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in which they were worn, as they required a sling of string to keep them off the ground.” Bee had just been nettled at Pierce Egan producing a new edition of Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, and was determined to excel him in a vulgar dictionary of his own, which should be more racy, more pugilistic, and more original. How far he succeeded in this latter particular his ridiculous etymology of Slang will show. Slang is not an English word, it is the Gipsey term for their secret language, and its synonyme is GIBBERISH – another word which was believed to have had no distinct origin.41 Grose – stout and burly Captain Grose – who we may characterise as the greatest antiquary, joker, and drinker of porter of his day, was the first author who put the word Slang into print. It occurs in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, of 1785, with the signification that it implies “Cant or vulgar language.” Grose, I may remark in passing, was a great favourite with the poet Burns, and so pleased by his extensive powers of story-telling and grog-imbibing, that the companionable and humour-loving Scotch bard wrote for his fat friend – or, to use his own words, “the fine, fat, fodgel wight” – the immortal poem of “Tam O’Shanter.”

      Without troubling the reader with a long account of the transformation into an English term of the word Slang, I may remark in passing that it is easily seen how we obtained it from the Gipseys. Hucksters and beggars on tramp, or at fairs and races, associate and frequently join in any rough enterprise with the Gipseys. The word would be continually heard by them, and would in this manner soon become Cant;42 and, when carried by “fast” or vulgar fashionables from the society of thieves and low characters to their own drawing-rooms, would as quickly become Slang, and the representative term for all vulgar or Slang language.

      Any sudden excitement, peculiar circumstance, or popular literary production, is quite sufficient to originate and set going a score of Slang words. Nearly every election or public agitation throws out offshoots of the excitement, or scintillations of the humour in the shape of Slang terms – vulgar at first, but at length adopted as semi-respectable from the force of habit and custom. There is scarcely a condition or calling in life that does not possess its own peculiar Slang. The professions, legal and medical, have each familiar and unauthorised terms for peculiar circumstances and things, and I am quite certain that the clerical calling, or “the cloth,” is not entirely free from this peculiarity. Every workshop, warehouse, factory, and mill throughout the country has its Slang, and so have the public schools of Eton, Harrow, and Westminster, and the great Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Sea Slang constitutes the principal charm of a sailor’s “yarn,” and our soldiers and officers have each their peculiar nicknames and terms for things and subjects proper and improper. A writer in Household Words (No. 183) has gone so far as to remark, that a person “shall not read one single parliamentary debate, as reported in a first-class newspaper, without meeting scores of Slang words;” and “that from Mr. Speaker in his chair, to the Cabinet Ministers whispering behind it – from mover to seconder, from true blue Protectionist to extremest Radical – Mr. Barry’s New House echoes and re-echoes with Slang.” Really it seems as if our boasted English tongue was a very paltry and ill-provided contrivance after all; or can it be that we are the most vulgar of people?

      The universality of Slang is extraordinary. Let any person for a short time narrowly examine the conversation of their dearest and nearest friends, aye, censor-like, even slice and analyse their own supposed correct talk, and they shall be amazed at the numerous unauthorised, and what we can only call vulgar, words they continually employ. It is not the number of new words that we are ever introducing that is so reprehensible, there is not so much harm in this practice (frequently termed in books “the license of expression”) if neologisms are really required, but it is the continually encumbering of old words with fresh and strange meanings. Look at those simple and useful verbs, do, cut, go, and take, and see how they are hampered and overloaded, and then let us ask ourselves how it is that a French or German gentleman, be he ever so well educated, is continually blundering and floundering amongst our little words when trying to make himself understood in an ordinary conversation. He may have studied our language the required time, and have gone through the usual amount of “grinding,” and practised the common allotment of patience, but all to no purpose as far as accuracy is concerned. I am aware that most new words are generally regarded as Slang, although afterwards they may become useful and respectable additions to our standard dictionaries. Jabber and HOAX were Slang and Cant terms in Swift’s time; so indeed were MOB and SHAM.43 Words directly from the Latin and Greek, and Carlyleisms, are allowed by an indulgent public to pass and take their places in books. Sound contributes many Slang words – a source that etymologists too frequently overlook. Nothing pleases an ignorant person more than a high-sounding term “full of fury.” How melodious and drum-like are those vulgar coruscations RUMBUMPTIOUS, SLANTINGDICULAR, SPLENDIFEROUS, RUMBUSTIOUS, and FERRICADOUZER. What a “pull” the sharp-nosed lodging-house keeper thinks she has over her victims if she can but hurl such testimonies of a liberal education at them when they are disputing her charges, and threatening to ABSQUATULATE! In the United States the vulgar-genteel even excel the poor “stuck-up” Cockneys in their formation of a native fashionable language. How charming to a refined ear are ABSKIZE, CATAWAMPOUSLY, EXFLUNCTIFY, OBSCUTE, KESLOSH, KESOUSE, KESWOLLOP, and KEWHOLLUX! Vulgar words representing action and brisk movement often owe their origin to sound. Mispronunciation, too, is another great source of vulgar or slang words – RAMSHACKLE, SHACKLY, NARY-ONE for neither, or neither one, OTTOMY for anatomy, RENCH for rinse, are specimens. The commonalty dislike frequently occurring words difficult of pronunciation, and so we have the street abridgments of BIMEBY for by and by, CAZE for because, GIN for given, HANKERCHER for handkerchief, RUMATIZ for rheumatism, BACKY for tobacco, and many others, not perhaps Slang, but certainly all vulgarisms. Archbishop Whately, in his interesting Remains of Bishop Copleston, has inserted a leaf from the Bishop’s note-book on the popular corruption of names, mentioning among others KICKSHAWS, as from the French, quelques choses; BEEFEATER, the lubberly guardian of royalty in a procession, and the supposed devourer of enormous beefsteaks, as but a vulgar pronunciation of the French, buffetier; and GEORGE and CANNON, the sign of a public-house, as nothing but a corruption (although so soon!) of the popular premier of the last generation, George Canning. Literature has its Slang terms; and the desire on the part of writers to say funny and startling things in a novel and curious way (the late Household Words,44 for instance), contributes many unauthorised words to the great stock of Slang.

      Fashionable, or Upper-class Slang, is of several varieties. There is the Belgravian, military and naval, parliamentary, dandy, and the reunion and visiting Slang. Concerning the Slang of the fashionable world, a writer in Household Words curiously, but not altogether truthfully, remarks, that it is mostly imported from France; and that an unmeaning gibberish of Gallicisms runs through English fashionable conversation, and fashionable novels, and accounts of fashionable parties in the fashionable newspapers. Yet, ludicrously enough, immediately the fashionable magnates of England seize on any French idiom, the French themselves not only universally abandon it to us, but positively repudiate it altogether from their idiomatic vocabulary. If you were to tell a well-bred Frenchman that such and such an aristocratic marriage was on the tapis, he would stare with astonishment, and look down on the carpet in the startled endeavour to find a marriage in so unusual a place. If you were to talk to him of the beau monde, he would imagine you meant the world which God made, not half-a-dozen streets and squares between Hyde Park Corner and Chelsea Bun House. The thé dansante45 would be completely inexplicable to him. If you were to point out to him the Dowager Lady Grimguffin acting as chaperon to Lady Amanda Creamville, he would imagine you were referring to the petit Chaperon rouge– to little Red Riding Hood. He might just understand what was meant by vis-a-vis, entremets, and some others of the flying horde of frivolous little foreign slangisms hovering about fashionable cookery and fashionable furniture; but three-fourths of them would seem to him as barbarous French provincialisms, or, at best, but as antiquated and obsolete expressions, picked out of the letters of Mademoiselle Scuderi, or the tales of Crebillon the

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