ne days. The corruption of Paris seems to breed verbal
distortions rather freely, and the ordinary babble of the city workman
is as hard to any Englishman as are the colloquialisms of Burns to the
average Cockney.

In England our slang has undergone one transformation after another ever
since the time of Chaucer. Shakespeare certainly gives us plenty; then
we have the slang of the Great War, and then the unutterable horrors of
the Restoration--even the highly proper Mr. Joseph Addison does not
disdain to talk of an "old put," and his wags are given to "smoking"
strangers. The eighteenth century--the century of the gallows--gave us a
whole crop of queer terms which were first used in thieves' cellars, and
gradually filtered from the racecourse and the cockpit till they took
their place in the vulgar tongue. 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. No distinct mental process, no process
of corruption, is made manifest by the use of these terms; we simply