| Gipsy. | English. |
| Bamboozle, to perplex or mislead by hiding. Modern Gipsy. | Bamboozle, to delude, cheat, or make a fool of any one. |
| Bosh, rubbish, nonsense, offal. Gipsy and Persian. | Bosh, stupidity, foolishness. |
| Cheese, thing or article, “That’s the CHEESE,” or thing. Gipsy and Hindoo. | Cheese, or CHEESY, a first-rate or very good article. |
| Chive, the tongue. Gipsy. | Chive, or CHIVEY, a shout. To CHIVEY, to hunt down with shouts. |
| Cuta, a gold coin. Danubian Gipsy. | Couter, a sovereign, twenty shillings. |
| Dade, or Dadi, a father. Gipsy. | Daddy, nursery term for father.(*) |
| Distarabin, a prison. Gipsy. | Sturabin, a prison. |
| Gad, or Gadsi, a wife. Gipsy. | Gad, a female scold; a woman who tramps over the country with a beggar or hawker. |
| Gibberish, the language of Gipsies, synonymous with Slang. Gipsy. | Gibberish, rapid and unmeaning speech. |
| Ischur, Schur, or Chur, a thief. Gipsy and Hindoo. | Cur, a mean or dishonest man.(*) |
| Lab, a word. Gipsy. | Lobs, words. |
| Lowe, or Lowr, money. Gipsy and Wallachian. | Lowre, money. Ancient Cant. |
| Mami, a grandmother. Gipsy. | Mammy, or Mamma, a mother, formerly sometimes used for grandmother.(*) |
| Mang, or Maung, to beg. Gipsy and Hindoo. | Maund, to beg. |
| Mort, a free woman,—one for common use amongst the male Gipsies, so appointed by Gipsy custom. Gipsy. | Mot, a prostitute. |
| Mu, the mouth. Gipsy and Hindoo. | Moo, or Mun, the mouth. |
| Mull, to spoil or destroy. Gipsy. | Mull, to spoil, or bungle.(*) |
| Pal, a brother. Gipsy. | Pal, a partner, or relation. |
| Pané, water. Gipsy. Hindoo, PAWNEE. | Parney, rain. |
| Rig, a performance. Gipsy. | Rig, a frolic, or “spree.” |
| Romany, speech or language. Spanish Gipsy. | Romany, the Gipsy language. |
| Rome, or Romm, a man. Gipsy and Coptic. | Rum, a good man, or thing. In the Robbers’ language of Spain (partly Gipsy), RUM signifies a harlot. |
| Romee, a woman. Gipsy. | Rumy, a good woman or girl. |
| Slang, the language spoken by Gipsies. Gipsy. | Slang, low, vulgar, unauthorized language. |
| Tawno, little. Gipsy. | Tanny, Teeny, little. |
| Tschib, or Jibb, the tongue. Gipsy and Hindoo. | Jibb, the tongue; Jabber,[9] quick-tongued, or fast talk. |
[In those instances indicated by a (*), it is doubtful whether we are indebted to the Gipsies for the terms. Dad, in Welsh, also signifies a father. Cur is stated to be a mere term of reproach, like Dog, which in all European languages has been applied in an abusive sense. Objections may also be raised against Gad, Maund, and many other of these parallels. We have, however, no wish to present them as infallible; our idea is merely to call the reader’s attention to the undoubted similarity between both the sound and the sense in most examples.]
Here, then, we have the remarkable fact of at least a few words of pure Gipsy origin going the round of Europe, passing into this country before the Reformation, and coming down to us through numerous generations purely by the mouths of the people. They have seldom been written or used in books, and it is simply as vulgarisms that they have reached us. Only a few are now Cant, and some are household words. The word jockey, as applied to a dealer or rider of horses, came from the Gipsy, and means in that language a whip. The word, used as a verb, is an instance of modern slang grown out of the ancient. Our standard dictionaries give, of course, none but conjectural etymologies. Another word, bamboozle, has been a sore difficulty with lexicographers. It is not in the old dictionaries, although it is extensively used in familiar or popular language for the last two centuries; and is, in fact, the very kind of word that such writers as Swift, Butler, L’Estrange, and Arbuthnot would pick out at once as a telling and most serviceable term. It is, as we have seen, from the Gipsy; and here we must state that it was Boucher who first drew attention to the fact, although in his remarks on the dusky tongue he has made an evident mistake by concluding it to be identical with its offspring, Cant. Other parallel instances, with but slight variations from the old Gipsy meanings, might be mentioned; but sufficient examples have been adduced to show that Marsden, a great Oriental scholar in the last century, when he declared before the Society of Antiquaries that the Cant of English thieves and beggars had nothing to do with the language spoken by the despised Gipsies, was in error. Had the Gipsy tongue been analysed and committed to writing three centuries ago, there is every probability that many scores of words now in common use could be at once traced to its source, having been adopted as our language has developed towards its present shape through many varied paths. Instances continually occur nowadays of street vulgarisms ascending to the drawing-rooms of respectable society. Who, then, can doubt that the Gipsy-vagabond alliance of three centuries ago has contributed its quota of common words to popular speech?
Thomas Moore, in a humorous little book, Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress, 1819, says, “The Gipsy language, with the exception of such terms as relate to their own peculiar customs, differs but little from the regular Flash or Cant language.” But this was magnifying the importance of the alliance. Moore, we should think, knew nothing of the Gipsy tongue other than the few Cant words put into the mouths of the beggars in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedy of the Beggar’s Bush, and Ben Jonson’s Masque of the Gipsies Metamorphosed,—hence his confounding Cant with Gipsy speech, and appealing to the Glossary of Cant for so-called “Gipsy” words at the end of the Life of Bamfylde Moore Carew, to bear him out in his assertion. Still his remark bears much truth, and proof of this would have been found long ago if any scholar had taken the trouble to examine the “barbarous jargon of Cant,” and to have compared it with Gipsy speech. George Borrow, in his Account of the Gipsies in Spain, thus eloquently concludes his second volume; speaking of the connexion of the Gipsies with Europeans, he says:—“Yet from this temporary association were produced two results; European fraud became sharpened by coming into contact with Asiatic craft; whilst European tongues, by imperceptible degrees, became recruited with various words (some of them wonderfully expressive), many of which have long been stumbling-blocks to the philologist, who, whilst stigmatizing them as words of mere vulgar invention, or of unknown origin, has been far from dreaming that a little more research or reflection would have proved their affinity to the Sclavonic, Persian, or Romaic, or perhaps to the mysterious object of his veneration, the Sanscrit, the sacred tongue of the palm-covered regions of Ind; words originally introduced into Europe by objects too miserable to occupy for a moment his lettered attention—the despised denizens of the tents of Roma.” These words might with very little alteration be ascribed to the subject of which this volume is supposed—indeed hoped—to be a handbook.
But the Gipsies, their speech, their character—bad enough, as all the world testifies, but yet not devoid of redeeming qualities—their history, and their religious belief, have been totally disregarded, and their poor persons buffeted and jostled about until it is a wonder that any trace of origin or national speech remains. On the Continent they received better attention at the hands of learned men. Their language was taken down in writing and examined, their history was traced, and their extraordinary customs and practice of living in the open air, and eating raw, and often putrid meat, were explained. They ate reptiles and told fortunes because they had learnt to do so through their forefathers centuries back in Hindostan; and they devoured carrion because the Hindoo proverb—“That which God kills is better than that killed by man”[10]—was still in their remembrance. This is the sort of proverb, we should imagine, that would hardly commend itself to any one who had not an unnatural and ghoule-like tendency anxious for full development. Grellman, a learned German, was their principal historian, and to him, and those who have followed him, we are almost entirely indebted for the little we know of their language. The first European settlement of the Gipsies was in the provinces adjoining the Danube, Moldau and Theiss, where M. Cogalniceano, in his Essai sur les Cigains de la Moldo-Valachie, estimates them at 200,000. Not a few of our ancient and modern Cant and Slang terms are Wallachian and Greek words, picked up by these wanderers from the East, and added to their common stock.
Gipsy, then, started, and was partially merged into Cant; and the old story told by Harrison and others, that the first inventor of canting was hanged for his pains, would seem to be a humorous invention, for jargon as it is, it was doubtless of gradual formation, like all other languages or systems of speech. Most of the modern Gipsies know the old Cant words as well as their own tongue—or rather what remains of it. As Borrow says, “The dialect of the English Gipsies is mixed with English words.”[11] Those of the tribe who frequent fairs, and mix with English tramps, readily learn the new words, as they are adopted by what Harman calls “the fraternity of vagabonds.” Indeed, the old Cant is a common language to the vagrants of many descriptions and every possible origin who are scattered over the British Isles.
English Cant has its mutabilities like every other system of speech, and is considerably altered since the first dictionary was compiled by Harman in 1566. A great many words are unknown in the present tramps’ and thieves’ vernacular. Some of them, however, still bear their old definitions, while others have adopted fresh meanings. “Abraham-man” is yet seen in our modern “sham Abraham,” or “play the old soldier”—i.e., to feign sickness or distress. “Autum” is still a church or chapel amongst Gipsies; and “beck,” a constable, is our modern Cant and Slang “beak,” once a policeman, but now a magistrate. “Bene,” or “bone,” stands for good in Seven Dials and the back streets of Westminster; and “bowse” is our modern “booze,” to drink or fuddle. A “bowsing ken” was the old Cant term for a public-house; and “boozing ken,” in modern Cant, has precisely the same meaning. There is little doubt, though, that the pronunciations were always as they are now, so far at least as these two instances are concerned. “Cassan” is both old and modern Cant for cheese; the same may be said of “chattes,” or “chatts,” the gallows. “Cofe,” or “cove,” is still a vulgar synonym for a man. “Dudes” was Cant for clothes; we now say “duds.” “Flag” is still a fourpenny-piece; and “fylche” means to rob. “Ken” is a house, and “lick” means to thrash; “prancer” is yet known amongst rogues as a horse; and to “prig,” amongst high and low, is to steal. Three centuries ago, if one beggar said anything disagreeable to another, the person annoyed would say, “Stow you,” or hold your peace; low people now say, “Stow it,” equivalent to “Be quiet.” There is, so far as the Slang goes, no actual difference in the use of these phrases, the variation being in the pronouns—in fact, in the direction. “Trine” is still to hang; “wyn” yet stands for a penny. And many other words, as will be seen in the Dictionary, still retain their ancient meaning.
As specimens of those words which have altered their original Cant signification, may be instanced “chete,” now written cheat. “Chete” was in ancient Cant what chop is in the Canton-Chinese—an almost inseparable adjunct. Everything was termed a “chete,” and qualified by a substantive-adjective, which showed what kind of a “chete” was meant; for instance, “crashing-chetes” were teeth; a “moffling-chete,” was a napkin; a “topping-chete,” was the gallows, and a “grunting-chete,” was a pig. Cheat nowadays means to cozen or defraud, and lexicographers have tortured etymology for an original—but without success. Escheats and escheatours have been named, but with great doubts; indeed, Stevens, the learned commentator on Shakspeare, acknowledged that he “did not recollect to have met with the word cheat in our ancient writers.”[12] Cheat, to defraud, then, is no other than an old Cant term somewhat altered in its meaning,[13] and as such it should be described in the next etymological dictionary. Another instance of a change in the meaning of the old Cant, but the retention of the word, is seen in “cly,” formerly to take or steal, now a pocket; and with the remembrance of a certain class of low characters, a curious connexion between the two meanings is discovered. “Make” was a halfpenny: we now say “mag,”—“make” being modern Cant for getting money by any possible means, their apophthegm being—“Get money the best way you can, but make it somehow.” “Milling” stood for stealing; it ultimately became a pugilistic term, and then faded into nothingness, “the cove wot loves a mill,” being a thing of the past. “Nab” was a head,—low people now say “nob,” the former meaning, in modern Cant, to steal or seize. “Pek” was meat,—we still say “peckish,” when hungry. “Peckish” is though more likely to be derived from the action of birds when eating, as all slang has its origin in metaphor. “Prygges, dronken Tinkers or beastly people,” as old Harman wrote, would scarcely be understood now; a “prig,” in the 19th century, is a pickpocket or thief. He is also a mean, contemptible little “cuss,” who is not, as a rule, found in low life, but who could be very well spared from that of the middle and upper classes. “Quier,” or “queer,” like cheat, was a very common prefix, and meant bad or wicked,—it now means odd, curious, or strange; but to the ancient Cant we are possibly indebted for the word, which etymologists should remember.[14] “Rome,” or “rum,” formerly meant good, or of the first quality, and was extensively used like cheat and queer,—indeed as an adjective it was the opposite of the latter. “Rum” now means curious, and is synonymous with queer; thus,—“rummy old bloke,” or a “queer old man.” Here again we see the origin of an every-day word, scouted by lexicographers and snubbed by respectable persons, but still a word of frequent and popular use. “Yannam” meant bread; “pannum” is the word now. Other instances could be pointed out, but they will be observed in the Dictionary.
Several words are entirely obsolete. “Alybbeg” no longer means a bed, nor “askew” a cup. “Booget,”[15] nowadays, would not be understood for a basket; neither would “gan” pass current for mouth. “Fullams” was the old Cant term for false or loaded dice, and although used by Shakspeare in this sense, is now unknown and obsolete. Indeed, as Moore somewhere remarks, the present Greeks of St. Giles’s themselves would be thoroughly puzzled by many of the ancient canting songs,—taking, for example, the first verse of an old favourite—
“Bing out, bien Morts, and toure and toure,
Bing out, bien Morts, and toure;
For all your duds are bing’d awast;
The bien cove hath the loure.”[16]