BOOKS.
A DICTIONARY OF SLANG.*
Tars is a very valuable book, and though the author is quite aware of its incompleteness it is much fuller and much more satisfactory than we have any right to expect from an attempt still in its infancy. The dictionary has been more than trebled since the appearance of the first edition in 1859, and many of its most important portions are entirely new.
The compiler does well to distinguish in his preliminary essay between cant and slang, but we doubt whether he has carried the principle of his distinction sufficiently out. Cant is properly technical and secret, slang general and popular. Cant is of the nature of a new language,—inventing either fresh words for old meanings iu order to disguise them, or fresh words for new distinctions such as the minute professional details of a new calling require. Slang is of the nature of a comment allusive or metaphorical on words and thoughts current and popular in the society in which it is used. For example, the word " bloak " or " bloke" for " man," originally a gipsy word, is cant ; it is simply a translation, unintelligible except to the initiated, of the word "man." There is no sort of humour or byplay or allusive- ness in the word. So also swag for the booty which is the pro- duce of a burglary is cant. It conveys no gloss on the meaning of the term. It is simply a technical term needed by professional thieves to express an idea of their trade without circumlocution. On the other hand, the expressions " blow-out" or " tuck-in" are school-boy slang,—being in fact glosses on the act of feast- ing, the former describing it with relation to the effect pro- duced on the patient, the latter with relation to the mode in which it is produced by the agent. This being the distinction between cant and slang, it is not easy to see why the mere tech- nicalities of thieves should be distinguished from the tech- nicalities of more honest professions by receiving a place in this volume. For example, there is no more reason why " gammy," or " birk," or other costermongers' or thieves' terms, which are simply used for professional purposes and not in any way as letting in new illustrations of an old word, should be included in this dictionary than the printer's ordinary technicalities " copy," " galley," " form," &c., or those of any other trade or profession, the insertion of all of which would of course have expanded the book beyond all manageable limits. The technical use of an ex- pression need not of course exclude it from the region of slang, — if the mode in which it has gained that use be of that popular, graphic, and illustrative character which is of the essence of slang. For example, the gaoler's term for handcuffs, "bracelets,' is obviously not cant but slang, being neither a technical nor secret expression, though technically used, but a popular and originally no doubt a grim sort of humorous equivalent for an equally convenient word. And there seems no more reason why the dry technicalities of burglary and, picking pockets should be entitled to a place in this dictionary than the often equally curious technicalities of other trades,—equally curious we mean both etymologically and intellectually. We suppose the compiler would say that the purpose of the book is to cata- • The Siang Dictionary ; or, the Vulgar Words, Street Phrases, and" Past" Brpres• sterns of High and Lour Society. Many with their etymology and a few with their history traced. London: John Camden Ifotten. logue the fast language both of high life and of the streets, and that even the technicalities of thieving,—in some sense a fourth " liberal " profession,—necessarily affect the language of the streets even more than University technicalities affect the fast language of high life. No doubt a more considerable proportion of the technicalities of thieves is in some sense slang,—that is, throws some capricious and perhaps humorous cross-light on the objects of common life,—than of any other technical profession. Even barristers and medical students have contributed fewer slang terms to our literature than costermongers and thieves. Still the dry technical terms of thieves and costermongers have none of the proper interest of slang, and it would have been well, we think, to include fewer of these, and more of those " rabble-charming words which carry so much wildfire wrapt up in them," as the com- piler quotes from South on his title-page, than has been at- tempted in this book. For example, the dictionary of back-slang at the conclusion, i. e., of words purposely made unintelligible to ordinary persons by being spelt backwards with very complicated variations, seems to us to have no more purpose in relation to the subject than a French or German glossary of the same words would have ;—and not so much as a glossary of the technical terms of all other trades.
The " cant " of the streets is not generally very interesting or instructive, though it must have given the compiler of this dictionary great trouble to collect. " Slang, '' however, whether of high or low, is often both, and yet even more difficult to exhaust, because, as we believe at least, if the original freshness of meaning were restored to the commonest words, we should find that almost all words take their primary force from physical metaphors or other allusions which give them something of the nature of slang. Carlyle knows this so well that he has created for himself a kind of slang by merely restoring, or attempting to restore, to a number of blanched and faded general words the old, and sometimes perhaps a shade more than the old, physical or moral force,—turning king into " Canning," Parliament into " Babblement," poet into " maker," and so forth. Again, every boy is taught at school that the word " dicere," to speak, from which we get our ' diction' and dictionary,' originally like the Greek SEIZ, the root of dump', means "point out," and is connected with "digitus," the ' finger ' with which we point, that " legere " and Xerly, to read, originally meant to gather or bind (as in "eligere," &c.), and denotes " reading" from the difficulty of binding together the symbols into words and sentences that express a meaning. Also there are plenty of instances in this book that slang is a mere return (not always conscious) to similar physical mean- ings. Thus we find under the word " grappling-irons " that this phrase is sea slang for " fingers." But the finger itself no doubt comes from " fang," the root of the German fangen, to catch, and means "catchers," which is not far removed in drift from the slang phrase. So, too, wo find in the dictionary the phrase " over the left " noted ns a slang expression expressing dislike or distrust, and the compiler might have also given the vulgar use of " left-handed" as applied to illegitimate offspring; while the use of the word sinister, "left-handed," to express distrust in a closely related sense is pure and classical English,—as is that of dexterous, or "right handed," to express general skill and tact. So, again, the University word "shady," meaning simply, poor and inefficient, as when a man is said to be "shady in Latin, but topping in Greek plays," is obviously University slang ; but the same root in the German "Schade," misfortune or mischief, is used only in the sense which with us is the slang sense,—only used as above or in the recently invented slang phrase concerning the " cold shade of the aristocracy." The truth is that almost all words which have now dropped into the pale and level abstract, have originally had meanings which if revived would look like slang, and that the invention of new sling phrases consists chiefly in drawing into prominence some physical metaphor or capricious allusion analogous to those which society has been so long unconsciously employed in paring down to vaguer and less graphic impressions. Thus the compiler of the dictionary gives,—not, however, with a quite accurate interpre- tation,—a phrase of literary slang invented in the last few years, and, as it happens, within the present writer's own circle of friends, namely, " padding," which is explained as meaning " the light articles in the monthly magazines of which the serial stories are the main attraction." The idea intended by the word was simply the second-rate and comparatively unimportant articles—as often perhaps solid as "light"—which are needed to pad out to its proper bulk any periodical after the greater articles, the main " features " of the number, have been decided on. The interstices between the edges of the principal ideas, it was thought, need filling-in with intellectual materials of a less ex- citing and vivid nature, in order to throw the others into relief, as well as in order to avoid disturbing the public with too much emphasis in a single demand on its attention. And that was the padding. The phrase was wanted, and justified itself by imme- diately taking root in the minds of editors, and there is every probability of its settling down in time into a meaning as little accentuated as the word "stuff," which originally had a strong "stuffy" meaning, but now denotes only raw or manufactured material.
The derivations and sometimes etymologies given in this dictionary are perhaps the least plausible parts of it. For example, the expressive slang word "to slope," in the sense of to decamp, depart, make off, is referred to the word " lope," and the "s" accounted for in the most improbable way as arising from a false conception as to the proprietorship of the "s" in the phrase "let's lope," "let us elope or make off." This ignores the only touch of humour in this bit of slang. " To slope " is not properly to take to your heels and run away as from a pursuit, but to diverge gracefully from an unwelcome or unpleasant position as the diagonal diverges from the side of a parallelogram ;—not to be coarsely retrograde, but mildly and gracefully evasive. It is in meaning essentially the same word as the slope of an inclined plane, and very likely of the same root (though with modified meaning)- as the word slip' and the German schleppen. The com- piler might also perhaps have set up now and then some standard of slang, if such an expression be at all admissible, by pointing out where the metaphor or allusion which constitutes the basis of the word is apposite, and where the contrary. For example, there are two words (both given), and used in the same sense, for dis- appearing or relieving society gentlyof your presence, one of which is founded in scientific fact, and the other in delusion, we
mean " to mizzle" and " to evaporate." " Mizzle,"says the diction. ary means " to run away, to decamp, to disappear as in a mist,
from mizzle, a drizzling rain, a Scotch mist,"—but it is the rain or mist which mizzles, not the person who disappears in it, and the idea evidently in the mind of the inventor of the word was that a
thin Scotch drizzle is an evanescent and pallid sort of phenomenon which might typify the gradual fading away of anything from view. In fact, however, mizzling is a process of condensation
not of evanescence ; vapour is rendered more visible as it
comes down in thin rain ; and "mizzling" should therefore, strictly speaking, denote the closer approach of a damping and unwelcome influence, not the departure or decamping of anything. Evapo- rate' is the true word for what is meant,—the rarefaction of the liquid into a gas, not the condensation of a gas into a liquid.
There are many other slang terms founded on hasty metaphors that will not hold water, which should have been condemned by the lexicographer, as well as a considerable number of derivations
which might have been given and are omitted. But on the whole a difficult work is admirably done, and we have every reason to thank the projectorof a dictionary which will undoubtedly swell edition by edition into one of more and more magnitude and value.
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