The sweet idyll of "Life in London" is
a perfect garden of slang; Tom the Corinthian and Bob Logic lard their
phrases with the idiom of the prize-ring, and the author obligingly
italicises the knowing words so that one has no chance of missing them.
But nowadays we have passed beyond all that, and every social clique,
every school of art and literature, every trade--nay, almost every
religion--has its peculiar slang; and the results as regards morals,
manners, and even conduct in general are too remarkable to be passed
over by any one who desires to understand the complex society of our
era. The mere patter of thieves or racing-men--the terms are nearly
synonymous--counts for nothing. Those who know the byways of life know
that there are two kinds of dark language used by our nomad classes and
by our human predatory animals. A London thief can talk a dialect which
no outsider can possibly understand; for, by common agreement, arbitrary
names are applied to every object which the robbers at any time handle,
and to every sort of underhand business which they transact. But this
gibberish is not exactly an outcome of any moral obliquity; it is
employed as a means of securing safety. The gipsy cant is the remnant of
a pure and ancient language; we all occasionally use terms taken from
this remarkable tongue, and, when we speak of a "cad," or "making a
mull," or "bosh," or "shindy," or "cadger" or "bamboozling," or "mug,"
or "duffer," or "tool," or "queer," or "maunder," or "loafer," or
"bung," we are using pure gipsy.
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