Americans seem to be vastly more adept at making new slang than Englishmen, just as they are more adept at making more seemly neologisms.10 There was a time when this was not true, and most of the slang that American purists frowned upon was of English origin,11 but after the War of 1812 and the beginning of the great movement into the West Americans began to roll their own, and for years past the flow has been in the other direction.1 Not only the movies and talkies but also American comic strips have flooded England with the latest confections of the Broadway and Hollywood neologists, and the fecund American key-hole columnists have been widely imitated. Now and then, to be sure, some hunkerous patriot, in D. W. Brogan’s phrase, “sounds the clarion and fills the fife ” against the invasion,2 but meanwhile the wholesale adoption of American slang words and phrases goes on, and, as the London correspondent of the Baltimore Sun reported in 1937, “Britons are gradually growing reconciled to the Americanization of their language.”3 Many of them, indeed, go further: they declare that they like it. “American slang,” wrote Horace Annesley Vachell, in 1935 or thereabout, “is not a tyranny, but a beneficent autocracy,” and then he proceeded to argue for the superiority of the American lounge-lizard and to be tickled pink to the English top-hole and putrid. “English slang at its best,” he went on, “has to curtsey to American slang, and at its worst it is toppingly the worst in the world.” Even the Manchester Guardian and the London Times have praised the neologisms that the invasion brings in. The Guardian, in 1932, spoke editorially of “its Elizabethan vigor and its sometimes more than Elizabethan capacity for uncouth inventiveness”1 and in 1937 of its “rich wit and expressive metaphor,”2 and the Times, so long ago as 1931, granted “the variety of the sources, the ingenuity of the adaptation, and the lively vigor of these hard-hitting words.”3
When, in 1937, an English schoolma’am named Miss Gwatkin set off a bomb at a convention of the Association of Head Mistresses at Brighton by employing to debunk in a speech and by boldly arguing that English school children were tiring of lessons in “correct” English and that “slick Americanisms meet their need and are far more effective,” she was supported heartily by the press, including the ultra-conservative Morning Post and the Daily Telegraph. “To complain,” said the Telegraph, “that girls and boys use these phrases before they are naturalized is to beg the question; it is they who give them their naturalization papers.”4 The Morning Post went further. “Not only the English language,” it said, “but we ourselves have grown richer by the importation of such words [as O.K., to debunk and highbrow]. What substitute can we offer for highbrow? Intellectual snob is our best, and that is both longer and inexact.”5 A contributor to Answers, signing himself Philemon, thus summed up in 1941: “Let the purists be shocked! Let the precisions be offended! Let us drop a bomb among schoolmarmy talkers!”6
Maurice H. Weseen’s “Dictionary of American Slang,”7 which I was constrained to describe in AL4, p. 570, as “extremely slipshod and even ridiculous,” has been supplanted since by “The American Thesaurus of Slang,” by Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark,8 and there has appeared an excellent bibliography of slang, cant and argot by W. J. Burke.9 In England the indefatigable Eric Partridge has followed his “Slang Today and Yesterday”10 and his annotated edition of Francis Grose’s “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue”1 with a large “Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English”2 and William Matthews has published “Cockney Past and Present,”3 and in Australia Sidney J. Baker has brought out “A Popular Dictionary of Australian Slang”4 (which has many resemblances to American) and a large and valuable work on Australian English in general.5 The Berrey-Van den Bark thesaurus, in its revised form, is a huge volume of 1231 pages. Its chief virtue is its comprehensiveness: it includes virtually every word of slang, cant or argot that had got into print at the time its forms closed. Moreover, its contents are arranged in such a way that looking up the vocabulary of any given trade, profession or graft is made easy. Its principal defect is that the inquirer who starts from a word instead of a category finds himself confronted with a 341-page, four-column index that is based on a complicated and sometimes maddening scheme of reference. Unhappily, no effort is made to date its entries, nor are there any etymologies – two valuable features of Partridge’s “Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.” Various other dictionaries of American slang seem to be under way as I write; in fact, I hear of a new one every few months. But it is not likely that the work of Berrey and Van den Bark will be supplanted in the near future, for scholars of their extraordinary diligence are very rare. Meanwhile, American Speech occasionally publishes useful papers on this or that aspect of American slang, and there is frequent (if seldom illuminating) discussion of the theme in the newspapers.6
1 See AL4, p. 555.
2 The DAE traces to stump to Peter Pilgrim; Philadelphia, 1838. The author of this tale of Western adventure was Robert Montgomery Bird, famous in his day for Nick of the Woods.
1 I take these from Modern Slang, by J. Louis Kuethe, American Speech, Dec., 1936, pp. 293–97.
2 This was broadcast in 1900 by Just Because She Made Dem Googoo Eyes, a coon-song by Hughie Cannon (words) and Johnny Queen (music). It deserved to live and in fact seems to be still alive in some parts of the country, for on March 25, 1944 the New Yorker reported, p. 22, that a man had been lately arrested in Houston, Texas, for violating a city ordnance prohibiting “making goo-goo eyes” on the street.
1 It might be worth while to attempt a history of such banalities, with dates. In 1869 the Boston music publishers, White, Smith & Perry, published a song called Shew, Fly, Don’t Bother Me, with music by Frank Campbell. It was sung by Cool Burgess and Rollin Howard. Many other catch-phrases have been popularized by songs, e.g., Yes, we have no bananas. In American Notes & Queries, Aug., 1946, p. 74, Peter Tamony traced Nay, Nay, Pauline to Yale Yarns, by J. S. Wood; New York, 1895, p. 232. In The Kilroy Story, Esquire, April, 1946, David Scheyer attempted to account for Kilroy was here. Another etymology is in American Notes & Queries, Feb., 1947, pp. 173–74, and yet another in Air Words, by Fred Hamann; Seattle, 1946, p. 33. Open the door, Richard, came in on its heels and was as quickly defunct. The English are very fond of such phrases, e.g., How’s your poor feet?, Does your mother know you’re out?, Cut yourself a piece of cake and Keep your hair on. See It Makes You Think, London Star, May 10, 1940, and Let Me Tell Yo-o-ou, Dundee Telegraph and Post, Oct. 9, 1941.
2 Sinclair Lewis, in Cass Timberlane; New York, 1945, pp. 323–24, listed some of the terms then in use for “the sort of male once described with relish as an agreeable scoundrel,” e.g., lug, jerk, louse, stinker, twirp, rat, crumb, goon and wolf. Most of them soon passed out.
1 A Check-Up on Slang in America, Baltimore Sun (and other papers), Sept. 8, 1935.
2 New York, 1942.
3 William Feather Magazine, Oct., 1943, p. 19.
4 Some American Idioms From the Yiddish, by Julius G. Rothenberg, American Speech, Feb., 1943, pp. 43–48. The slang words for to cheat, to swindle are often identical with those for to have sexual intercourse.
1 “The commonest stimuli of slang,” said Professor J. Y. P. Greig, an esteemed Scots authority, in a university address in 1938 (Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, Aug. 24), “are sex, money and intoxicating liquor.”
2 A Bookman’s Notes, Manchester Guardian, March 8, 1935.
3 Breaking Priscian’s Head; New York, 1929, p. 83. Said Benjamin R. Bulkeley in Something Literary: Slang and Colloquialisms, Boston Herald, May 5, 1928: “While it should today be ruled out of a sermon or a sonnet we do not know what the next century may allow.”
4 Eric Partridge says in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English; second edition; London, 1938, p. 61, that it arose in the United States at some time before 1925, and was adopted by the English in 1927. He seeks to derive it from the German blech, a slang term for nonsense, and explains that there are “millions of Germans in the United States,” but this sounds suspici
ously like blah itself. Dr. Louise Pound lists many synonyms for it in American Speech, April, 1929, pp. 329–30, but not one of them comes within miles of it.
5 New Yorker, Oct. 2, 1943: “On Sunday, September 12, the [New York] Times used stooge in the headline of a story.… It was not set off by quotation marks.”
6 The DAE’s first example is dated 1869, when piker meant a yokel from Pike county, Missouri, then the common symbol of everything poverty-stricken and uncouth. It began to take on its present significance in the 1890s, when it appeared in the New York stock market to designate a petty operator.
7 Traced by the DAE to 1856 and marked an Americanism. Partridge says that the English adopted it c. 1870.
8 The DAE’s first example comes from a word-list in Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Part VIII, 1895, p. 400, but I recall hearing it before that. Partridge suggests that it may be derived from the German stunde, an hour, but I am aware of no evidence for this.
1 In the sense of to run away to hike is old in the English dialects and was listed by Francis Grose in the second edition of his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue; London, 1788. Partridge says that it sank into disuse in England, and was revived at some uncertain date in the United States and readopted in England c. 1926.
2 The history of this most successful of all American slang terms is given in Supplement I, pp. 269–79.
3 Racket is old, but racketeer was a product of Prohibition.
4 In the sense of a half-wit. On May 8, 1946, in a speech to a Highway Safety Conference at Washington, President Harry S. Truman said: “It is perfectly absurd that a man … can go to a place and buy an automobile and get behind the wheel – whether he has ever been there before makes no difference, or if he is insane or a nut or a moron.” In reporting this speech the New York Times used nuts in its headline, enclosed in quotation marks. See “Nuts” and Morons, Boston Herald (editorial), May 20, 1946. As a noun meaning the head the word has been traced to 1858 in England, and in the sense of something agreeable, as in “It was nuts to him” it goes back to Shakespeare’s time.
5 The noun, in the sense of a barrier in a river to retain floating logs, is traced by the DAE to 1676 and marked an Americanism. The earliest example of the verb in the sense of to whoop up is dated 1873. Partridge says that it reached England c. 1885.
6 Boost the noun has not been found before 1825 but the verb is in the glossary attached to David Humphreys’ The Yankey in England, 1815. It is defined therein as to raise up, lift up or exalt. Partridge says that it reached England c. 1860 and the noun c. 1865. The etymology is undetermined.
7 Robert Lynd predicted in Horrible New Words, London News Chronicle, March 18, 1939, that it would be as dead, “a few years hence,” as “the tony and top-hole of previous generations,” but within a year the English papers were calling the early, inactive stage of World War II the Phony War; on April 3, 1940, the term was used by Paul Reynaud, then premier of France, and on Aug. 24, 1945, the staid Edinburgh Scotsman was printing an editorial, Apt Phrases, which described it as a “typical outsider from across the Atlantic that has strengthened its position as a result of the war” and added that it “may have come to stay.”
8 See Supplement I, p. 325, n. 3.
9 Many more are listed in AL4, pp. 197–98.
10 See Supplement I, pp. 440–53.
11 Such was the case, for example, with the locutions denounced by John Witherspoon in No. VII of The Druid, May 30, 1781, and it seems to have been the case with “the empty sarcastical slang so common to all the coxcombical gang” that Washington Irving derided in Salmagundi, June 27, 1807. To this day, in fact, many slang terms of English origin continue in everyday American use, e.g., horse-laugh, soft-soap, cold-shoulder and lady-killer. An acute observer, Thomas Adolphus Trollope (1810–92), notes in his What I Remember; New York, 1888, pp. 34–36, that the vocabulary of slang in the early part of the century was limited, and that most of it was better described as class argot.
1 The Canadian humorist, Stephen Leacock, said in Our Living Language: a Defense, New York Times Magazine, Feb. 26, 1939, p. 9: “American slang contains a much greater percentage of cleverness than English. To call a professional at cricket a pro, or breakfast brekker, or political economy pol. econ. saves time, but that is all. To call a pair of trousers bags is a step up: there is a distinct intellectual glow of comparison. But it is only twilight as compared with such American effects as lounge-lizard, rubberneck, sugar-daddy, tangle-foot and piece of calico.”
2 The Conquering Tongue, London Spectator, Feb. 5, 1943, p. 120. James Agate summed up in the London Express, June 4, 1936, by headlining an article with the sombre and final judgment: “I Loathe This American Slang.” In the Carlisle Journal, April 5, 1946, a local Rotarian declared that it “has its roots in Negroid patter” and that “the whole influence of these clipt, shoddy and ugly terms is vulgarizing and lowering to the intelligence.”
3 English Potpourri, by Paul W. Ward, Aug. 1.
1 Still More American Language, Aug. 19.
2 American Slang, June 28.
3 American Slang, May 11.
4 Debunking the Taboo on Slang, June 14, 1937.
5 English and Slang, June 14, 1937. See also Conquest of England (editorial), New York Times, July 4, 1937.
6 What Slanguage!, Sept. 13.
7 New York, 1934. Weseen, who was associate professor of business English at the University of Nebraska, died April 14, 1941.
8 New York, 1942. A second edition, including a supplement on the teen-age and jive jargon and the Army, Navy and Air Corps argot of World War II, was published in 1947.
9 The Literature of Slang; New York, 1939.
10 London, second edition; 1935.
1 London, 1931.
2 New York, 1937; second edition, revised and enlarged, 1938. It includes the numerous Americanisms that have become naturalized in England.
3 London, 1938.
4 Melbourne, 1941; second edition, 1943.
5 The Australian Language; Sydney, 1945. Baker has also published Australian Pronunciation; Sydney, 1947, and New Zealand Slang; Christ-church, 1940, and Arnold Wall has done New Zealand English; Christ-church, 1938.
6 Burke’s The Literature of Slang, which ran serially in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library in 1936–38, is close to complete down to the latter year. Most of the later works of any value are mentioned in the footnotes to the present chapter.
2. CANT AND ARGOT
The common slang of the United States, as I have noted, is a catch-all for the inventions of various quite different classes of wits, though most of them have the common quality of being more or less disreputable. A neologism coined by a smart Harlem wise-cracker today may be raging in all the fashionable finishing-schools tomorrow, and there is a constant infiltration from the argots of innumerable lawful occupations and the cants of innumerable rackets. We owe many common words and phrases, for example, to the circus folks, e.g., guy, ballyhoo, three-ring and to shoot the chutes; many more to the hobos, e.g., jungle, hand-out, panhandler and probably hobo itself; and yet more to downright criminals, e.g., bull (for policeman), third-degree, to gyp, to bump off, to take for a ride, to shake down, to hi-jack and once-over. We have borrowed by a head, to scratch and to tout from the race-tracks; nineteenth-hole, to stymie and birdie from the golf-links; dope, coke, hop and to needle from the drug-addicts, and understudy, barnstormer, star, angel, box-office, to ring down the curtain on and full house from the stage. In addition, large numbers of terms that belong to argot or cant are understood and occasionally used by Americans, though they have not yet entered (and perhaps never will enter) the common slang of the country.
The cant of modern criminals began to be formulated in western Europe in the early Fifteenth Century, when roving bands of a strange, dark race of petty thieves appeared from the mysterious East and were presently intermingled with the native tramps, beggars and other fly-by-night rogues. These newcomers, at the start, were assumed t
o be Egyptians, which explains our English name of Gipsies for them, but later studies of their history and language have demonstrated that they actually came from northwestern India. They were in Germany by 1414, in Italy by 1422, in France by 1427 and in England by the early 1500s. Two of the largest classes of indigenous vagabonds that they encountered were those of the begging friars and the displaced Jews. Both of these borrowed words and phrases from them and in turn reinforced their language with home-made inventions, and by the end of the Fifteenth Century there had developed in Germany a rogues’ jargon that was based on German, but included many Hebrew and Gipsy terms. Some of these survive to the present day, even in the United States, e.g., pal from the Gipsy1 and ganov from the Hebrew.
American Language Supplement 2 Page 94