was applied only to the confraternity of vagabonds or “argotiers,” and there is no evidence of its having been used before 1698 as an appellation for their language, which till then had been known as “jargon du matois” or “jargon de l’argot.” Grandval, in his Vice puni ou Cartouche, offers the following derivation, which must be taken for what it is worth.
Mais à propos d’argot, dit alors Limosin,
Ne m’apprendrez-vous pas, vous qui parlez latin,
D’où cette belle langue a pris son origine?
—De la ville d’Argos, et je l’ai lu dans Pline,
Répondit Balagny. Le grand Agamemnon