Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
American Language Supplement 2 (136 page)
After the publication of this dictionary by B. E. there was an interval of nearly a century before England saw another work of importance in the same field. Then, in 1785, came the first edition of Captain Francis Grose’s “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” the foundation of every treatise on thieves’ cant and likewise on ordinary slang that has been done since. There was a second edition in 1788, and a third in 1796, five years after the author’s death. In 1811 there was a fourth, brought out under the title of “Lexicon Balatronicum” by Hewson Clarke, a literary hack of the time,
5
and in 1823 there was a fifth, with the original title restored
and Pierce Egan serving as editor.
1
Finally, there is the reprint issued in 1931, edited by Eric Partridge and limited to 550 copies. This reprint is based on the third edition of 1796, which seems to have embodied corrections and additions prepared by Grose himself. Partridge adds a brief biography of the author, and enriches the dictionary itself with a large number of glosses, some of them very valuable.
Grose was the son of a Swiss jeweler who came to England early in the Eighteenth Century, set up business in London, and acquired a moderate fortune. The son was born in 1731 or thereabout and received a good education, though he did not proceed to a university. His early interests were divided between drawing and military affairs. He was for many years adjutant and paymaster of the Hampshire militia, and meanwhile he became so well regarded as a draftsman and water-colorist that in 1766 he was elected a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists. On his father’s death in 1769 he came into enough money to put him at ease, and thereafter he devoted himself largely to antiquarian studies. Between 1773 and 1787 he published six volumes of “The Antiquities of England and Wales,” and at the time of his death in 1791 he had done two more on “The Antiquities of Scotland” (1789–91), and had nearly finished two on “The Antiquities of Ireland.” He was married and had seven children, one of whom rose to be deputy governor of New South Wales, but he was a gay dog and put in a large part of
his leisure investigating the night life of London. He also made a number of exploratory tours of the British Isles, and on one of them had a meeting with Robert Burns in Scotland which developed into a close friendship. Burns wrote two poems about him, in one of which, “On Captain Grose’s Peregrinations Through Scotland,” occur the famous lines:
A chiel’s amang ye, taking notes,
And, faith, he’ll prent it.
This couplet has been taken over by journalists as referring to their mystery, but it actually alludes to Grose’s antiquarian researches. Egan says that his nocturnal tours of the London underworld were made in company with a retainer named Batch, and goes on:
Batch and his master used frequently to start at midnight from the King’s Arms in Holborn in search of adventures. The back slums of St. Giles’s were explored again and again, and the captain and Batch made themselves as affable and jolly as the rest of the motley crew among the beggars, cadgers, thieves, etc., who at that time infested the Holy Land [
i.e.
, St. Giles’s]. It was from these nocturnal sallies and the slang expressions which continually assailed his ears, that Grose was first induced to compile “A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.”
This last may be true, but it is somewhat misleading. The fact is that Grose’s dictionary leaned heavily upon the before-mentioned “New Dictionary” of B. E., though neither Egan nor Partridge calls attention to it.
1
A number of his definitions are taken over from B. E. unchanged,
2
and many others are changed but little.
3
Grose even preserved B. E.’s plurals where the singular form would have been more rational. But it is not to be gainsaid that he added a great deal of new matter of his own and got rid of many of B. E.’s nonce-words and literary affectations, so that his dictionary came much closer to the actual vulgar speech than its predecessor. And if he mined B. E., then all his successors have mined Grose; indeed,
his dictionary remained the best thing of its sort until Partridge began to investigate English slang during World War I. With Partridge’s glosses his book still makes excellent reading. It came out at just the right time. That large facility for concocting new and picturesque words which characterized the English of the Seventeenth Century had begun to yield, by the last half of the century following, to the policing of the purists, and thereafter its prodigies were transferred to America, but there was still enough good slang in currency to be worth recording, and Grose recorded it with eager diligence and appreciation. In his first edition of 1785 there were about 3,000 entries, and in his third of 1796 the number had grown to nearly 4,000. It is thus impossible to give more than a random sampling here. But certainly the following, none of them to be found in B. E. and all now obsolete, deserve to be remembered:
Babes in the wood. Criminals in the stocks or pillory.
Baptized. Spirits that have been lowered with water.
Barrel fever. He died of the barrel fever: he killed himself by drinking.
Beau trap. A loose stone in a pavement, under which water lodges, and, on being trod upon, squirts up.
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Betwattled. Surprised, confounded.
Blowse, or blowsabella. A woman whose hair is dishevelled and hanging about her face; a slattern.
Blubber cheeks. Large, flaccid cheeks.
Bookkeeper. One who never returns borrowed books.
Bran-faced. Freckled.
Cleaver. One that will cleave; used of a forward or wanton woman.
Collar day. Execution day.
Fish. A seaman.
Gummy. Clumsy.
Hen-house. A house where the woman rules.
Jacob. A ladder.
Oven. A great mouth.
Peery. Inquisitive, suspicious.
Pound. A prison.
Scapegallows. One who deserves and has narrowly escaped the gallows.
Sea crab. A sailor.
Slush bucket. A foul feeder.
Smear. A plasterer.
Sneaksby. A mean-spirited fellow, a sneaking cur.
Snip. A tailor.
Strangle-goose. A poulterer.
Suds.
In the suds:
in a disagreeable situation.
Traps. Constables and thief-takers.
Many of the other terms listed by Grose have survived to our day. Some still belong to slang or the lower levels of colloquial speech,
e.g., cow-juice, to crook the elbow, duds, grub, hush-money, leery, to lush, pig-headed, sky-parlor, spliced
(married), to
touch
(borrow) and
uncle
(pawnbroker), but others have climbed to more respectable standing,
e.g., crocodile tears, of easy virtue, elbow room, fogy, foul-mouthed, to fuss, gingerbread
(decoration),
greenhorn
,
1
humbug, lopsided, mum, pin-money, pug-nose, sandwich
,
2
tidy
and
white lie
.
Grose, in his preface to his first edition of 1785, differentiated clearly between the cant of rogues and ordinary slang. “The vulgar tongue,” he said, “consists of two parts: the first is the cant language, called sometimes pedlar’s French or St. Giles’s Greek; the second, those burlesque phrases, quaint allusions and nicknames for persons, things and places which, from long uninterrupted usage, are made classical by prescription.” In this last, of course, he was in error: slang may be quite evanescent and still be true slang. When, as and if it becomes “classical” it usually enters into the ordinary vocabulary, though it may never take on much dignity there. Grose borrowed his account of the origin of cant from William Harrison’s “Description of England” prefaced to Raphael Holinshed’s famous “Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland,” published in two volumes in 1577–78.
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Said Harrison:
It is not yet fifty years sith this trade [of beggars] began, but how it hath prospered sithens that time it is easy to judge, for they are now supposed, of one sex and another, to amount unto above ten thousand persons, as I have heard reported; moreover, in counterfeiting the Egyptian rogues they have devised a language among themselves, which they name canting,… a speech compact thirty years since of English and a great number of words of their own devising, without all order or reason, and yet such it is as none but themselves are able to understand. The first deviser thereof was hanged by the neck, as a just reward no doubt for his deserts and a common end to all of that profession. A gentleman, Mr. Thomas Harman, of late hath taken great pains to search out the secret practices of this ungracious rabble, and among other things he setteth down and prescribed twenty-two sorts of them.
The book by Harman, here mentioned by Harrison, was entitled “A Caveat or Warening For Commen Cursetors
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Vulgarely Called Vagabondes.” It was published in London in 1567, and not a few of the terms it listed survived in B. E.’s “New Dictionary” of 1698 and even into Grose. Not much is known about Harman save that he was a country gentleman and apparently interested in police matters. He indicated that the region in which he lived was hard beset, in his time, by troops of wandering rogues, and he describes their depredations at length. At the end of his book there is a brief vocabulary of “the leud, lousey language of these lewtering luskes and lasy lorrels,”
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including the following:
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Belly chete. An apron.
Bousing ken. An alehouse.
Bowse,
v
. To drink.
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Cante,
v
. To speak.
Chattes. The gallows.
Cly the gerke,
v
. To be whipped.
Couch a hogshead,
v
. To lie down and sleep.
Crashing chetes. Teeth.
Cutte,
v
. To say.
Darkemans. Night.
Drawers. Hosen.
Gan. A mouth.
Gentry morte. A noble or gentle woman.
Glasyers. Eyes.
Glymmar. Fire.
Hearing chetes. Ears.
Ken. A house.
Lage. Water.
Lap. Buttermilk or whey.
Lightmans. Day.
Margery prater. A hen.
Myll a ken,
v
. To rob a house.
Mynt. Gold.
Nab. A head.
Nosegent. A nun.
Nygle,
v
. To have to do with a woman.
Pannam. Bread.
Patrico. A priest.
Prat. A buttock.
Prygge,
v
. To ride.
Quyerkyn. A prison.
Roger, or tyb of the buttery. A goose.
Rome bouse.
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Wine.
Salomon. An altar or mass.
Slate or slates. A sheet or sheets.
Smelling chete. A nose.
Stamps. Legs.
Stow you,
v
. Hold your peace.
Strommell. Straw.
The ruffian cly thee. The devil take thee. (Ger.
klauen
, to claw, to clutch).
Togeman. A cloak.
Towre,
v
. To see.
Tryninge. Hanging.
Yaram. Milk.
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Harman apparently picked up some of these from the fugitive literature of the time,
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but the rest seem to have come out of his own observation. As I have noted, many works dealing with rogues and vagabonds and recording more or less of their cant appeared in England during the Seventeenth Century and more followed in the Eighteenth. There is a bibliography of them in Burke and they are discussed in “The Development of Cant Lexicography in England, 1566–1765,” by Gertrude E. Noyes.
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Dr. Noyes shows that most of the lexicographers of roguery followed B. E. in pilfering from Harman. This was especially true of Dekker, who brought out “The Gull’s Hornbook” in 1609 and followed it with other things of the same sort, and of the anonymous author of “The Groundwork of Coney-Catching,” 1592. In turn these thieves supplied material to later ones, for example, Richard Head, whose “The English Rogue” appeared in 1665, followed by “The Canting Academy” in 1673.
The literature of criminals’ cant since Grose has been voluminous, but on the whole it was of small value until recent years. Godfrey Irwin’s “American Tramp and Underworld Slang,” brought out in 1931, was mainly devoted to the argot of tramps, but within its limits it was well done, and I know of no later book that is better.
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At about the same time Dr. David W. Maurer, of the University of Louisville, began to interest himself in the subject, and has since become the chief American authority upon it. He has two important qualifications for his task: he is a man trained in scholarly and especially philological method, and he has an extraordinary capacity for gaining the confidence of criminals. He has published a book upon the techniques and speech of the confidence men who constitute the gentry of the underworld
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and papers in the learned journals and elsewhere upon the argots of various lesser groups, ranging from forgers and safecrackers to drug-peddlers and prostitutes, and he has been at work for some years past upon a comprehensive “Dictionary of American Criminal Argots.”
2
A century ago the cant of American criminals was still largely dependent upon that of their English colleagues, stretching back for centuries, but though it still shows marks of that influence
3
it is now predominantly on its own. Its chief characters, says Maurer, are “its machine-gun staccato, its hard timbre, its rather grim humor, its remarkable compactness.”
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It differs considerably, of course, from specialty to specialty, but within a given specialty “it appears to be well standardized from coast to coast and from the Gulf into Canada.” It shows the cosmopolitan quality of all American speech, and includes loans from Yiddish, Spanish, German, French, Chinese and even Hindustani. Like slang in general, it is the product, not of the common run of criminals, but of individual smarties, so it tends to increase in picturesqueness as one goes up the scale of professional rank and dignity. Says Maurer:
