YOUNKER, in street language, a lad or a boy. Term in general use amongst costermongers, cabmen, and old-fashioned people. Barnefield’s Affectionate Shepherd, 1594, has the phrase, “a seemelie YOUNKER.” Danish and Friesic, JONKER. In the Navy, a naval cadet is usually termed a YOUNKER.
YOUR-NIBS, yourself.
ZIPH, LANGUAGE OF, a way of disguising English in use among the students at Winchester College. Compare MEDICAL GREEK.
ZOUNDS, a sudden exclamation,—abbreviation of God’s wounds.
SOME ACCOUNT OF THE BACK SLANG,
THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF COSTERMONGERS.
The costermongers of London number between thirty and forty thousand. Like other low tribes, they boast a language, or secret tongue, in which they hide their earnings, movements, and other private affairs. This costers’ speech, as Mayhew remarks, offers no new fact, or approach to a fact, for philologists; it is not very remarkable for originality of construction; neither is it spiced with low humour, as other cant. But the costermongers boast that it is known only to themselves; that it is far beyond the Irish, and puzzles the Jews.
The main principle of this language is spelling the words backwards,—or rather, pronouncing them rudely backwards. Sometimes, for the sake of harmony, an extra syllable is prefixed, or annexed; and, occasionally, the word is given quite a different turn in rendering it backwards, from what an uninitiated person would have expected. One coster told Mayhew that he often gave the end of a word “a new turn, just as if he chorussed it with a tol-de-rol.” Besides, the coster has his own idea of the proper way of spelling words, and is not to be convinced but by an overwhelming show of learning,—and frequently not then, for he is a very headstrong fellow. By the time a coster has spelt an ordinary word of two or three syllables in the proper way, and then spelt it backwards, it has become a tangled knot that no etymologist could unravel. The word GENERALISE, for instance, is considered to be “shilling” spelt backwards. Sometimes Slang and Cant words are introduced, and even these, when imagined to be tolerably well known, are pronounced backwards. Other terms, such as GEN, a shilling, and FLATCH, a halfpenny, help to confuse the outsider.
After a time, this back language, on BACK-SLANG, as it is called by the costermongers themselves, comes to be regarded by the rising generation of street sellers as a distinct and regular mode of speech. They never refer words, by inverting them, to their originals; and the YENEPS and ESCLOPS, and NAMOWS, are looked upon as proper, but secret terms. “But it is a curious fact, that lads who become costermongers’ boys, without previous association with the class, acquire a very ready command of the language, and this though they are not only unable to spell, but ‘don’t know a letter in a book.[56]’” They soon obtain a considerable stock vocabulary, so that they converse rather from the memory than the understanding. Amongst the senior costermongers, and those who pride themselves on their proficiency in BACK-SLANG, a conversation is often sustained for a whole evening, especially if any “flatties” are present whom they wish to astonish or confuse. The women use it sparingly, but the girls are generally well acquainted with it.
The addition of an s, I should state, always forms the plural, so that this is another source of complication. For instance, woman in the BACK-SLANG, is NAMOW, and NAMUS, or NAMOWS, is women, not NEMOW. The explorer, then, in undoing the BACK-SLANG, and turning the word NAMUS once more into English, would have suman,—a novel and very extraordinary rendering of women. Where a word is refractory in submitting to a back rendering, as in the case of pound, letters are made to change positions for the sake of harmony; thus, we have DUNOP, a pound, instead of dnuop which nobody could pleasantly pronounce. This will remind the reader of the Jews’ “old clo! old clo!” instead of old clothes, old clothes, which would tire even the patience of a Jew to repeat all day.