NO GOOD; too poor, and know too much.
Where did these signs come from, and when were they first used? are questions which I have asked myself again and again, whilst endeavouring to discover their history. Knowing the character of the Gipseys, and ascertaining from a tramp that they are well acquainted with the hieroglyphics, “and have been as long ago as ever he could remember,” I have little hesitation in ascribing the invention to them. And strange it would be if some modern Belzoni, or Champollion, discovered in these beggars’ marks fragments of ancient Egyptian or Hindoo hieroglyphical writing! But this, of course, is a simple vagary of the imagination.
That the Gipseys were in the habit of leaving memorials of the road they had taken, and the successes that had befallen them, there can be no doubt. In an old book, The Triumph of Wit, 1724, there is a passage which appears to have been copied from some older work, and it runs thus: – “The Gipseys set out twice a year, and scatter all over England, each parcel having their appointed stages, that they may not interfere, nor hinder each other; and for that purpose, when they set forward in the country, they stick up boughs in the way of divers kinds, according as it is agreed among them, that one company may know which way another is gone, and so take a different road.” The works of Hoyland and Borrow supply other instances.
I cannot close this subject without drawing attention to the extraordinary fact, that actually on the threshold of the gibbet the sign of the vagabond is to be met with! “The murderer’s signal is even exhibited from the gallows; as a red handkerchief held in the hand of the felon about to be executed is a token that he dies without having betrayed any professional secrets.”34
Since the first edition of this work was published the author has received from various parts of England numerous evidences of the still active use of beggars’ marks, and mendicant hieroglyphics. One gentleman writes from Great Yarmouth to say that only a short time since, whilst residing in Norwich, he used frequently to see them on the houses and street corners. From another gentleman, a clergyman, I learn that he has so far made himself acquainted with the meanings of the signs employed, that by himself marking the characters
THE HISTORY OF SLANG, OR THE VULGAR LANGUAGE OF FAST LIFE
Slang is the language of street humour, of fast, high, and low life. Cant, as was stated in the chapter upon that subject, is the vulgar language of secrecy. They are both universal and ancient, and appear to have been the peculiar concomitants of gay, vulgar, or worthless persons in every part of the world, at every period of time. Indeed, if we are to believe implicitly the saying of the wise man, that “there is nothing new under the sun,” the “fast” men of buried Nineveh, with their knotty and door-matty looking beards, may have cracked Slang jokes on the steps of Sennacherib’s palace; and the stocks and stones of Ancient Egypt, and the bricks of venerable and used-up Babylon, may, for aught we know, be covered with Slang hieroglyphics unknown to modern antiquarians, and which have long been stumbling-blocks to the philologist; so impossible is it at this day to say what was then authorised, or what then vulgar language. Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding, and excitement, and artificial life. Even to the classics it was not unknown, as witness the pages of Aristophanes and Plautus, Terence and Athenæus. Martial, the epigrammatist, is full of Slang. When an uninvited guest accompanied his friend, the Slang of the day styled him his UMBRA; when a man was trussed, neck and heels, it called him jocosely QUADRUPUS.
Old English Slang was coarser, and depended more upon downright vulgarity than our modern Slang. It was a jesting speech, or humorous indulgence for the thoughtless moment, or the drunken hour, and it acted as a vent-peg for a fit of temper or irritability; but it did not interlard and permeate every description of conversation as now. It was confined to nick-names and improper subjects, and encroached but to a very small extent upon the domain of authorised speech. Indeed, it was exceedingly limited when compared with the vast territory of Slang in such general favour and complete circulation at the present day. Still, although not an alarming encumbrance, as in our time, Slang certainly did exist in this country centuries ago, as we may see if we look down the page of any respectable History of England. Cromwell was familiarly called OLD NOLL, – just the same as Buonaparte was termed BONEY, and Wellington CONKEY, or NOSEY, only a few years ago. His Legislature, too, was spoken of in a high-flavoured way as the BAREBONES, or RUMP Parliament, and his followers were nicknamed ROUNDHEADS, and the peculiar religious sects of his protectorate were styled PURITANS and QUAKERS.35 The Civil War pamphlets, and the satirical hits of the Cavaliers and the Commonwealth men, originated numerous Slang words and vulgar similes, in full use at the present moment. Here is a field of inquiry for the Philological Society, indeed I may say a territory, for there are thirty thousand of these partisan tracts. Later still, in the court of Charles the Second, the naughty ladies and the gay lords, with Rochester at their head, talked Slang; and very naughty Slang it was too! Fops, in those days, when “over head and ears” in debt, and in continual fear of arrest, termed their enemies, the bailiffs, PHILISTINES36 or MOABITES. At a later period, when collars were worn detached from shirts, in order to save the expense of washing – an object it would seem with needy “swells” in all ages – they obtained the name of JACOBITES. One half of the coarse wit in Butler’s Hudibras lurks in the vulgar words and phrases which he was so fond of employing. They were more homely and forcible than the mild and elegant sentences of Cowley, and the people, therefore, hurrah’d them, and pronounced Butler one of themselves, – or, as we should say, in a joyful moment, a jolly good fellow. Orator Henley preached and prayed in Slang, and first charmed and then swayed the dirty mobs in Lincoln’s Inn Fields by vulgarisms. Burly Grose mentions Henley, with the remark that we owe a great many Slang phrases to him. Swift, and old Sir Roger L’Estrange, and Arbuthnot, were all fond of vulgar or Slang language; indeed, we may see from a Slang word used by the latter how curious is the gradual adoption of vulgar terms in our standard dictionaries. The worthy doctor, in order to annihilate (or, as we should say with a fitting respect to the subject under consideration, SMASH) an opponent, thought proper on an occasion to use the word CABBAGE, not in the ancient and esculentary sense of a flatulent vegetable of the kitchen garden, but in the at once Slang sense of purloining or cribbing. Johnson soon met with the word, looked at it, examined it, weighed it, and shook his head, but out of respect to a brother doctor inserted it in his dictionary, labelling it, however, prominently “Cant;” whilst Walker and Webster, years after, when to cabbage was to pilfer all over England, placed the term in their dictionaries as an ancient and very respectable word. Another Slang term,
This term, with a singular literal downrightness, which would be remarkable in any other people than the French, is translated by them as the sect of
Swift alludes to this term in his
