ng Land.

_Slang_ does _not_ mean, as Mr Hotten asserts, the secret language of the
Gipsies, but is applied by them to acting; to speaking theatrical
language, as in a play; to being an acrobat, or taking part in a show. It
is a very old Gipsy word, and indicates plainly enough the origin of the
cant word "slang." Using other men's words, and adopting a conventional
language, strikes a Gipsy as _artificial_; and many men not Gipsies
express this feeling by speaking of conventional stage language as
"theatrical slang." Its antiquity and origin appear in the Hindu swangi,
an actor; swang, mockery, disguise, sham; and swang lena, to imitate. As
regards the sound of the words, most English Gipsies would call swang
"slang" as faithfully as a Cockney would exchange _hat_ with '_at_.

Deepest among deep words in India is _tat_, an element, a principle, the
essence of being; but it is almost amusing to hear an English Gipsy say
"that's the tatto (or tat) of it," meaning thereby "the thing itself,"
the whole of it. And thus the ultimate point of Brahma, and the infinite
depth of all transcendental philosophy, may reappear in a cheap,
portable, and convenient form, as a declaration that the real meaning of
some mysterious transaction was that it amounted to a sixpenny swindle at
thimble-rig; for to such base uses have the Shaster and the Vedas come in
England.

It is, however, pleasant to find the Persian _bahar_, a garden, recalling
Bahar Danush, the garden of knowledge (Hindustani, bagh), reappearing in
the English Gipsy _bar_. "She pirryed adree the bar lellin ruzhers."
"She walked in the garden plucking flowers." And it is also like old
times and the Arabian Nights at home, to know that bazaar is a Gipsy
word, though it be now quite obsolete, and signifies no longer a public
street for shops, but an open field.

But of all words which identify the Gipsies with the East, and which
prove their Hindu origin, those by which they call themselves Rom and
Romni are most conclusive. In India the Dom caste is one of the lowest,
whose business it is for the men to remove carcasses, while the Domni, or
female Dom, sings at weddings. Everything known of the Dom identifies
them with Gipsies. As for the sound of the word, any one need only ask
the first Gipsy whom he meets to pronounce the Hindu _d_ or the word Dom,
and he will find it at once converted into _l_ or _r_. There are, it is
true, other castes and classes in India