DOOK, to tell fortunes, and DOOKING, fortune-telling, are derived by the writer last cited, correctly enough, from the Gipsy dukkerin,—a fact which I specify, since it is one of the very rare instances in which he has not blundered when commenting on Rommany words, or other persons’ works.
Mr Borrow has told us that a TANNER or sixpence, sometimes called a Downer, owes its pseudonym to the Gipsy word tawno or tano, meaning “little”—the sixpence being the little coin as compared with a shilling.
DRUM or DROM, is the common English Gipsy word for a road. In English slang it is applied, not only to highways, but also to houses.
If the word GIBBERISH was, as has been asserted, first applied to the language of the Gipsies, it may have been derived either from “Gip,” the nickname for Gipsy, with ish or rish appended as in Engl-ish, I-rish, or from the Rommany word Jib signifying a language.
KEN, a low term for a house, is possibly of Gipsy origin. The common word in every Rommany dialect for a house is, however, neither ken nor khan, but Ker.
LIL, a book, a letter, has passed from the Gipsies to the low “Gorgios,” though it is not a very common word. In Rommany it can be correctly applied only to a letter or a piece of paper, which is written on, though English Gipsies call all books by this name, and often speak of a letter as a Chinamāngri.
LOUR or LOWR, and LOAVER, are all vulgar terms for money, and combine two Gipsy words, the one lovo or lovey, and the other loure, to steal. The reason for the combination or confusion is obvious. The author of the Slang Dictionary, in order to explain this word, goes as usual to the Wallachian Gipsies, for what he might have learned from the first tinker in the streets of London. I should remark on the word loure, that Mr Borrow has shown its original identity with loot, the Hindustani for plunder or booty.
I believe that the American word loafer owes something to this Gipsy root, as well as to the German laufer (landlaufer), and Mexican Spanish galeofar, and for this reason, that when the term first began to be popular in 1834 or 1835, I can distinctly remember that it meant to pilfer. Such, at least, is my earliest recollection, and of hearing school boys ask one another in jest, of their acquisitions or gifts, “Where did you loaf that from?” A petty pilferer was a loafer, but in a very short time all of the tribe of loungers in the sun, and disreputable pickers up of unconsidered trifles, now known as bummers, were called loafers. On this point my memory is positive, and I call attention to it, since the word in question has been the subject of much conjecture in America.
It is a very curious fact, that while the word loot is unquestionably Anglo-Indian, and only a recent importation into our English “slanguage,” it has always been at the same time English-Gipsy, although it never rose to the surface.
MAUNDER, to stroll about and beg, has been derived from Mand, the Anglo-Saxon for a basket, but is quite as likely to have come from Maunder, the Gipsy for “to beg.” Mumper, a beggar, is also from the same source.