A College Is a Prison

A DICTIONARY OF THE UNDERWORLD (804 pp.)--Eric Partridge--Macmillan ($9).

HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE (I 88 pp.] --Eric Partridge--Macmillan ($ 1.75).

"Th' nex' mornin' they try t' hang th' torpedoin' on me, but the [crooked] beak gets th' office, an' comes down. He goes f'r me, puts me on th' bricks, an' hands me two grand an' tells me t' breeze th' burg; which I does. Well, when I hits Frisco th' bulls know me. They frisk me an' pipes the case dough. I tries t' tell 'em it's square jack, but they don't fall, an' th' nex' thing I knows I'm doing a ten-spot in college."

Thus, in 1934, spoke a gunman sentenced to ten years in San Quentin for a shooting. He was talking a venerable underworld cant rooted 400 years deep in Anglo-American history. Britain's Eric Partridge, a lexicographer who has strayed off the fairways of the English language to rummage in the rough (A Dictionary of Slang, Shakespeare's Bawdy), shows in his massive new Dictionary of the Underworld that even in 18th Century London a beak was a magistrate, a college was a prison, and to frisk was to search. But U.S. criminals, no mere copycats, have made their own additions to the lingo, among them (see above): torpedo (to kill), pipe (to see), case dough (trial money) and square jack (honest money).

Roughing It. Criminals originally coined cant (itself a 16th Century underworld verb meaning "to speak") to conceal their plans from eavesdroppers. When cant words pass into popular slang, as they do in the U.S. far more rapidly than Lexicographer Partridge seems to be aware, new mintings are made. Yet "the main body of cant is [more] conservative" than most people realize.

In Here, There and Everywhere, a volume of essays on slang and cant, Author Partridge subscribes to the theory that English cant had its first big bloom in the Reformation, when dispossessed English priests joined up with thieves and highwaymen and taught them scraps of Latin. By 1630, "Thieves' Latin" had all but passed away, to be replaced by the cant which fathered U.S. gangster and hobo language--a rich mulligan of native ingredients peppered lightly with foreign words, e.g., booze from the Middle Dutch bus en (to tipple), stir from the gypsy stariben (a prison).

Declining Imports. Cant got its second big push in the mid-19th Century, when U.S. cons, doxies, hoboes and fingers stopped importing so much from abroad. Since then, U.S. cant has grown so rapidly that today it is "numerically larger than the British"--and still so wildly prolific that just before his book went to press, hardworking Lexicographer Partridge ordered a batch of addenda bound in to catch such sprouts, new to him, as winchell (a swindler's victim), boodled (loaded with cash), cooties' reveille (lights-out in the cells), hoochie-papping (stealing another man's girl), goof ball (marijuana smoker) and mouse-kick (watch-pocket).

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