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 1577–78.3 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 Cursetors1 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,”2 including the following:3
Belly chete. An apron.
Bousing ken. An alehouse.
Bowse, v. To drink.4
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.1 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.2
Harman apparently picked up some of these from the fugitive literature of the time,3 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.4 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.5 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 underworld1 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 influence3 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.”4 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 r
un 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:
Why do criminals speak a lingo? There are several reasons, perhaps the most widely accepted of which is that they must have a secret language in order to conceal their plans from their victims or from the police. In some instances it is undoubtedly used for this purpose – for instance, flat-jointers,5 three-card monte men, and other short-con workers1 sometimes use it to confuse or deceive their victims. But most professional criminals speak argot only among themselves,… for using it in public would mark them as underworld characters whether or not they were understood.… There is a very strong sense of camaraderie among them, a highly developed group-solidarity.… A common language helps to bind these groups together and gives expression to the strong fraternal spirit.… Professional crime is nothing more than a great variety of highly specialized trades; hence it is only natural that many of the same factors which operate among legitimate craftsmen should affect criminal speech.2
The vast upsurge of crime brought in by Prohibition made all Americans familiar with a large number of criminal words and phrases, and many of these, as I have noted, have entered into the everyday speech of the country. How much of the argot of the Volsteadian racketeers was the product of their own fancy and how much was thrust upon them by outside admirers, e.g., newspaper reporters and movie writers, is not easily determined, but Maurer is convinced that a substantial amount of it came from the latter, including even such apparently characteristic terms as big shot. He says3 that actual members of the mob called the brass hats of the profession wheels (in the plural). But trigger-man, torpedo, gorilla, pineapple (bomb), whiskers (a Federal agent: a reference to Uncle Sam), hot (a stolen object or a criminal pursued by the law), on the lam, to snatch (to kidnap), moll and racket, whatever their provenance, were really in use. The gentlemen of the big con, i.e., swindlers who specialize in rooking persons of means, constitute the aristocracy of the underworld, and hold aloof from all lesser criminals. They are, taking one with another, of superior intelligence, and not many of them ever land in prison. Their lingo thus shows a considerable elegance and also some humor, e.g., apple, savage or Mr. Bates for a victim; big store, the bogus poolroom or brokerage office to which apples are lured; coarse ones, large bills; ear-wigger, one who tries to eavesdrop; excess baggage, a member of a mob who fails to pull his weight in the boat; to fit the mitt, to bribe an official; Joe Hep, a victim who tumbles to what is happening; larceny, the itch for illicit money that lures a victim on: “He has larceny in his heart”; to light a rag, to run away; to play the C, to operate a confidence game; to sting, to swindle; sucker-word, a term not used by professionals,1 and yellow, a telegram. The craft is called the grift, not the graft.2
At the opposite pole from practitioners of the big con are the crude and brutal fellows who follow the heavy rackets, i.e., those involving violence. They include burglars, safe-blowers (yeggs), hijackers, kidnapers, automobile thieves, window-smashers, mail robbers, pay-roll grabbers, purse-snatchers, and so on. They had their heyday during the thirteen delirious years of Prohibition, and there was a revival of their art, made much of by the newspapers, following World War II, but on the whole they seem to be declining in prosperity, and the new methods of thief-taking organized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation have landed large numbers of them in prison. They range in professional dignity from the jug-heavies or bank burglars, who stand at the top, to the mere hoodlums, many of them young neophytes, at the bottom. Among the cant terms of the jug-heavies are bug, a burglar alarm; to case, to spy out; cutter, a prosecuting attorney; dinah or noise, dynamite; double, a false key; forty, O. K.; gopher, an iron safe; hack, a watchman; soup or pete, nitroglycerine; stiffs, negotiable securities; swamped, surprised and surrounded, and V, a safe. Maurer says3 that there are some regional differences in jug-heavy speech, e.g., a bank is a jug everywhere but sometimes a jay in the Middle West or a tomb in the East, and a policeman is an elbow on the Pacific Coast, the law or the works in the Middle West, and a shamus, fuzz or goms in the East. The automobile thieves who once raged in large and well-organized gangs also had an argot of their own, e.g., doghouse, a small garage; bent one or kinky, a stolen car, and consent job, a car stolen with the connivance of an owner eager for the insurance,4 and so did the hijackers who arose during Prohibition and flourished in the aftermath of World War II, e.g., baloney, an automobile tire; box, a truck trailer; to carry the mail, to drive fast; crate, a truck; dark horse, a watchman; girl scout or hairpin, a female associate; in creeper, in low gear; on the I. C., on the lookout; powder-wagon or blast-furnace, a sawed-off shotgun; red eye, a stop signal; stick, a crowbar; toby, a highway; traveler, a hijacker, and whistler, a police-car.1 The stick-up men who specialize in robbing pedestrians often operate in pairs. One clasps the victim around the neck from behind and chokes him while the other goes through his pockets. This is often done very violently and sometimes the victim is badly hurt. It is called mugging in New York, but yoking in most other places.2
Forgers, counterfeiters (penmen) and other such intellectuals have a certain standing in the underworld and even pickpockets are respected more or less as the masters of a difficult art, but they do not rank with the princes of the big con nor even with the more daring heroes of the heavy rackets. Among forgers, says Maurer,3 there is a “sharp division of labor.” The men who produce forged checks (makers, designers, scratchers or connections) are usually wholesalers who supply the actual passers, but do not tackle the public. The former, like their allies, the counterfeiters, often operate in safety for years on end, but the latter are frequently taken. The passer is also called a paperhanger, but the colleague who works off counterfeit money is a paper-pusher, pusher or shover. A forged check is paper, scrip or a stiff, and when it is a cashier’s check it is a jug-stiff or cert. Bouncer and rubber-check, both in common use among laymen, do not seem to be in the professional vocabulary. The paperhanger does most of his spread on Saturday, after the banks close; in consequence he is usually broke by Friday, and he thus calls a dismal countenance a Friday face. To him a store-detective is a shamus, Mr. Fakus or Oscar, a warrant for his arrest is a sticker, a credit manager is a credie or a Joe Goss, a check-book is a damper-pad, and the confidence talk which precedes his passing of a bad check is the business. Among pickpockets the act of picking a pocket is called the beat, the sting or a come-off, a watch is a toy, thimble, turnip, kettle or super,1 a policeman is a buttons, fuzz or shamus, a victim is a chump, mark, yap, or hoosier, the member of a mob who does the actual stealing is a claw, wire or tool, his assistants are stalls, a wallet is a poke, leather, hide or okus,2 an empty wallet is a cold poke, dead skin or bloomer, a ring is a hoop, paper money is rag or soft, and an overcoat is a tog. All pickpockets are guns, cannons or boosters, and a lady of the profession is a gun-moll.3 Dip for a practitioner is now obsolete in America, though it is still used by lay writers upon crime waves and seems to survive in England.4 Shoplifters, or boosters, have some resemblance to pickpockets, but they are much less daring. Many of them are women, and most of the women are amateurs. The professionals often carry a booster-box, which is a box resembling an ordinary shopper’s parcel, but with a trap-door for receiving the loot.5
A large part of the vocabulary of the rum-running mobs of Prohibition days passed into the general speech, e.g., the real McCoy,6 to take for a ride,1 torpedo, trigger-man, bath-tub gin,2 alky, to muscle in, to cut (to dilute), hide-out, jake (all right), to needle (to add alcohol), piece (a share), tommy-gun and hijacker,3 and some of them seem likely to stick, along with the Yiddish loans that these public servants also made familiar, e.g., kosher (reliable), meshuga (crazy) and to yentz (to cheat).4 The assorted ruffians who adorned the same glorious era made every American schoolboy aware of the meaning of to rub out, mob, to scram,5 G-man,6 canary,1 to put the heat on, gat,2 on the lam,3 – or else,4 gangster,5 racketeer6 and public enemy.7
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“One might expect prison slang,” says Maurer, “to be a composite of the various specialized argots, but while some bonafide argot crops out in it, it is, on the whole, a separate institutional lingo which differs somewhat from prison to prison.” He goes on:
Relatively few successful professionals ever do time, and when they do they tend to hold themselves somewhat apart from the general run of prisoners. They count upon their strong political connections to secure preferment and often associate with the prison administration on intimate terms. The great bulk of prison populations is composed of amateurs or failures; hence the fallacious belief among some psychologists and criminologists that criminals are subnormal in intelligence. Thorough-going and successful professionals are usually superior in intelligence and have nothing about them to suggest the popular conception of a criminal. If you mixed a hundred of them with an equal number of business and professional men all the statistics of a Hooton or a Lombroso would never set them apart.1
But the residuum actually behind the bars is of generally low mentality2 and in consequence the lingo of the average prison, save in so far as it is reinforced by the inventions of the aloof minority or by contributions from outside, shows little imagination. Its basis, says James Hargan, is “a variety of Anglo-Saxon terms dealing mainly with the sexual and simpler life processes, which have survived the centuries in defiance of the dictionary’s refusal to receive them.”3 A large part of it, adds Hargan, shows a “euphemistic, often humorous understatement” by which the prisoner “softens an otherwise too unpleasant reality into something bearable,” e.g., kimona, a coffin; dance-hall, the death house; sleeping time, a short sentence; mouse, a spy or informer; and bird-cage, a cell. The animal appetites naturally take a major place in his thinking, and much of his humor, such as it is, is devoted to flings at his always monotonous and usually tasteless fare. I quote from a convict lexicographer:
On our first morning at breakfast a waiter came along calling “Strawberries” and we gullibly pushed our plate out – to have it filled with red beans.… Stew is slum, coffee is jamoca and water is sky juice. When someone yells for the sand one passes him the salt. Hamburger balls are entitled jute-balls.… Gravy and pork sausages go under the pseudonym of hog and mud, while pork, gravy and boiled potatoes are hog, mud and rocks. Bread parades under the alias of sawdust.4
American Language Supplement 2 Page 96