Thieves' cant
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Thieves' cant (also called flash lingo, gibberish, patter flash, and slang) is a secret language (or cryptolect) formerly used by thieves, beggars and hustlers of various kinds in Great Britain and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries. The classic, colorful argot is now mostly obsolete, and is largely relegated to the realm of literature and fantasy role-playing.
Cant was a common feature of rogue literature of the Elizabethan period in England, in both pamphlets and Elizabethan theatre. Thomas Harman who claimed to be a Justice of the Peace included examples in his Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566). He claimed that he collected his information from vagabonds he interrogated at his home in Essex. He also called it “pedlars’ French” or “pelting speech”, and said he was told had been invented as a secret language some 30 years earlier. The earliest records of canting words are included in The Highway to the Spitalfields by Robert Copland c.1536. Copland and Harman were used as sources by later writers. A spate of rogue literature started in 1591 with Robert Greene's series of five pamphlets on cozenage and coney-catching. These were continued by other writers, including Thomas Middleton, in The Black Book and Thomas Dekker, in The Bellman of London (1608), Lantern and Candlelight (1608) and O per se O (1612). Cant was included together with descriptions of the social structure of beggars, the techniques of thieves including coney-catching, gul-groping and gaming tricks, and the descriptions of low life of the kind which have always been popular in literature. Many of these pamphlets borrowed from earlier works, sometimes wholesale.
Harman included a canting dictionary which was copied by Thomas Dekker and other writers. That such words were known to a wide audience is evidenced by the use of cant words in Jacobean theatre. Middleton and Dekker included it in The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cut-Purse (1611). It was used extensively in The Beggars Bush, a play by Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, first performed in 1622, but possibly written c.1614. The play remained popular for two centuries, and the canting section was extracted as The Beggars Commonwealth by Francis Kirkman as one the drolls he published for performance at markets, fairs and camps.
The influence of this work can be seen from the independent life taken on by the "Beggar King Clause", who appears a real character in later literature. The ceremony for anointing the new king was taken from Thomas Harman and described as being used by gypsies in the nineteenth century. Bampfylde Moore Carew, who published his picaresque Life in 1745, claimed to have been chosen to succeed "Clause Patch" as King of the Beggars, and many editions of his work included a canting dictionary. Such dictionaries, often based on Harman’s, remained popular, including The Canting Academy, or Devils Cabinet opened, by Richard Head (1673), and BE's Dictionary of the Canting Crew (1699)
Some words from thieves’ cant continued to be used into the twentieth century combined with slang words from eighteenth century London.
Two issues remain unresolved. The first is the extent to which thieves' cant developed from Romany. That this might be so was a popular theory in the eighteenth century, but it fell out of fashion. Etymological research now suggests a substantial correlation between Romany words and cant, and equivalents, in many European languages. Against this, in England at least, there are objections that such a connection was widely made by contemporary writers, who regarded the Egyptians, as they were known, as separate from the standard vagabonds, and that cant was fully developed within 50 years of their first arrival in England. The second is the extent to which the words in literature were taken from street usage, or were adopted by those wishing to show that they were part of a real or imagined criminal underworld. It is likely that the transmission has almost certainly been in both directions.
See also
References
- Judges, A.V., (1930, reprinted 1974) The Elizabethan Underworld, includes the main works of rogue literature
- Aydelotte, F., (1913, reprinted 1967) Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds, provided analysis of the literature.
- Coleman, J., (2004) A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries, Volume 1: 1567-1784
- Green, J., Romany Rise, Critical Quarterly,
- For Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence. (1811), based on the dictionary compiled by Captain Grose in 1785.
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