Slang Dictionary

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A SHORT HISTORY OF SLANG, THE VULGAR LANGUAGE OF FAST 'LIFE. SLANG is the language of street humour, of fast, high, and low life. Cant, as was stated in the chapter upon that subject, is the vulgar language of secrecy. It must be admitted, however, that within the past few years they have become almost...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A SHORT HISTORY OF SLANG, THE VULGAR LANGUAGE OF FAST 'LIFE. SLANG is the language of street humour, of fast, high, and low life. Cant, as was stated in the chapter upon that subject, is the vulgar language of secrecy. It must be admitted, however, that within the past few years they have become almost indivisible. They are both universal and ancient, and appear to have been, with certain exceptions, the offspring of gay, vulgar, or worthless persons in every part of the world at every period of time. Indeed, if we are to believe implicitly the saying of the wise man, that there is nothing new under the sun, the bloods of buried Nineveh, with their knotty and door-matty-looking beards, may have cracked Slang jokes on the ?steps of Sennacherib's palace; while the stocks and stones of ancient Egypt, and the bricks of venerable and used-up Eabylon, may be covered with Slang hieroglyphs, which, being perfectly unknown to modern antiquaries, have long been stumbling-blocks to the philologist; so impossible is it at this day to say what was then authorized, or what vulgar, language. The only objection that can be raised to this idea is, that Slang was, so far as can be discovered, traditional, and unwritten, until the appearance of this volume, a state of things which accounts for its many changes, and the doubtful orthography of even its best known and most permanent forms. Slang is almost as old as speech, and must date from the congregating together ofTHE SLANG DICTIONARY. 35 people in cities. It is the result of crowding, and excitement, and artificial life. We have traces of this as far as we can refer back. Martial, the epigrammatist, is full of Slang. When an uninvited guest accompanied his friend, the Slang of the day styled him his umbra; when a man was t...