shoes
potato-trap mouth
yam eat
gab talk
tooth-music hearty chewing
queer lamp blind or squinting eye
7.7
bene cove good fellow
bread-basket stomach
gummy-stuff medicine
bang-up best
jock joy
stubble hold
gob mouth
prime twig first-rate condition, here re-literalized
edge encourage, induce
lathy thin
heaver lover
glib smooth
spado sword
spit sword
agogare anxious, eager
cog tooth
slippery soap
lurch abandon
daddle hand
put on a string send on a wild-goose chase
M T empty
drab nasty woman
pelt rage
tout follow, pursue
boated gone to sea
nubibus the clouds
Notes
Matsell (d. 1877), “Chief of the New York Police” (though not the only one, as there was more than one force), claims to have spent “years of diligent labor” studying thieves’ cant, which he identifies as “the Romany or Gipsy language, adapted to the use of rogues in all parts of the world.” In addition to the lexicon, the book contains a sample conversation, a story, a poem, and even a tailor’s advertisement translated into cant. It seems doubtful that anyone spoke the way Matsell imagines—that is, using jargon equivalents for all common words all the time (although there was evidently a term for doing just that—namely, “stamfishing”; cf. Scots English “scomfish’t,” 14.1). By composing texts entirely in cant, Matsell has in effect created a literary language, and it is the one I am using here. To learn it, I found it helpful to read Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York and to watch Martin Scorsese’s film of nearly the same title. The film’s screenwriters (Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan) drew on Matsell’s glossary, and the bits that made it into the script sound especially convincing when performed by Daniel Day-Lewis in his role as gang lord Bill Cutting. Although the Five Points gangsters are altogether more brutal and savage than anyone in the Impostures, their language proved a good fit for this one. Among other things, it contains eight different ways to say “eyes,” which came in handy in a story about a man pretending to be blind. In a few cases where Matsell could not supply a word I needed (e.g., “its liturgies and articles” in §7.1
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