newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-
purchase tout-in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless
parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from
the community, and, what should justify him according to
our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering.
I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets
him in a different class from other people, or gives most
modern men the right to despise him.
Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? -
for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the
simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In
practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless,
productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it
shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy,
efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning
is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of
it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this
test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one
could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would
become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar,
looked at realistically, is simply a business man, getting
his living, like other business men, in the way that comes
to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold
his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing
a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.
XXXII
I WANT to put in some notes, as short as possible, on
London slang and swearing. These (omitting the ones
that everyone knows) are some of the cant words now
used in London:
A gagger-beggar or street performer of any kind. A
moocher-one who begs outright, without pretence of
doing a trade. A nobbler-one who collects pennies for a
beggar. A chanter-a street singer. A clodhopper -a street
dancer. A mugfaker-a street photographer. A glimmer-
one who watches vacant motor-cars. A gee (or jee-it is
pronounced jee)-the accomplice of a cheapjack, who
stimulates trade by pretending to buy
something. A split-a detective. A flattie-a policeman. A
dideki-a gypsy. A toby-a tramp.
A drop-money given to a beggar. Funkumlavender or
other perfume sold in envelopes. A boozer -a public-
house. A slang-a hawker's licence. A kip -a place to
sleep in, or a night's lodging. SmokeLondon. A judy-a
woman. The spike-the casual ward. The lump-the casual
ward. A tosheroon-a half-crown. A denner-a shilling. A
hog-a shilling. A sprowsie-a sixpence. Clods-coppers. A
drum-a billy can. Shackles-soup. A chat-a louse. Hard-
up-tobacco made from cigarette ends. A stick or cane -a
burglar's jemmy. A peter-a safe. A bly-a burglar's oxy-
acetylene blow-lamp
To bawl-to suck or swallow. To knock off-to steal. To
skipper-to sleep in the open.
About half of these words are in the larger diction-
aries. It is interesting to guess at the derivation of some
of them, though one or two-for instance, "funkum" and
"tosheroon"-are beyond guessing. "Deaner" presumably
comes from "denier." "Glimmer" (with the verb "to
glim") may have something to do with the old word
"glim," meaning a light, or another old word "glim,"
meaning a glimpse; but it is an instance of the formation
of new words, for in its present sense it can hardly be
older than motor-cars. "Gee" is a curious word;
conceivably it has arisen out of "gee," meaning horse, in
the sense of stalking horse. The derivation of "screever"
is mysterious. It must come ultimately from scribo, but
there has been no similar word in English for the past
hundred and fifty years; nor can it have come directly
from the French, for pavement artists are unknown in
France. "Judy" and "bawl" are East End words, not
found west of Tower Bridge. "Smoke" is a word used
only by tramps. "Kip" is Danish. Till quite recently
the word "doss" was used in this sense, but it is now
quite obsolete.
London slang and dialect seem to change very
rapidly. The old London accent described by Dickens
and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has
now vanished utterly. The Cockney accent as we know
it seems to have come up in the 'forties (it is first men-
tioned in an American book, Herman Melville's White
Jacket), and Cockney is already changing; there are few
people now who say "fice" for "face," "nawce" for
"nice" and so forth as consistently as they did twenty
years ago. The slang changes together with the accent.
Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the
"rhyming slang" was all the rage in London. In the
"rhyming slang" everything was named by something
rhyming with it-a "hit or miss" for a kiss, "plates of
meat" for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even
reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct.' Perhaps
all the words I have mentioned above will have van-
ished in another twenty years.
The swear words also change-or, at any rate, they are
subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the
London working classes habitually used the word
"bloody." Now they have abandoned it utterly, though
novelists still represent them as using it. No born
Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish
origin) now says "bloody," unless he is a man of some
education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social
scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of
the working classes. The current London adjective, now
tacked on to every noun, is --------- . No
doubt in time---, like "bloody," will find its way into
1 It survives in certain abbreviations, such as "use your
twopenny" or "use your head." "Twopenny" is arrived at like
this: head-loaf of bread-twopenny loaf-twopenny.
the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.
The whole business of swearing, especially English
swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is
as irrational as magic-indeed, it is a species of magic.
But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our
intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we
do by mentioning something that should be kept secret -
usually something to do with the sexual functions. But
the strange thing is that when a word is well established
as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning;
that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word.
A word becomes an oath because it means a certain
thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to
mean that thing. For example, ----. The Londoners do
not now use, or very seldom use, this word in its
original meaning; it is on their lips from morning till
night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing.
Similarly with -------, which is rapidly losing its original
sense. One can think of similar instances in
French-for
example,------,, which is now a quite meaningless
expletive. The word--- , also, is still used
occasionally in Paris, but the people who use it, or most
of them, have no idea of what it once meant. The rule
seems to be that words accepted as swear words have
some magical character, which sets them apart and
makes them useless for ordinary conversation.
Words used as insults seem to be governed by the
same paradox as swear words. A word becomes an
insult, one would suppose, because it means something
bad; but in practice its insult-value has little to do with
its actual meaning. For example, the most bitter insult
one can offer to a Londoner is "bastard"which, taken for
what it means, is hardly an insult at all. And the worst
insult to a women, either in London
or Paris, is "cow"; a name which might even be a com-
pliment, for cows are among the most likeable of animals.
Evidently a word is an insult simply because it is meant as
an insult, without reference to its dictionary meaning;
words, especially swear words, being what public opinion
chooses to make them. In this connection it is interesting
to see how a swear word can change character by crossing
a frontier. In England you can print « Je m'en fous »
without protest from anybody. In France you have to print
it " Je m'en f-----" Or, as another example,
take the word "barnshoot"a corruption of the Hindustani
word bahinchut. A vile and unforgivable insult in India, this
word is a piece of gentle badinage in England. I have even
seen it in a school text-book; it was in one of
Aristophanes' plays, and the annotator suggested it as a
rendering of some gibberish spoken by a Persian
ambassador. Presumably the annotator knew what
bahinchut meant. But, because it was a foreign word, it had
lost its magical swear-word quality and could be printed.
One other thing is noticeable about swearing in
London, and that is that the men do not usually swear in
front of the women. In Paris it is quite different. A
Parisian workman may prefer to suppress an oath in front
of a woman, but he is not at all scrupulous about it, and
the women themselves swear freely. The Londoners are
more polite, or more squeamish, in this matter.
These are a few notes that I have set down more or less
at random. It is a pity that someone capable of dealing
with the subject does not keep a year-book of London
slang and swearing, registering the changes accurately. It
might throw useful light upon the formation, development
and obsolescence of words.
XXXIII
THE two pounds that B. had given me lasted about ten
days. That it lasted so long was due to Paddy, who had
learned parsimony on the road and considered even one
sound meal a day a wild extravagance. Food, to him, had
come to mean simply bread and margarine -the eternal tea-
and-two-slices, which will cheat hunger for an hour or
two. He taught me how to live, food, bed, tobacco and all,
at the rate of half a crown a day. And he managed to earn
a few extra shillings by "glimming" in the evenings. It
was a precarious job, because illegal, but it brought in a
little and eked out our money.
One morning we tried for a job as sandwich men. We
went at five to an alley-way behind some offices, but there
was already a queue of thirty or forty men waiting, and
after two hours we were told that there was no work for
us. We had not missed much, for sandwich men have an
unenviable job. They are paid about three shillings a day
for ten hours' work-it is hard work, especially in windy
weather, and there is no skulking, for an inspector comes
round frequently to see that the men are on their beat. To
add to their troubles, they are only engaged by the day, or
sometimes for three days, never weekly, so that they have
to wait hours for their job every morning. The number of
unemployed men who are ready to do the work makes
them powerless to fight for better treatment. The job all
sandwich men covet is distributing, handbills, which is
paid for at the same rate. When you see a man distributing
handbills you can do him a good turn by taking one, for he
goes off duty when he has distributed all his bills.
Meanwhile we went on with the lodging-house life-
a squalid, eventless life of crushing boredom. For days
together there was nothing to do but sit in the under-
ground kitchen, reading yesterday's newspaper, or, when
one could get hold of it, a back number of the Union Jack.
It rained a great deal at this time, and everyone who came
in steamed, so that the kitchen stank horribly. One's only
excitement was the periodical tea-and-two-slices. I do not
know how many men are living this life in London-it must
be thousands at the least. As to Paddy, it was actually the
best life he had known for two years past. His interludes
from tramping, the times when he had somehow laid
hands on a few shillings, had all been like this; the
tramping itself had been slightly worse. Listening to his
whimpering voice-he was always whimpering when he was
not eating-one realised what torture unemployment must
be to him. People are wrong when they think that an
unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on
the contrary, 'an illiterate man, with the work habit in his
bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An
educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is
one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy,
with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of
work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such
nonsense to pretend that those who have "come down in
the world" are to be pitied above all others. The man who
really merits pity is the man who has been down from the
start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.
It was a dull time, and little of it stays in my mind,
except for talks with Bozo. Once the lodging-house was
invaded by a slumming-party. Paddy and I had been out,
and, coming back in the afternoon, we heard sounds of
music downstairs. We went down to find
three gentle-people, sleekly dressed, holding a religious
service in our kitchen. They were a grave and reverend
seignior in a frock coat, a lady sitting at a portable
harmonium, and a chinless youth toying with a crucifix. It
appeared that they had marched in and started to hold
the service, without any kind of invitation whatever.
It was a pleasure to see how the lodgers met this
intrusion. They did not offer the smallest rudeness to the
slummers; they just ignored them. By common consent
everyone in the kitchen-a hundred men, perhaps behaved
as though the slummers had not existed. There they stood
patiently singing and exhorting, and no more notice was
taken of them than if they had be
en earwigs. The
gentleman in the frock coat preached a sermon, but not a
word of it was audible; it was drowned in the usual din of
songs, oaths and the clattering of pans. Men sat at their
meals and card games three feet away from the
harmonium, peaceably ignoring it. Presently the slummers
gave it up and cleared out, not insulted in any way, but
merely disregarded. No doubt they consoled themselves by
thinking how brave they had been, "freely venturing into
the lowest dens," etc. etc.
Bozo said that these people came to the lodginghouse
several times a month. They had influence with the police,
and the "deputy" could not exclude them. It is curious
how people take it for granted that they have a right to
preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income
falls below a certain level.
After nine days B.'s two pounds was reduced to one and
ninepence. Paddy and I set aside eighteenpence for our
beds, and spent threepence on the usual tea-andtwo-
slices, which we shared-an appetiser rather than a meal.
By the afternoon we were damnably hungry and
Paddy remembered a church near King's Cross Station
where a free tea was given once a week to tramps. This
was the day, and we decided to go there. Bozo, though it
was rainy weather and he was almost penniless, would not
come, saying that churches were not his style.
Outside the church quite a hundred men were waiting,
dirty types who had gathered from far and wide at the
news of a free tea, like kites round a dead buffalo.
Presently the doors opened and a clergyman and some
girls shepherded us into a gallery at the top of the church.
It was an evangelical church, gaunt and wilfully ugly, with
texts about blood and fire blazoned on the walls, and a
hymn-book containing twelve hundred and fifty-one
hymns; reading some of the hymns, I concluded that the
book would do as it stood for an anthology of bad verse.
There was to be a service after the tea, and the regular
congregation were sitting in the well of the church below.
It was a week-day, and there were only a few dozen of
them, mostly stringy old women who reminded one of
boilingfowls. We ranged ourselves in the gallery pews and
were given our tea; it was a one-pound jam jar of tea each,
with six slices of bread and margarine. As soon as tea was
Down and Out in London and Paris Page 20