A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant/History

by Albert Barrère and Charles Godfrey Leland

A BRIEF

HISTORY OF ENGLISH SLANG.

By CHARLES G. LELAND.

T does not seem to have occurred to any writer that the chief reason why the early history of purely English slang is obscure, is because that previous to a certain determinate date, there was really so little of it, that it hardly existed at all. There can be no biography of a child worth writing so long as it can babble only a few words. It is probable that of these few early slang words, none have been lost. During the Saxon Early English and Middle English periods, there were provincial dialects, familiar forms of speech, and vulgarisms, but whether a distinct canting tongue was current in England, remains as yet to be established. That the tinkers or metal-workers, who roamed all over Great Britain, were a peculiar people,^[1] with a peculiar Celtic language called Shelta, may be true, but canting as yet did not exist.

No discoveries have as yet been made which cast much light on the process by which English canting, or the language of the loose and dangerous classes, was first formed. This much we know, that in England, to a beginning of antiquated and provincial or perverted words, a few additions were made of Welsh, Irish, or Gaelic, with here and there a contribution from the Continent. It seems to be evident that this rill of impure English, most defiled, was a very slender one. But as C. J. Ribton Turner suggests, it was the arrival of the gypsies in England about 1505, speaking by themselves a perfect language, which stimulated the English nomads to greatly improve their own rude and scanty jargon. According to Samuel Rowlande, whose work, "The Runnagate's Race," appeared in 1610, one Cock Lorrell, a great rascal, but evidently a man of talents, became, in 1501, the acknowledged head of all the strollers in England. This person formed his followers into a regular guild or order, according to the spirit of the time in which he lived, and observing that the gypsies, under their leader, Giles Hathor, were a powerful and rapidly increasing body, he proposed to them a general council and union of interests and language.

"After a time that these vp-start Lossels had got vnto a head, the two chief Commaunders of both these regiments met at the Diuels-arse-a-peak, there to parle and intreete of matters that might tend to the establishing of this their new found gouernment; and first of all they think it fit to deuise a certaine kinde of Language, to the end that their cousenings, knaueries, and villainies might not be so easily perceiued and knowne in places where they come."

Here Samuel Rowlande, speaking ignorantly, says that this tongue was made up out of Latin, English, and Dutch, with a few words borrowed from Spanish and French. To this day it is common enough for "travellers," or gypsies, to tell the ignorant that the language which they speak is Latin, French, or Dutch, &c. From the language itself, as given by Robert Copland (1535), and Harman ("Caveat for Cursitors") in 1567, it appears that the gypsies actually contributed a certain amount of Romany, but that with their natural dislike to teach it, they made this contribution as small as possible—though it is larger than Mr. Turner supposes. He has, however, with very approximate accuracy, shown the various Celtic origins of the terms not reducible to English or Saxon. Of Latin he finds only eight words, of which two are very doubtful, while two others, gerry (i.e. jerry), excrement, and peck, meat, are plainly from the Romany jirr (rectum vel excrementum), and pekker, roast, i.e., roast meat. It is too far afield to seek these common gypsy words in the Latin gerræ, trifles, and pecus, cattle.

This was the beginning made of the canting or thieves' tongue, and it must be admitted that the first meeting of this Philological Oriental Congress for the purpose of forming a language was probably not deficient in a certain picturesque element, and an able artist might find a worse subject than this grand council of the gypsies and vagabonds in their cavern among the hills. It is to be observed that Harman, a magistrate who was not only very familiar with every type of criminals, but who was the first who ever published a canting vocabulary, declares that it was only within thirty years previous to 1567 that the dangerous classes had begun to use a familiar jargon at all. Mr. Turner says that this statement is little better than a guess at the truth; but Harman, who seems to have been an earnest and honest writer, explicitly declares that his statement was the result of inquiry among many, or to use his own words: "As far as I can learne or understand by the examination of a number of them, their language—which they terme peddelars Frenche or canting—began but within these xxx yeeres or lyttle above."

What confirms this statement, if it does not actually prove it, is the fact that Harman, though he evidently laboured hard to make a full vocabulary and had many facilities for collecting words, gives us in all only about 160, while those who came after him in the field are accused of only repeating him. But the truth probably is, that Harman was quite right; canting was really young in his time, and small in proportion to its age. Its growth may be very clearly traced in dramatic, comic, or criminal literature from 1535, as shown by Robert Copland in his "Hye Way to the Spyttel House," down to the present day.

In old canting the most striking element is the large proportion of Celtic words, drawn from all parts of Great Britain. Turner has observed that the Act 5 Edward III. c. 14, affords evidence that the Welsh gwestwr, "unbidden guest," or vagabond, was a public nuisance in England prior to 1331. In fact the Welsh and Irish stroller, or professional rogue and beggar, was a common type represented and ridiculed in broadsides or plays till within a century.^[2] Edicts and Acts of Parliament, and the most vigorous punishment and reshipment of "ye vacabones" to their homes, were utterly ineffectual to keep them out of England. In the English "kennick" or canting of the lowest classes of the present day, the greater proportion of Celtic terms are apparently not taken directly from Gaelic, Erse, Welsh, or Manx, but from a singular and mysterious language called Shelta (Celtic?), or Minklas Thari (tinkers' talk), which is spoken by a very large proportion of all provincial tinkers (who claim for it great antiquity), as well as by many other vagabonds, especially by all the Irish who are on the roads. The very existence of this dialect was completely unknown until 1867, its vocabulary and specimens of the language being first published in "The Gypsies" (Boston, 1880). It has been ingeniously conjectured by a reviewer that as all the Celtic tinkers of Great Britain formed, until the railroad era, or about 1845, an extremely close corporation, always intermarrying, and as they are all firmly persuaded that their tinkerdom and tongue are extremely ancient, they may possibly be descendants of the early bronze-workers, who also perambulated the country in bands, buying up broken implements and selling new ones. This is at least certain, that the tinkers as a body were very clannish, had a strongly-marked character, a well-developed language of their own, and that while they were extremely intimate with the gypsies, often taking wives from among them, and being sometimes half-bloods, they still always remained tinklers and spoke Shelta among themselves. The nature of this alliance is very singular. In Scotland the tinkler is popularly identified with the gypsy, but even half-blood tinklers, such as the Macdonalds,^[3] who speak Romany, do not call themselves gypsies, but tinklers. The caste deserves this brief mention since it has apparently been the chief source through which Celtic words have come into English canting—an assertion which is not the mere conjecture of a philologist, but the opinion of more than one very intelligent and well-informed vagabond. It is very remarkable that though Shelta is more or less extensively spoken even in London, and though it has evidently had a leading influence in contributing the Celtic element to canting, thus far only one writer has ever published a line relative to it. Hotten or his collaborateurs seem, in common with Turner and all other writers on vagabonds, never to have heard of its existence. It will probably be recognised by future analysts of canting that in all cases where a corrupted Celtic word is found in it, it will be necessary to ascertain if it did not owe its change to having passed through the medium of Shelta.

Though the gypsy contribution to canting was not extensive, it was much larger than many extensive writers on vagabonds have supposed, and it is worth noting that a number of our most characteristic slang words, such as row, shindy, tool (in driving), mash (i.e., to fascinate), pal, chivvy, and especially the arch-term slang itself, are all Romany. It is not remarkable that Cock Lorrell recognised in the gypsies "a race with a back-bone," and one from whom something could be learned. Their blood "had rolled through scoundrels ever since the flood," and from the beginning they had spoken not a mere slang, but a really beautiful and perfect language resembling Hindustani or Ūrdū, but which was much older. The constituents of this tongue are Hindi and Persian—the former greatly predominating—with an admixture of other Indo-Aryan dialects. It was first suggested in "English Gypsies and their Language" that the true origin of the Rom or gypsy was to be found among the Dom, a very low caste in India, which sprung from the Domar, a mountain tribe of shepherd-robbers; and recent researches by Mr. Grierson among the Bihari Dom have gone far to confirm the conjecture. Its author also discovered that there exists to-day in India a wandering tribe known as Trablūs, who call themselves Rom, and who are in all respects identical with the Syrian and European gypsies. About the tenth century, owing to political convulsions, there were in India a great number of outcasts of different kinds. Among these the Jâts, a fierce and warlike tribe, crushed by Mahometan power, seemed to have coalesced with the Doms or Rom, the semi-Persian Luri or Nuri (originally Indian), and others, and to have migrated westward. Miklosich, in a very learned work, has, by analysing the language as it now exists, pointed out the Greek, Slavonian, and other words which they picked up en route. It was about the beginning of the fifteenth century that a band of about 300 of these wanderers first appeared in Germany, whence they in a few years spread themselves over Europe, so that within a decade many thousands of them penetrated to every corner of the Continent. They were evidently led by men of great ability. They represented themselves as pilgrims, who, because they had become renegades from Christianity, had been ordered by the King of Hungary as a penance to wander for fifty years as pilgrims. They had previously by telling the same story, but adapted to the faith of Mahomet, got a foothold in Egypt. They thus obtained official license to make themselves at home in every country, except in England, yet went there all the same. Andrew Borde, the eccentric physician, who lived during the reign of Henry VIII., was the first person who made (in 1542) a vocabulary of their language, which he did under the impression that it was "Egyptian" or the current tongue of Egypt. Bonaventura Vulcanius, in 1597, in his curious book "De Literis et Lingua Getarum," also gave specimens of Romany as "Nubian." The first European writer who discovered that Romany was really of Hindu origin, was J. C. Rudiger, and this he announced in a book entitled "Neuester Zuwachs der Sprachkunde," Halle 1782. He was followed by Grellmann, whose work was much more copious. It was translated into English at the beginning of this century, and passed through three editions. George Borrow, in his novels of "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye," published about 1845, and in "The Gypsies in Spain," first told the public much about this subject, and his influence was very great both in England and on the Continent in awakening an interest in it. Among more recent writers, Dr. Bath C. Smart, Francis Groome, and the writer, have been the principal collectors of Anglo-Romany lore. Borrow, who knew the gypsies so well, was far from being perfect in their language, as he declared positively that there are only 1200 words in the English dialect; more recent researches have more than doubled the number.

The next element of importance which enters into English slang of the middle type, subsequent to old cant, is Dutch. Of this there are two separate sources. In England, from the time of William of Orange until that of George II., there was a constant influx of Nederduytsch, while in America, the State of New York, while subject to Holland, contributed an equally large proportion of quaint expressions, and of these in time there was great interchange between the old country and the new. To detect many of these, one must go much deeper into Dutch than the standard dictionaries, and descend to Teirlinck's and other collections of thieves' slang, or dig into such old works as those of Sewel, in which the vulgar and antiquated words "to be avoided" are indicated by signs. As English and Dutch belong to the same stock, it naturally results that numbers of our provincial or obsolete terms are the same or nearly the same in both; in such cases we have generally placed them together. An examination of the work cannot fail to convince any one that our indebtedness to this source is much greater than has ever been supposed. But as these derivations are often as doubtful as they are numerous and plausible, the editor, with the example of Bellenden Kerr^[4] before him, would beg the reader to observe that in this work no ancient or foreign words are advanced as positively establishing the etymology of any slang expression, but are simply adduced as indicating possible relations. The day has gone by when it sufficed to show something like a resemblance in sound and meaning between a dozen Choctaw and as many Hebrew words, to prove positively that the Red Indians are Jews. But "wild guess-work" is still current even in very learned works, and though "in a pioneer way" it is useful in affording hints to true philologists, it should never claim to be more than mere conjecture.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth many Italian words found their way not only into English literature but also into slang, and additions have occasionally been made since then from the same source. Thus fogle, a handkerchief, is beyond question the Italian foglia, a leaf, also slang for a silk handkerchief (Florentine follo), and not the German vogel, a bird, as Hotten declares. The number of these derivations is much larger than has ever been supposed, and much of the mine is still unworked.

Old canting retained its character until the reign of Charles II., when a great deal of general slang began to be current, which was not connected in any way with the jargon of the dangerous classes. Bite, macaroni, and quiz were slang, but not cant; they originated in or were first made popular by fashionable people. Following the Spanish Quevedo, and other writers of the vida tunantesca, or "tagrag-and-bobtail school," as models, not only the dramatists, but authors like Sir Roger L'Estrange and Defoe used directly, or put into the mouths of their heroes, a familiar, free and easy, offhand style, which was anything but conventional, or as many may think, correct. Pedantic writers also continued for more than a century to deliberately manufacture in great quantity, from Latin, words of the kind used by the unfortunate Limousin student who was beaten by Gargantua. An "about-town" dialect was developed by "bloods" and wits, in which Dutch, Italian, and French began to appear more frequently than of yore. Gypsy and old canting terms rose now and then from the depths, or dregs, and remained on the surface. It was during this which may be called the middle slang epoch, that those conventional or colloquial terms began to be current, which, without being vulgar or directly associated with crime, were, owing to their novelty, flippancy, or "fastness," still kept in limbo, or under probation. It has been truly enough said that the old slang was altogether coarse or vulgar, and that there was subsequently a great increase in the number of low and obscene terms classed with it, a growth which went on vigorously until the end of the reign of George IV. But while Butler, Swift, Tom Brown, Grose, and scores of minor artists dealt out more or less "dirt or deviltry," it should be remembered that the accretion of new phrases, which were in no way "immoral," was really much greater.

About this time, during the latter part of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth, was the beginning of the vast array of words now in familiar use, which are unjustly called slang, because that term forces upon them associations with vulgarity and crime which they no more merit than that leaves or flowers should be identified with the dirt from which they grow. This quarantine language is simply the natural and inevitable result of a rapid increase in inventions, needs, new sources of humour, and, in fact, of all social causes. New names are in as great demand as they were of yore, when heathen were converted and baptized in batches. Then they were often all called John or James by the thousand "for short," but now we are more discriminating and analytical. But it is to be observed that hitherto no writer whatever has ever dealt with these quarantined words or probationers in the spirit which they merit, or pointed out the fact that they fulfil a legitimate function in language, or attempted to collect them in a book.

It would appear to have been about a century ago that a few Yiddish, or Hebrew-German, words began to creep into English slang. When we consider that fully one-half of the Rothwalsch or real slang of Germany is of this kind of Hebrew, and also the great numbers of persons who speak it, it is remarkable that we really have so little of it. As an instance of the guess-work philology which we have alluded to, it may be pointed out that the common Jewish word gonnof (Hebrew ganef), a thief, is according to Hotten very old, in English, because it is found in a song of the time of Edward VI. as gnoffe!

"The country gnoffes, Hob, Dick, and Will,
⁠With clubs and clouted shoon,
Shall fill up Dussyn Dale
⁠With slaughtered bodies soon."

But gnoffe, according to Wright, does not mean a thief at all, but a churl (also an old miser). Its true root is probably in the Anglo-Saxon cneov, cnuf, or cnûvan (also cneav, knave), to bend, yield to, cneovjan (genuflectere). If country boors or peasants be therefore the meaning of gnoffes, it would be in Yiddish keferim. This remarkable dialect is now spoken by some thousands of persons in London, and there are one if not two newspapers published in it. The editor has not only the German-Jewish Chrestomatie of Max Grünbaum, and many books written in Yiddish, but also eleven vocabularies of it, one of which, a MS. of about 3000 words, is by far the most extensive ever compiled. It seems not unlikely that the word poker, as a game of cards, is derived from Yiddish, since in it pochger (from pochgen) means a man who in play conceals the state of his winnings or losses, or hides his hand. This is so eminently characteristic of poker that the resemblance seems to be something more than merely accidental There have always been Jewish cardplayers enough in the United States to have given the word. The most remarkable and desperate game of poker within the writer's knowledge (in which not only a fortune but a life were risked) occurred on board a Mississippi steamer, its hero being a Jew.

Of late years many Anglo-Indian and pidgin-English, or Anglo-Chinese words, have become familiar to the public. For the former our chief authority has been the "Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms," by Col. Henry Yule and the late Arthur Coke Burnell (870 pp. 8vo, London, John Murray, 1886), a copious work, as remarkable for extensive erudition as for sagacity, common-sense, and genial humour. For pidgin-English we have used the only work extant on the subject, viz., "Pidgin-English Ballads, with a Vocabulary," by C. G. Leland (London, Triibner & Co., 1887). This remarkable dialect, owing to the ease with which it is acquired, is now spreading so rapidly all over the East that Sir Richard Burton thinks that it may at no distant date become the lingua-franca of the whole world.

Anything like a distinct history of the development of English slang has hitherto been impossible, owing to the ignorance of most of those who have put themselves forward as its analysts and lexicographers. Samuel Rowlande told the world that gypsy and canting had resolved themselves into one and the same thing, and following his lead, one authority after the other, such as the author of the "Life of Bampfylde Moore Carew," gave us as "Gypsy" vocabularies, works in which hardly a trace of Romany was to be found. In vain did Grellmann, Hoyland, and George Borrow explain that these wanderers spoke an Oriental language—even Mr. Edward Gosse, in his "Memoir of Samuel Rowlande," says that "'Martin Markall' is entirely in prose, except some queer gypsy songs"—the "gypsy songs" in question having less resemblance to gypsy than English has to Spanish or French. The editor has before him a work written and published within a few years, called "The New York Slang Dictionary," in which the writer tells us that "bilk is a word in the gypsy language, from which most English slang is derived" (bilk not being Romany at all), and assures the reader that his book (which is simply a re-hash of Grose, with the addition of some purely modern Americanisms) will enable him to make himself understood in the slums of St. Petersburg, Paris, or in any country in the world! In common with far greater critics and scholars, he believes that gypsy is a mixture of all European tongues and corrupt English, when, in fact, it does not contain a single French word.^[5] Hotten had a far better knowledge of the constituent elements of slang, unfortunately he had not even an average "smattering" of the languages which must be understood, and that into their very provincialisms, argots, and corruptions, in order to solve the origin of all the really difficult problems in it. He knew that the poet, Thomas Moore, made a great mistake in believing that canting was gypsy, but he knew nothing whatever of Romany, and asserts that it is mingled up and confused with canting, and is ignorant enough to declare that "had the gypsy 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." This was the result of an erroneous belief that Mr. Borrow knew everything of English Romany that could be known, while the fact is that by comparison with Continental dialects, and with the aid of what Mr. Borrow did not know, it is tolerably certain that the English gypsy of three centuries ago is by no means the lost language which he assumed it to be.

The last and not least important element in English slang consists of Americanisms. The original basis or beginning of these is to be found in Yankeeisms or words and phrases peculiar at first to New England. They consisted chiefly of old English provincialisms, with an important addition of Dutch which came over the border from New York and New Jersey, and a few Canadian-French expressions. For these the dictionary of Mr. Bartlett is an invaluable source of reference. We cannot praise too highly the industry and sagacity manifested in that work. His weak point lies in the fact that having been guided by dictionaries such as that of Wright, he too frequently assumes that a word which is marked as provincial is not generally known in England. Hence he gives as peculiarly and solely American words which have no special claim to be regarded as such. In addition to these mostly Saxon-born terms, there is a much greater number of quaint eccentric expressions of Western and Southern growth, which increase at such a rate that one might easily compile from a very few newspapers an annual volume of new ones. Yet again, English slang phrases are continually being received and shifted into new meanings and forms, as caprice or need may dictate. It may surprise the reader to learn that the works of Artemus Ward, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and other standard humourists, are by no means the great mines of slang which they are popularly supposed to be. It is in the newspapers, especially in their reports, theatrical or local, and not infrequently in the "editorials," that the new racy and startling words occur, as they are improvised and picked up. This dictionary contains a large collection of true and recent American colloquial or slang phrases, and though the works of the great American humourists have been carefully searched for this purpose, it will be found that the majority of terms given are from other sources. The reader who is familiar with Bartlett and other writers on Americanisms, can judge for himself to what extent—or to what a slight extent—we are "indebted" to them. It is true that they are frequently cited, but in the great majority of instances it has been for the purpose of correction, emendation, or illustration of their definitions.

The history of Slang is that of the transition of languages into new forms, and from this point of view it may be assumed that such a work as the present will be of as great interest to the thorough student of history as the folk-lore to which it properly belongs, or anything else which indicates the phases of culture.

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1. John Bunyan, it may be remembered, once asked his father whether the tinkers were not "a peculiar people." Regarded from any point of view, this indicates that he suspected they were not English. Bunyan, according to recent researches, could not have been a gypsy, but as a tinker he must have known Shelta, or the old tinker's language, and therefore naturally suspected that he belonged to some kind of separate race.
2. A majority of those travellers and tramps in England, who are simply beggars and thieves, and who do not seek for work, are still Irish. Full information on this subject may be found in the "History of Vagrants and Vagrancy," by C. J. Ribton Turner; and it may be said with truth that all the criminals of the towns and cities put together do not injure the country at large so much as these creatures, who carry vice into every hamlet, and into the remotest corners of the kingdom.
3. It is needless to say that gypsies have assumed family names, such as Stanley, Lee, &c., and among others that of Macdonald.
4. The author of an ingenious and eccentric work in two volumes, in which he endeavoured to prove that most English proverbs, sayings, and nursery rhymes are all in old Dutch, and have an esoteric meaning, being really attacks on the Church.
5. George Borrow thinks that the word būddika, a shop, is from the French boutique. It is much more probably the Italian bottega, though it still more resembles the Spanish bodega.