American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  This vocabulary has its local variations, but most of it seems to be in general use in American prisons, for the same malefactors move from one to another. A large part of it is identical with the table talk of soldiers and sailors. Milk is chalk; macaroni, dago; eggs, cacklers, cackleberries or shells, or, if fried, red eyes; potatoes, spuds;1 onions, stinkers or tear-gas; butter, grease; catsup, red-lead; soup, water; bread, duffer or punk; sugar, sand or dirt; roast beef, shoe-sole, leather or young horse; veal, lamb or mutton, goat-meat; coffee, gargle, suds or black soup; sausage, beagle, dog or balloon; tea, dishwater; sauerkraut, shrubbery or hay; a meat loaf, mystery or rubber-heels; biscuits, cat-heads or humpers; bread and gravy, poultice; tapioca, fish-eyes or cats’-eyes, and a sandwich, duki (from duke, the hand). Meat as a whole is pig and food in general is swag, garbage, scoff, chow, chuck or peelings. A waiter is a soup-jockey. The prison functionaries all have derisive names. The head warden is the big noise, the ball of fire, or the Man; the guards are shields, screws, hooligans, roaches, hacks, slave-drivers or herders; the chaplain is a frocker, goody, psalmer, buck (if a Catholic priest), Bible-back or the Church; the doctor is a croaker, cutemup, sawbones,2 pill-punk, iodine, salts or pills; the barber is a scraper, chin-polisher or butcher.

  A new prisoner is a fish; a letter smuggled out of prison is a kite; a crime is a trick or caper; a cell, when not a bird-cage, is a drum; a drug addict is a junker, junkie, hype, whang, hophead or snowbird. A prisoner who goes crazy is said to be on his top, conky, footch, guzzly, beered, loco, blogo, buggy, woody or meshuga. To die is to go down or to slam off. To escape is to gut, to mouse, to have the measles, to take (or cop) a mope, to hang it, to be on the bush, to lam the joint, to go over the wall, to get a bush bond (or parole) or to crush out. To finish a sentence is to get up. A sentence is a trick, knock, rap, hitch, bit, stretch or jolt. If short it is sleeping time, if for one year it is a boffo, it for two a deuce, if for five a five-specker or V, if for twenty a double sawbuck, if for life the book, the ice-box or all. The prison is the big house, the college or the joint. A pardon or commutation is a lifeboat. An arrest is a fall, a man is a gee, a bed is a kip, and the prison morgue is the greenhouse. Many euphemisms are in use. At Sing Sing, for example, the death-house is Box Z, the section for insane convicts is Box A, and the place where dead inmates are buried is Box 25. Not a few of the terms reported smell of the lamp, and certainly did not emanate from the common run of prisoners, e.g., last mile for the march to the gallows or electric chair, Cupid’s itch for venereal disease, pussy bandit for a rapist, gospel-fowl for chicken, sleigh-bells for silver, and toad-hides for paper money.1

  Between the world of professional criminals and that of honest folk there is a half-world of part-time, in-and-out malefactors, and to it belongs the army of hoboes, beggars, prostitutes, drug addicts, and so on. Most juvenile delinquents are part of it and remain so, for not many of them can ever hope to be promoted from neighborhood gangs to touring mobs. Indeed, the average bad boy of today, alarming his parents and feeding the fires of editorial writers, is very apt to end tomorrow, not in prison, but upon a clerk’s stool in some petty government office, and the girl who abandons her virginity at fifteen is far more likely to celebrate her twentieth birthday on her honeymoon than in the gutter. To the layman all the species of the genus hobo look pretty much alike, but there are actually sharp divisions between one and another, though all are alike enemies of bourgeois cage-life. In the same jungles near a railroad-yard there may be camped at the same time migratory workers wandering from job to job, yeggs fleeing the police, genuine tramps who go no further than minor thieving but never work at all, and a miscellaneous rabble of temporary wanderers. The average intelligence of these public nuisances is probably even lower than that of habitual criminals. At the top are the congenital vagabonds, sometimes smart and amusing fellows, who choose to eschew what passes for civilization among us; at the bottom are the incurable drunkards, the drug addicts, the chronic out-of-works and beggars, the fugitives from unendurable jobs or wives, the runaway boys and girls, and the swarms of psychopaths. Some of these persons conduct themselves in a reasonably orderly manner according to codes of their own devising, but the great majority of them are incurably anti-social and teeter precariously upon the verge of crime. Most of the females are either harlots or ex-harlots, and many of the males are homosexuals. At the bottom of the pile are the poor wretches, mainly aging, who find road life increasingly insupportable, and so gravitate dismally toward the big cities, to become beggars and mission-stiffs.

  It will be recalled that the first investigation of underworld speech in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries had to do with the talk of such vagrants rather than with the cant of more daring criminals. That speech still excites the interest of the curious, and there is a large literature upon it.1 In part it is made up of borrowings from criminal cant, in part of loans from the argot of railroad men, and in part of what seem to be original inventions. Many of its terms are familiar to most Americans, e.g., jungles (usually plural), the camp of vagabonds outside a city, sometimes occupied for years; blind, the front of a baggage-car, directly behind the engine-tender; flop, a place to sleep (flop-house, a cheap lodging-house); mulligan, a stew made in the jungles of any food the assembled hoboes can beg, borrow or steal; slave-market, an employment agency; main stem or drag, the main street of a town; crummy, lousy;1 to mooch, to beg;2 hand-out, food begged at a house-door;3 to panhandle, to ride the rods;4 hoosegow, a jail;5 bughouse, crazy;6 barrel-house, a low saloon;7 to pound the ties, and to rustle a meal.8

  Among the more esoteric terms recorded in the literature are to go gooseberrying, to rob clothes lines (gooseberries); filling-station, a small town (once a tank-town or whistle-stop); bindle, the hobo’s roll of clothes and bedding (if he carries one he is a bindle-stiff); scissors-bill, a law-abiding citizen;9 rattler, a freight-car; red-ball, a fast freight; stash, a hiding-place;10 clown, a rustic policeman; gay-cat, a newcomer to the road; jungle-buzzard, one who partakes of a meal in a jungle without contributing anything to it;11 skid-road, a city street frequented by hoboes; tourist or snow-fly, a tramp who goes South in Winter to escape the cold weather; lump or poke-out, a hand-out (if unwrapped it is a bald-lump); locust or sap, a policeman’s stick; to be fanned, to be awakened by having it applied to the soles of one’s feet; gandy-dancer, a section hand; hairbin, a housewife; pie-card, a union card used as a credential in begging; shark, an employment agent; man-catcher, an employer seeking workers; stew-bum, a drunkard; sit-down, a meal in a house; hump, a mountain; tin cow, canned milk; Peoria, soup;1 drag, a train; reefer, a refrigerator-car; shack, a brakeman; to put it down, to get off a train, and to carry the banner, to walk the streets all night, lacking money for lodging.

  The bums who congregate in cities and live by panhandling have special names to designate men whose appeals to charity are helped by various disabilities, real or imaginary. A blind man is Blinky, a man who holds out that he is deaf and dumb is D. & D. (if he claims to be only deaf he is Deafy; if only dumb, Dummy), a one-legged or legless man is Peggy, a one-armed or armless man is Wingy or Army, a paralytic is Crippy, an epileptic is Fritz, a man with tremors is Shaky, and one pretending to be insane is Nuts. Those who exhibit sores, usually made with acid, are blisters; those who throw their bones out of joint are throwouts or tossouts, those who cough dismally are ghosts, and those who squat in front of churches or other public buildings and pretend to be helpless are floppers.2 Cripples in general are crips. Those who repair umbrellas at street-corners are mush-fakers (an umbrella is a mush).3 Those who make and sell objects of wire, e.g., coat-hangers, are qually-workers. Those who gaze longingly into restaurants or bake-shops while they gnaw at prop bread-crusts are nibblers. Those who dig into garbage-cans are divers. Those who pretend to have fainted from hunger are flickers. Those with hard-luck stories are weepers. Those who practise minor con games are dingoes.4 Those who pick up cigar and cigarette butts are snipe-hunters. Homosexuals ar
e common among hoboes, and have a vocabulary of their own. They are called wolves or jockers and the boys accompanying them are guntzels, gazoonies, punks, lambs or prushuns.5 There are generally recognized hobo nicknames for most towns and many railroads. Chicago is the Village, Cincinnati is Death Valley, Richmond, Va., is Grantsville, Pittsburg is Cinders or the Burg, Spokane, Wash., is the Spokes, Walla Walla, Wash., is the Wallows, Kalamazoo, Mich., is the Zoo, Columbus, O., is Louse Town, Little Rock, Ark., is the Rock, Joliet, Ill., is Jolly, Salt Lake City is the Lake, Toledo is T. O., Butte, Mont., is Brass, Kansas City is K. C., Cleveland is Yap Town, Minneapolis is Minnie, Washington is the Cap, Terre Haute, Ind., is the Hut, and New York is simply the City.1

  Webster 1934 says that the origin of hobo is unknown. The DAE says that the suggestion that it comes from “Hello Beau” or “Ho, beau,” an alleged greeting of railroad brakemen to tramps and of tramps to one another, “perhaps deserves special attention,” but goes no further. Many other etymologies have been proposed. Jack London undertook, without evidence or plausibility, to derive the word from oboe; others have suggested that it comes from “Homeward bound,” a slogan of soldiers returning from the Civil War; from Hoboken; from homus bonum, a good fellow; from hoe-boy, a California farm-hand of Gold Rush days; from “Ho, bo” or “Ho, bub,” a greeting to boys; from “Ho, boy,” the cry of mailmen along the Oregon Short Line in the 80s; and from a Japanese word meaning everywhere. All these sound improbable to me. The DAE’s first example of the word comes from one of the magazine articles of Josiah Flynt, and is dated 1891. It came into wide use soon afterward.2 Tramp has been traced in England to 1664, but it was not in general use in the United States until the 1880s. Bum, which is usually assumed to be derived from the German bummler, of the same meaning, first came into use in San Francisco, in the form of bummer, c. 1855. Applied to predatory soldiers, it was widely popular during the Civil War, but was not shortened to bum until c. 1870.3

  Also hanging about the outskirts of the professional criminals are the drug addicts, the prostitutes, and the disorderly children (not a few of them with well-to-do and even rich parents) who train for entrance into one or another of the three groups. There is nothing inherently criminal about taking drugs, and in many cases it is not even anti-social, but the laws against it have made those who do so partners of the racketeers who supply them, just as Prohibition made even the most moderate boozer a partner of Al Capone. Moreover, small-time criminals themselves often become addicts, and all drug-sellers are criminals, so the relation between crime and addiction is close. The language of the vice and trade has been reported by David W. Maurer,1 James A. Donovan, Jr.,2 Victor Folke Nelson,3 Milton Mezzrow4 and Meyer Berger:5 it varies according to the drug used, but has many general terms, some of them borrowed from the vocabulary of criminals. Maurer says that “it changes rapidly, for as soon as a word is generally known outside the fraternity it dies and another is coined to take its place.” At the time of writing a wholesaler is a big man, a retailer is a pedlar or connection (not infrequently he is also an ice-tong doctor, i.e., an abortionist), a beginning addict is a joy-popper or student, a finished addict is a gowster or junker, and is said to have a monkey on his back, non-addicts are square Johns or do-right people, an addict well supplied is on the mojo and is said to be in high, a standard dose is a ration, check, deck, bindle, block, card, cube, cap or piece, a half size is a bird’s eye, to adulterate is to shave and an adulterated piece is a short piece, a dose injected hypodermically is a shot, pop, O, bang, jolt, fix-up or geezer, a needle is a spike, gun, joint, nail, luer, or artillery, and a Federal narcotics agent is whiskers, gazer, uncle, or a headache-man. Opium is tar, mud, black stuff, gum or hop, morphine is white stuff, Racehorse Charlie, sugar, white nurse or sweet stuff, cocaine is snow, happy dust, C, Heaven dust or coke,6 and marihuana is muggles, Mary Warner, mezz, Indian hay, loco weed, Mary Jane, mooter, love weed, bambaiacha, mohasky, fu, mu, moocah, grass, tea or blue sage.1

  Opium smoking, says Maurer, is going out, largely because the drug is bulky and smoking it calls for prepared quarters and a somewhat elaborate apparatus. Many of the terms used by smokers are of Chinese origin, e.g., yen, the craving; yen-pok or fun (pronounced foon), the prepared pill; yen-shee-kwoi, an unsophisticated smoker; toy, the box in which opium is kept; yen-shee or gee-yen, unburned gum; suey-pow, a sponge for cleaning the pipe, yen-shee-gow, a scraper for the same purpose, and hop with its derivative, hophead. In English the pipe is a stem, saxophone, gong, gonger, dream-stick, joy-stick or bamboo. An addict smoking is said to be hitting (or beating) the gong, kicking the gonger, kicking the gong around, or laying the hip, the preparation of the opium is called cooking (or rolling) a pill, an addict is a cookie, and one who cooks it for others is a chef. A marihuana smoker is a viper, tea-man or reefing-man, a cigarette is a reefer,2 stick, killer, goof-but, giggle-smoke, gyve or twist, smoking is viping or sending, a place devoted to sending is a pad and a peddler is a pusher. “A smoker is high when contentment creeps over him”3 and down on the morning after. The stump of a cigarette is a roach, whiskey is shake-up, and the juke-box or phonograph usually present in a pad is a piccolo. In the days when cocaine was a popular tipple a devotee was a cokie, snowbird snifter or Charlie Coke, to inhale the drug, often called Bernice, was to go on a sleighride or to go coasting, and a mixture of cocaine and morphine was a whizz-bang or speed-ball. The vocabulary of addicts differs somewhat from place to place. Maurer records that in Chicago (1938) they called themselves ads, junk-hogs, jabbers, knockers and smeckers, terms apparently not in use elsewhere, and Sanders tells me that prisoners in the Virginia State Prison (1942) had a long list of local names for various mild narcotics and sedatives, e.g., cement, codeine; ping pong, pantopon; yellow jacket, nembutal; green hornet, sodium pentobarbital, and blue devil, sodium amytal. Most of these were suggested by the colors of the capsules. Elsewhere a sodium pentobarbital capsule is a goof-pill.1

  Maurer says that prostitutes are so stupid and so little group-conscious that they have never developed “the technical vocabulary which characterizes all other criminal groups.”2 Nevertheless, there are trade terms that prevail widely among them, and some are of considerable antiquity, e.g., landlady or madame, the keeper of a brothel; boarder, an inmate; hustler, a street-walker; friend, a pimp; hooker, an old prostitute; dark meat, a colored prostitute; stable, a group of women under control of one padrone; cathouse, crib or sporting-house, a brothel; call-house, one with no internes, which sends for girls on demand; to sit for company, to be on the staff of a brothel; to be busy, to be engaged professionally, and professor, a house musician.3 A creep-joint or panel-house is one in which patrons are robbed, a roller or mush-worker is a girl who robs them, and a lush-worker is one who specializes in drunks, but these last terms belong to the general vocabulary of criminals and are not peculiar to prostitutes. During World War II many patriotic young girls, some of them in their early teens, devoted themselves to entertaining soldiers and sailors on leave. They were usually called V-girls. Women who frequent taverns or night-clubs, getting a percentage on the drinks they induce male patrons to buy, are taxi-drinkers, mixers, percentage-girls or sitters.4 Crib, a very low form of brothel; cat-wagon, a conveyance used by touring prostitutes, and gun-boat, a boat used for the same purpose,1 seem to be obsolete, or nearly so.

  The line separating the criminal argots from ordinary slang is hard to draw, and in certain areas the two are mixed. Consider, for example, the language of showfolks. At the top it is highly respectable, and some of it is of considerable antiquity, but on the level of traveling carnivals and low city theatres it coalesces with that of hoboes, Gipsies and thieves. Similarly, the transient slang of jitterbugs and other incandescent youngsters is connected through that of jazz musicians with that of drug-addicts. All show-folks who work under canvas say they are on the show, not in it, just as pickpockets say they are on the cannon and yeggs that they are on the heavy, and there are many circus and carnival terms that are id
entical with criminal terms, e.g., grift, an illicit or half-illicit means of getting money; benny, an overcoat; shill, one hired to entice customers; cheaters, spectacles; mouthpiece, a lawyer; to lam, to depart hastily; hoosier, a yokel; home-guard, those who do not travel; leather, a pocketbook; moniker, a person’s name or nickname; office, a signal, and the various names for money, ranging from ace for a $1 bill to grand for $1,000.2 This lingo has been studied by David W. Maurer,3 George Milburn,4 Percy W. White,5 E. P. Conkle,6 A. J. Liebling,7 Marcus H. Boulware,8 Joe Laurie, Jr.,9 and Charles Wolverton.10 It is divided into halves, the first of which is that of showfolks proper, who are inclined to be an austere and even somewhat prissy lot, and the second that of their hangers-on, some of whom, as we have just seen, are hardly to be distinguished from malefactors. But each moiety knows and uses the argot of the other.

  That of the showfolks proper is picturesque and often amusing. “Few occupations,” says Maurer, “have so colorful a technical vocabulary.” A clown is a paleface, a whiteface or Joey, a tattooed man is a picture-gallery, a bareback rider is a rosinback, a contortionist is a frog, bender or Limber Jim, a freak or snake-charmer is a geek, and all performers are kinkers. The owner of the show is the governor or gaffer, the head electrician is shanty,1 a musician is a windjammer, a palmist is a mitt-reader, a phrenologist is a bump-reader, the stake-drivers are the hammer gang, those who load and unload the show are razorbacks, elephant handlers are bull men or bull hookers, the barker outside a sideshow is the spieler, his talk is the opening or ballyhoo,2 a bouncer is a pretty boy, a newcomer to the show is a first-of-May or Johnny-come-lately, and the august master of ceremonies is the equestrian director.3