The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human

by Jonathon Green

  We can sidestep the occupational slangs of the butcher and the baker and a wide variety of other job descriptions, but the language of some ‘jobs’ ensures that their terminology will gain a place within the slang dictionaries. It is not a matter of numbers, although that can matter, but of an innate outlaw status that renders their speech beyond the linguistic norm in just the same way as does that of out-and-out criminals. In such cases a language that might otherwise have been corralled as a jargon and limited to those who performed a given job, spills over into the realm of slang in general. Two such sources stand out: the hobo or bum (tramp in Britain) and the drug user. The former group offers around 550 terms; the latter well over 2,500 (and these exclude the ‘trade names’ of the various substances of recreational choice). For our puposes, let’s look at those who wander in fact, rather than in their own heads.

  On one level – the simple fact of moving around – the hobo/tramp is the descendant of the ‘sturdy beggars’ of the sixteenth century. It was this group, the ‘canting crew’, that is those who spoke cant, the criminal jargon of the time, whose world inspired what might be termed the first ever ‘slang dictionaries’. These were a cross-European phenomenon. For a variety of reasons – among them the end of the Hundred Years War and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England – there were many more wanderers than previously. Nor were they simply passive beggars: armed with a range of trickery they were also con-men (and women) and thieves. They lived off the land and off those gullible enough to fall for their deceptions. They spoke an incomprehensible language. All over Europe authorities and scholars set out to explain them, and their special language, believing that if one knew what they meant, one might be able to avoid the consequences of what they did. What the authorities came up with were known as ‘beggar books’. They were not completely new; there had been an Arabic equivalent, complete with a list of the main beggars and their tricks, in the tenth century, but these were a European first.

  The earliest appeared in Germany, albeit with a Latin title: the Liber Vagatorum (1509). This ‘Book of the Beggars’ also enjoyed a number of editions, perhaps the best known of which was that of 1528, which boasted a preface by none other than Martin Luther. It may perhaps seem odd that Luther, the father of Protestantism and more usually engaged in fighting the mighty Roman Catholic church, would bother with so minor a book, but for him begging, as carried out by what he saw as the innately corrupt mendicant orders of that church, was a source of evil and as such worthy of stamping out. As he stated in 1520:

  ‘Probably one of our greatest needs is to abolish all mendicancy everywhere in Christendom. No one living among Christians ought to go begging . . . In my view, nowhere else is there so much wickedness and deception as in mendicancy . . . I have calculated that each of the five or six mendicant orders makes a visitation of one and the same place more than six or seven times every year. Besides this, there are the common beggars and those who beg alms in the name of a patron saint, and then the professional pilgrims.’ And he admitted in the Introduction to the Liber Vagatorum, ‘I have myself of late years been cheated and slandered by such tramps and liars more than I care to confess.’ But his main aim in backing the book was moral: ‘the book . . . should become known everywhere, in order that men can see and understand how mightily the devil rules in this world; and [. . .] how such a book can help mankind to be wise and on the look out for him, viz, the devil.’

  The book offers some 295 words, of the roots of which just over half are German, followed by 22.1 per cent Hebrew, 6.8 per cent Dutch, 6.4 per cent Latin, and small specimens (all under 2 per cent) drawn from Romani, French and Spanish. Nearly 30 per cent have no ascertainable etymology. Among the words are hanfstaud, a shirt (literally ‘hemp-rub’), kabas, the head (from Latin caput), betzam, an egg (from Hebrew), diftel, a church (from German stiftel, literally a small cathedral), dotch, the vulva (possibly a corruption of German tasche, a pocket), crackling, a nut (German krachen, to crack), mess, money (German messing, brass), rolvetzer, a miller and schöchervetzer, an innkeeper (German schenken, to retail liquor).

  In addition to these general terms are those that denote the beggars’ tricks. Wilner, those who like the English ring-dropper pretended to ‘discover’ a piece of silver, which they then sell to a victim; Joners (perhaps linked to French jouer, to play), card-sharps; Sönzen-goers, prototype begging-letter writers, and armed with false documents; Schwanfelders, who stripped naked in the hope of exciting pity and thus alms. There are the Lossenders, literally the ‘let-loose’, who claim to have been imprisoned in far-off countries and there persecuted for their Christian faith, the Klenkner, those who pretend to wounds the gruesomeness of which is balanced only by the ingenuity that conjures them up from perfectly healthy flesh; the Dobissers or fake priests also known as Schleppers; the Grantners, who pretend to the ‘falling sickness’, again a form of epilepsy; the Gickisses, or beggars who pretend to blindness, and claim to be on a pilgrimage to Rome or Compostella; the Voppers who beg on behalf of a relation possessed of the devil; Dallingers, posing as ex-hangmen and now repentant; the Seffers, who cover themselves with salve so as to appear very ill and the Schweigers who concoct a case of jaundice, using a mix of horses’ dung and water.

  There are also those that use children – never their own – for begging, those who pretend to epileptic fits, the necessary foaming counterfeited by a piece of soap in the mouth, travelling quacks, and tinkers who rather than mend a kettle, knock a hole in it, thus providing work for an accomplice.

  The Liber Vagatorum, then, set the pattern, and it was widely emulated. In France there was La Vie généreuse des mercelots, gueux, et Boesmiens, contenans leurs facons de vivre, Subtilitez et Gergon, published in 1596. The title means ‘The Heroic Life of Beggars and Bohemians, their way of life, their tricks and their language.’

  Its pseudonymous author called himself Péchon de Ruby (roughly equivalent to ‘The Smart’ or perhaps ‘Naughty Kid’). Conforming to pattern, he offers a glossary of criminal argot and lays out a hierarchy of villainy. At the top of which stands le Grand Coesre, the king of the beggars and presumably cognate with such rulers as a Caesar or Tsar. ‘A very good-looking man, with the majesty of a great monarch [. . .] and a great beard.’ His coat, if we are to believe the author, consisted of six thousand coins sewn together.

  The King of the Beggars story was popular. In England one found Cock Lorel. The name, used in slang to mean the leader of a gang of rogues, combines the adjective cock, first-rate, and losel, a worthless rogue, a profligate. The equivalent, perhaps of today’s ‘Guv’nor’ or ‘The Man’. It is usually found as a proper name and features largely in the literature of Elizabethan villainy. ‘A great rascal, but evidently a man of talents’, his first appearance is as the eponymous anti-hero of Cock Lorel’s Bote (c.1500). According to the anonymously written verses, he is a ‘ship-master’, whose ‘crew’ is a group of rogues drawn from the workshops and gutters of London. Together they ‘sail’ the country, engaging in a variety of villainies. He appears in a number of works, as well as in the glossaries compiled by John Awdeley (whose Fraternity of Vagabonds was ‘confirmed by Cock Lorel’) and Samuel Rowlands (in Martin-Mark-all: Beadle of Bridewell), who suggests that while he was ‘the most notorious knaue that ever lived’ his ‘captain’s’ role was purely allegorical and that he was, in fact that by-word for villainy and sexual deceit, a tinker. Whatever his trade he remains at the head of his marauding beggars, sometimes plotting against the state, on one occasion even entertaining the Devil to dinner at the gang’s hideout in Derbyshire’s Devil’s Arse (now Peak Cavern) so named from the farting noises that accompanied waters flooding through the cave. According to Rowlands’ generally fictitious ‘history’ of the canting crew, Cock Lorel’s reign supposedly lasted c.1511–33. As well as supposedly establishing a number of rules whereby his villains should conduct themselves, he was the first to lay out the ‘quartern of knaues called the five and twentie orders of
knaues,’ a hierarchy of beggary much imitated in a succession of canting dictionaries (at its eighteenth-century peak there were sixty-four job descriptions).

  Italy would also contribute to the genre, albeit later still. The primary work was Il vagabondo, ovvero sferza de’ bianti e vagabondi (‘or the scourge of bandits and vagabonds’) by the Roman Dominican friar Giacinto de’ Nobili alias Rafaele Frianoro; it appeared in 1621 and enjoyed at least seventeen editions. Spain’s equivalent was Juan Hidalgo’s Vocabulario de germanía (1609, ‘brotherhood’ in Catalan and thence hermanos, brothers), published in Barcelona by Sebastián Cormellas.

  It would have been surprising had England not joined the party. The first homegrown beggar book The Hye Waye to the Spytel Hous – or, roughly, Road to the Charity Ward – appeared around 1534, the creation of the London printer Robert Copland. The Hye Waye is a lengthy verse dialogue, supposedly conducted between Copland and the Spytell House Porter. The clinic in question, while unnamed by Copland, is generally accepted to have been St Bartholemew’s Hospital, London’s oldest, founded in 1123 near the open space known as Smithfield, then best known for its regular burnings of malefactors and heretics, now London’s central meat market. Trapped in the hospital porch by a snow storm, Copland strikes up a conversation with the Porter, taking as their subject the crowd of beggars who besiege the Spytell House: ‘Scabby and scurvy, pock-eaten flesh and rind / Lousy and scald, and peeléd like an apes / With scantly a rag for to cover their shapes, / Breechless, barefooted, all stinking with dirt.’ The pair then discuss why some are allowed in and others rejected. Within this framework Copland notes and the Porter describes the various categories of beggars and thieves, as well as the tricks and frauds that are their stock in trade. They further note the way folly and vice lead inevitably to poverty and thence disease and finally, willy-nilly, to the Spytell House.

  Copland’s guide is not a true ‘beggar book’, the Hye Way does not offer a ‘canting vocabulary’, but it does provide vivid descriptions of a wide range of what would be known as ‘the canting crew’, ‘diddering and doddering, leaning on their staves, / Saying “Good master, for your mother’s blessing, / Give us a halfpenny”.’ Some, explains the Porter, are justified in their beggary. Others are not, and the porter explains how, after a hard day’s conning the kindly public, the counterfeit ‘cripples’, like their succesors in John Gay’s hit play The Beggar’s Opera (1728), stripped off weeping sores, crusty bandages and suppurating wounds, tossed aside their crutches and were miraculously restored to health:

  By day on stilts or Stooping on crutches

  And so dissimule as false loitering flowches,

  With bloody clouts all about their leg,

  And placers on their skin when they go beg.

  Some counterfeit lepry, and other some

  Put soap in their mouth to make it scum,

  And fall down as Saint Cornelys’ evil.

  These deceits they use worse than any devil;

  And when they be in their own company,

  They be as whole as either you or I.

  After Copland, John Awdeley, sometimes known as John Sampson: his most important work was The Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561). As wel of ruflyng Vacabondes, as of beggerly, of women as of men, of Gyrles as of Boyes with their proper names and qualityes’. But the star of the sixteenth-century show appeared in 1566: Thomas Harman’s Caveat or Warening for Commen Cursetours Vulgarely Called Vagabones. The most influential of any beggar book, it reproduces the now regular pattern, even if in its glossary it lists but 114 terms other than those of the begging specialities themselves. But Harman, a magistrate who allegedly swapped alms for a few samples of language, was a pioneer sociologist and in its socio-linguistic rigour it would play a greater role in the canting collections that followed than any predecessor.

  Cant moved on from vagabonds, the focus moving to out-and-out criminals, but they did not go away. The last and best-known example being yet another self-styled ‘beggar king’, one Bampfylde Moore Carew, whose original ‘autobiography’ appeared in 1745 and was still going strong in an edition of 1880. Its title is a book in itself: The life and adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew, commonly called the king of the beggars: being an impartial account of his life, from his leaving Tiverton School, at the age of fifteen, and entering into a society of Gipsies, wherein the motives of his conduct are related and explained: the great number of characters and shapes he has appeared in through Great-Britain, Ireland, and several other places of Europe, with his travels twice through great part of America: containing a particular account of the origin, government, laws, and customs of the Gipsies, with the method of electing their king, and a dictionary of the cant language used by the mendicants.

  The modern tramp or hobo, while utterly different in so many ways, is still at heart the descendant of Carew and his predecessors. Writing in his Tramping with Tramps (1899) the researcher Josiah Flynt notes the fact, and references Martin Luther’s foreword to the Liber vagatorum. And like them, as well as possessing a substantial non-standard vocabulary, he is nomadic rather than urban. For the purposes of recording that language we too must be nomads, and journey from Europe to America.

  The hobo was a traveller rather than a career criminal or con-man, and had a far larger territory to cover. The beggar walked, the hobo rode, on trains, travelling via systems he called the Q (the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad used at harvest time), the Mop (Missouri Pacific), the Dope (the Baltimore and Ohio), the Original Ham and Egg Route (Oberlin, Hampton and Eastern) and the Katy (the ‘bible belt’ lines of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad, also known as the ‘Moral, Klannish and Theological’). The practice, it seems, began when veterans of the US Civil War hopped freight trains to get themselves home. (The UK seems to have predated this, with the publication in 1845 of Tales of the Trains by Charles Lever, known as the ‘Tilbury Tramp’, but the relatively tiny UK network could never develop the same mythology: British tramps walked.) The first piece of hobo writing was Bret Harte’s ‘My Friend the Tramp’ (1877): after that and until World War II hobo-related material became a publishing mainstay, whether as sociological investigation or memoir. The language, offering the best proof of authenticity, was put on prominent display. By 1931, and published in London by Eric Partridge’s Scolartis Press, the lexis justified Godfrey Irwin’s full-scale dictionary: American Tramp and Underworld Slang.

  If one believes Jack London, one of the first to set down his experiences in The Road (1907) the language was as alluring as the lifestyle, with its fantasies of freedom, adventure and travel. The young London was fascinated by what he heard and attempted to set it down verbatim, capturing the fragmented conversation of a dozens bums in noisy chorus: ‘“When I was down in Alabama,” one kid would begin; or, another, “Coming up on the C. & A. from K.C.” [. . .] and yet another, “Nope, but I’ve been on the White Mail out of Chicago.” “Talk about rail-roadin’ – wait till you hit the Pennsylvania, four tracks, no water tanks, take water on the fly, that’s goin’ some.” “The Northern Pacific’s a bad road now.” “Salinas is on the ‘hog,’ the ‘bulls’ is ‘horstile.’” “I got ‘pinched’ at El Paso, along with Moke Kid.” “Talkin’ of ‘poke-outs,’ wait till you hit the French country out of Montreal – not a word of English – you say, ‘Mongee, Madame, mongee, no spika da French,’ an’ rub your stomach an’ look hungry, an’ she gives you a slice of sow-belly an’ a chunk of dry ‘punk.’” And I continued to lie in the sand and listen. [. . .] A new world was calling to me in every word that was spoken – a world of rods and gunnels, blind baggages and “side-door Pullmans” . . . “ bulls” and “shacks,” “floppings” and “chewin’s,” “pinches” and “get-aways,” “strong arms” and “bindle-stiffs,” “punks” and “profesh.” And it all spelled Adventure.’

  London’s tramping stories reflect his fascination. He began writing them in 1895, publishing them in small magazines, then collected them in The Road in 1907. That
was the end of his tramping, although he featured the more sedentary poor in his investigation of London’s impoverished East End, written up as People of the Abyss (1903).

  Among the hobo-specific terms he gathered were these: carry the banner (to walk the streets as a tramp), blind (an order to leave a town (presumably on the railroad). It also meant a baggage car that has no door at the end leading to the inside; thus it cannot be accessed while the train is in motion; thus ride the blinds, to travel in such a wagon, blind baggage tourist, one who travels on such cars; jump the blind baggage, to ride in such a car. In addition were blowed- or blown-in-the-glass stiff (an elite hobo, a veteran), bo (a hobo), bull (a railroad policeman), cannonball (an express), comet (the aristocrat of tramps, travelling only on express trains and only for lengthy journeys), deck (to ride the roof of a freight car), dewdrop (for guards and security men to pelt tramps with stones), ditch (to throw a hobo from a moving train), flopping (anything under or in which one sleeps), on the fly (of a train, while moving), throw one’s feet (to go around a town begging), ghost-story (a far-fetched anecdote), hit the grit (to jump from a moving train), hog-train (the world of hoboing), on the hog (unsatisfactory, unwelcoming), hold down (to ride a car roof), hold-me-down (a regular job), horstile (the invariable spelling of hostile, and referring to unfriendly local authorities), main stem (the main street), monica (or moniker and several other spellings, one’s ‘road’ nickname), mulligan (a stew made of whatever meats and vegetables are available), light piece (a coin, obtained through begging), perfesh (a professional, i.e. a full-time hobo), punch in the wind (to ride on the roof), ride the rods (to ride on the steel bars beneath a freight car; as a generic, to be a tramp), road kid (a juvenile tramp who was possibly in a homosexual relationship with an older partner), shack (a brakeman), side-door Pullman (a freight car), slam the gate (to beg from private houses), slough (to imprison), stew bum (a down-and-out alcoholic), stiff (a hobo or a drunk), and strong-arm (the act of throttling a victim so as to immobilise them for theft).