American Language (116 page)

36
I take the date from Slang Today and Yesterday, by Eric Partridge; 2nd ed.; London, 1935, p. 429. Partridge says that it was displaced, at least for a time, by the English
flapper
.

37
The Married Man’s Litany,
New Hampshire Spy
, June 10. I am indebted for the quotation to Dr. James Truslow Adams.

38
New York, 1934. Dr. Weseen seems to be uncertain about the meaning of the word
slang
. He extends it to embrace trade and class argots, the technical vocabularies of various arts and mysteries, common mispronunciations, and the general body of nonce-words. On what theory does he hold that
A No. 1, boss
, and
close call
are slang? Or
chaw, snoot
and
coupla?
Or
cold snap, eternal triangle
and
dead as a doornail?
Or
moron, journalese
and
Hoosier?
Or such painful artificialities as
Emersonthusiast, mound mainstay
(“the chief pitcher for a baseball team”), and
powerphobe
(“a person who fears the political power of public companies”). Some of his definitions are howlers, as, for example, “an uncouth person” for
leatherneck
(Tell it to the Marines!), and “the home of a newly married couple” — just that, and nothing more — for
love-nest
.

39
For example, A Thesaurus of Slang, by Howard N. Rose; New York, 1934. Rose’s aim is the lowly one of aiding writers of pulp fiction. The ordinary English words are listed alphabetically, and the equivalents in slang or argot follow them. Thus the fictioneer who yearns to give verisimilitude to his otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative may learn readily what college students call a library or a lavatory, and how hoboes distinguish between the professional levels of their trade.

40
2nd ed.; London, 1935. It contains a long and interesting history of modern slang, and separate chapters on various varieties of cant and argot.

41
Tokyo, 1931.

42
In seven volumes; London, 1890–1904. This huge work is mainly devoted to cant, but it also contains a great deal of English and American slang. About 15,000 terms are listed. In many cases there are dated quotations, but the dates are not always accurate. In his preface Farmer promised to include a bibliography, a vocabulary of foreign slang, and a study of comparative slang, but this intention seems to have been abandoned. An abridgment in one volume by the same authors appeared in London in 1905. Farmer alone printed a Dictionary of Americanisms in London in 1889. It included relatively little slang.

43
In two volumes; London, 1889–90. It listed about 4800 terms, and like Slang and Its Analogues was privately printed. There was a second edition in 1897.

44
Usually called simply the Slang Dictionary. The first edition appeared in London in 1859. There were later editions in 1860, 1864, and 1874, and many reprints.

45
The more respectable literature, running down to 1922, is listed in A Bibliography of Writings on the English Language, by Arthur G. Kennedy; Cambridge and New Haven, 1927, p. 419
ff
. There is a briefer bibliography in the third edition of the present work; New York, 1928, p. 463
ff
. For the period since 1922 the bibliographies printed in each issue of
American Speech
and annually in the
Publications of the Modern Language Association
are useful, though they are far from complete.

46
In a review of the Weseen Dictionary of American Slang, March 15, 1935.

47
May 14, 1931.

48
American Slang, Manchester
Guardian Weekly
, March 8, 1935.

49
London
Evening News
, April 30, 1934.

50
The same quest is sometimes pursued by Americans. See, for example, Shakespeare and American Slang, by Frederic S. Marquardt,
American Speech
, Dec., 1928, and Slang From Shakespeare, by Anderson M. Baten; Hammond, Ind., 1931.

51
Prendre sa chevre
has been traced to Henri Estienne’s Satires,
c
. 1585. It is to be found also in Montaigne and Moliére, and was included in the 1776 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie. Mr. Rowland M. Myers, to whom I am indebted here, suggests that Estienne may have picked it up in the course of his Greek studies. I have been told that the locution originated, in America, in the fact that the old-time horse-trainers, having a nervous horse to handle, put a goat in its stall to give it company. When the goat was taken away the horse yielded to the heebie-jeebies, and so was easily beaten on the track. A variant etymology was printed in the London
Morning Post
, Jan. 31, 1935. It was so precious that it deserves to be embalmed: “Among the Negroes in Harlem it is the custom for each household to keep a goat to act as general scavenger. Occasionally one man will steal another’s goat, and the household debris then accumulates, to the general annoyance.” The phrase “Let George do it,” once so popular in the United States, is said by some to have been only a translation of “Laissez faire a Georges,” which originated in France during the Fifteenth Century, and at the start had satirical reference to the multiform activities of Cardinal Georges d’Amboise, Prime Minister to Louis XII.

52
The Way They Talk Over There, Dec. 10, 1927.

53
I am informed by Staff Sergeant J. R. Ulmer, U.S.A., that
dog-robber
is an enlisted man’s term; the officers commonly use
striker
. In the same way, the enlisted men speak of
civvies
and the officers of
cits
(civilian clothes). Sergeant Ulmer says that the Regular Army makes little use of a number of terms that are commonly believed to be in its vocabulary, e.g.,
rookie:
it prefers
John
or
dumb John
.

54
I am indebted here to Dr. H. K. Croessman and to Mr. Elrick B. Davis. See A.E.F. English, by Mary Paxton Keeley,
American Speech
, 1930, and Soldier Slang, by Capt. Elbridge Colby, U.S.A., eight articles,
Our Army
, Oct., 1929 — June, 1930. An anonymous article in the
Stars and Stripes
, the newspaper of the A.E.F., for April 12, 1918, is also worth consulting. For British war slang see Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, 1914–18, by John Brophy and Eric Partridge; London, 1930; Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases, by Edward Fraser and John Gibbons; and War Words, in Contemporary English, by W. E. Collinson; Leipzig, 1927, p. 91
ff
. The book by Brophy and Partridge also includes American terms, but there are many omissions, and a few gross errors. Its vocabulary is amplified in Additions to a Volume on the Slang and the Idioms of the World War, by Eugene S. McCartney,
Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters
, Vol. X, 1928. See also Linguistic Processes as Illustrated by War Slang, by the same, the same, Vol. III, 1923. (For the last two I am indebted to Dr. W. W. Bishop, librarian of the University of Michigan.) For French war slang see The Slang of the Poilu, by Eric Partridge,
Quarterly Review
, April, 1932; L’Argot de la guerre, by Albert Dauzet; Paris, 1918; L’Argot des poilus, by François Dechelette; Paris, 1918; Le Langage des poilus, by Claude Lambert; Bordeaux, 1915; L’Argot des tranchées, by Lazar Saineau; Paris, 1915; and Le Poilu tel qu’il se parle, by Gaston Esnault; Paris, 1919. For German, see Wie der Feldgraue spricht, by Karl Bergmann; Giessen, 1916, and Deutsche Soldatensprache, by O. Mausser; Strassburg, 1917.

55
There have been several studies of the use of slang by the authors of fiction, British and American, but rather curiously all of them are by foreigners,
e.g.
, Slang bei Sinclair Lewis, Hanes-Werner Wasmuth; Hamburg, 1935; Slang and Cant in Jerome K. Jerome’s Works, by Olaf E. Bosson; Cambridge (England), 1911; Das Prinzip der Ver-wendung des Slang bei Dickens, by Karl Westendorff; Greifswald, 1923. Dickens himself printed an article on slang in
Household Words
, Sept. 24, 1853.

56
See All Around the Town, by Herbert Asbury; New York, 1934, p. 215.

57
There is a discussion of these borrowings in The American Underworld and English Cant, by Eric Partridge, printed in American Tramp and Underworld Slang, edited by Godfrey Irwin; London, 1931, p. 255
ff
.

58
A
Fence
Turns
Beef
Before a
Beak
, London
Evening News
, Nov. 21, 1933. In the third of a series of articles entitled London of the Crooks, printed in the same newspaper during June and July, 1935, George Dilnot printed definitions of
wise-guy, sucker, approach, build-up, pay-off, in-and-in, come-on
and
easy-mark
, all of them apparently borrowings from the cant of American thieves. Like the general slang of the Republic it is much more pungent than its English congener. Consider, for example, the literal English
mouthpiece
and the synecdochical American
lip
, both meaning a lawyer.

59
The Jargon of the Underworld,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Pt. X, 1927.

60
For example, Criminal Slang, by Louis E. Jackson and C. R. Hell-yer; Portland, Ore., 1914; It’s Greek to You — but the Crooks Get It, by Howard McLellan,
Collier’s
, Aug. 8, 1925; Criminalese, by James J. Finerty; Los Angeles, 1926; the Argot of the Underworld, by David W. Maurer,
American Speech
, Dec., 1931; The Language of the Underworld, by Ernest Booth,
American Mercury
, May, 1928; Crook Argot, by Maurice G. Smith,
American Speech
, Feb., 1928; The Chatter of Guns, by Charles G. Givens,
Saturday Evening Post
, April 13, 1929. Joseph M. Sullivan, who printed a brief glossary under the title of Criminal Slang; Boston, 1908, returned to the subject in two articles under the same title,
New England Magazine
, July, 1910, and
American Lain Review
, Nov.-Dec., 1918. A few of the terms in the argot of English criminals are listed in English Underworld Slang,
Variety
, April 8, 1931, reprinted in
American Speech
, June, 1931, p. 391
ff
.

61
Fin
, obviously from
fünf
, means five. It is used impartially to designate five dollars, a five-dollar bill and a five-year sentence. Sometimes
finif
, which is closer to
fünf
, is used in place of it.
Spiel
, for
spielen
, to play or perform, has got into ordinary American slang.
Gelt
, meaning money in general, needs no gloss.
Kosher
, in criminal argot, has come to mean reliable, trustworthy.
Kibitzer
is employed, as in non-felonious American, to designate an onlooker, and especially one who offers unsolicited advice.
Yentzer
means a cheater.
Ganov
, a thief, survives in its original form, and has also produced derivatives. Thus:
gun
, from its first syllable, means any sort of criminal, but especially a pickpocket;
gun-mob
means a gang, and
gun-moll
means a criminal’s girl.
Gun
has bred
cannon
, of the same meaning.

62
The Language of the Underworld,
American Mercury
, May, 1928. Mr. Booth is himself a felon of long professional experience, and is at the moment undergoing incarceration in Folsom Prison in California.

63
I Wonder Who’s Driving Her Now, by William G. Shepherd,
Journal of American Insurance
, Feb., 1929.

64
See Junker Lingo, by David W. Maurer,
American Speech
, April, 1933, and Addenda to Junker Lingo, by V. F. Nelson, the same, Oct., 1933.

65
It usually appears as
the real McCoy
. Its origin is disputed. One current etymology connects it with Bill
McCoy
, an eminent rum-runner in the heyday of Rum Row. Another holds that it comes from the name of Kid
McCoy
, welterweight champion of the world, 1898–1900. The story runs that a drunk once picked a quarrel with McCoy and refused to believe that he was the prize-fighter. After McCoy’s fist had done its work, the drunk picked himself up, saying “It’s the real
McCoy.
” See The Real
McCoy
, by P. R. Beath,
American Speech
, Feb., 1932, p. 239.

66
Vocabularies of the terms employed by racketeers during their Golden Age are to be found in The Argot of the Racketeers, by James P. Burke,
American Mercury
, Dec, 1930, and English As It Is Spoken Owes Debt to Racketeer, New York
World
, Nov. 17, 1929. For an account of the contribution of Prohibition to the general speech see Volstead English, by Achsah Hardin,
American Speech
, Dec., 1931.

67
See Table Talk,
San Quentin Bulletin
, Jan., 1931; Can Cant, by J. Louis Kuethe, Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Dec. 9, 1932; Prison Lingo, by Herbert Yenne,
American Speech
, March, 1927; Convicts’ Jargon, by George Milburn, the same, Aug., 1931; A Prison Dictionary (Expurgated), the same, Oct., 1933, and Prison Parlance, by J. Louis Kuethe, the same, Feb., 1934.

68
The Argot of an Orphans’ Home, by L. W. Merryweather,
American Speech
, Aug., 1932.

69
The best vocabulary of it is probably that in American Tramp and Underworld Slang, by Godfrey Irwin; London, 1931. Mr. Irwin spent “more than twenty years as a tramp on the railroads and roads of the United States, Canada, Mexico and Central America, and on tramp steamers in Central American waters.” Other useful articles are Hobo Cant, by F. H. Sidney,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. V, Pt. II, 1919; Hobo Lingo, by Nicholas Klein,
American Speech
, Sept., 1926; The Argot of the Vagabond, by Charlie Samolar, the same, June, 1927; More Hobo Lingo, by Howard F. Barker, the same, Sept., 1927; The Vocabulary of Bums, by Vernon W. Saul (alias K. C. Slim), the same, June, 1929; Junglese, by Robert E. Oliver, the same, June, 1932; How the Hobo Talks, by Charles Ashleigh,
Everyman
(London), May 21, 1931; Wobbly Talk, by Stewart H. Holbrook,
American Mercury
, Jan., 1926.