THE LATE David Maurer was Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Louisville. He was one of the pioneers of the study of American cant and argot, starting his work in the wake of H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, which asserted the separateness of the English of the United States from the tongue of the mother country. While Mencken, who was not a professional linguist, assumed the existence of a unified kind of American English enlivened by regional variations, Maurer sought to emphasise an essential disunity and the absence of a central norm on the lines of the so-called ‘King’s English’. He believed that the normative approach to language taught in schools and colleges aped a tradition in the motherland that was already fossilised in the eighteenth century, and a reasonable approach to American English might be in terms of American subcultures and their distinctive specialised forms of the language. Two of his former pupils have selected, from over two hundred books and papers and articles published by Maurer, a number of brief glossaries relating mainly to the criminal or sub-criminal trades. If we seem to know many of the words already, this is because a whole generation of specialist lexicographers has drawn deeply on Maurer, who never himself pursued the harmless drudgery beyond the glossarial stage, though his Argot of the Criminal Narcotic Addict, with its seventy-odd double-columned pages, could be classified as genuinely a pocket dictionary.

It is commonly assumed that there is, in proportion to the population, more criminality in America than in Europe. Maurer seems to accept the assumption and take some pride in it, though it is rather a pride in the linguistic wealth of the American criminal than in his antisocial enactments. European criminals, like English puritans, found a refuge in the Land of the Free, and the Mafia – which, sadly, has contributed little to the English lexis – has turned America into a hypertrophied Sicily. But some of the organised crime of America finds no counterpart in Europe. The bootlegger and his customers equally defied the Volstead Act, which itself could be glossed as a sort of criminality, and specifically American crime may be regarded as a response to specifically American puritanism. The moonshiners, tucked away in the Kentucky hills, are technically criminals, but it is easier to accept them as exponents of American individualism. The line is always hard to draw. The point, anyway, is not how specialist argots derive from antisocial trades, but how these argots are generated and sustained by the closed nature of the social groups which use them.

Maurer, we are told, was a man well qualified for this kind of linguistic fieldwork. He was big, tough, broad-shouldered, but never to be mistaken for a cop or a fed. The law used him to instruct its undercover agent in the use of one patois or another, but he found it hard to unteach his pupils the furtive predatory manner of the fuzz or pig (which term, incidentally, is as old as ‘China Street pig’, used for a Bow Street runner in the late eighteenth century). He himself was always accepted, and the lexical fruits are in this book. He began not with criminals but with North Atlantic fishermen, from whom, working with them at the nets, he garnered not only terms like gurry (fish entrails), dong (penis), whore’s egg (a small spiny crustacean relished by Italians) and put your face on (spoil someone’s good looks) but also peculiarities of verb morphology (I had seed but he have seed; I does/du:z but he do). Then he fared inland to engage circuses and carnivals.

A number of the terms he picked up from showpeople in 1931 have now passed into the general American vocabulary, such as cheaters (spectacles), saw-buck (ten-dollar bill), century (a hundred-dollar bill, hence C-Note), dip (pickpocket), Johnny-come-lately (greenhorn), hustler (prostitute), while other are already dead, such as jig-opry (negro minstrel), mitt (palmist), lucky-boy (lazy young man who lives off a circus girl), and main guy (show boss). His list, like all his lists, serves to show how ephemeral much of the argot of a subculture is. All such glossaries tend to be word-museums.

Maurer’s verbal gleanings from the prostitute’s trade fill a mere two pages, and he explains why. ‘Argots originate in tightly closed cliques, in groups where there is a strong sense of camaraderie and highly developed group solidarity based primarily on community of occupation. Since prostitution, by its very low position in the hierarchy of the crime world and by virtue of its internal organisation, denies the prostitute all claim to true professional status, it is obvious that professional pride is lacking as a motive for argot.’ Moreover, there is in prostitutes, as is evident from their fantasies (some of which, like Dr Johnson’s friend Ben Flint, they try to eternise in doggerel), a desire for conformity and respectability. Their language is a poor thing, but it has, or had, phrases like hair pie, public enemy (a customer’s wife), and Oom Paul (a customer, not necessarily a Boer, who likes cunnilingus). This must be the only trade which calls on the title of a classic play to designate one of its activities: She Stoops to Conquer describes fellatio, which, by the less cultivated, may be called Way Down South in Dixie. Maurer persistently confuses sodomy and pederasty. He is not interested in the origins of words and phrases, which makes him no true philologist. Eric Partridge was right to insist on providing etymologies, even when these were tentative or mere guesswork. Maurer gives us no hint, for instance, as to why a hooker who accepts coition up the dirt road is called a turquoise.

Before we engage genuine criminals, let us consider the language of the moonshiner, very little of whose terminology can be explicated on a basis of straight translation. It is not enough to define kerosene liquor as ‘liquor contaminated by kerosene.’ We have to know that a teaspoon of kerosene in a one thousand gallon vat of beer will cause all the liquor to taste of itself. When the boiler is fired with kerosene the moonshiner must wash his hands carefully ‘after filling the pressure tank, and not allow any of his supply bags to lean against a kerosene drum while hauling them to the still site.’ Horse-blanket whisky describes a crude liquor made by covering a boiling kettle of beer with a heavy horse-blanket which is periodically wrung of its condensed moisture. ‘This technique is not approved of by first-class moonshiners.’ To bulldog is ‘to heat used barrels by setting them against a large oil drum in which a fire is built in order to sweat out the whisky that has soaked into the barrel staves.’ Half the glossary is richly technical, the other half has to do with beating the revenooers.

The cream of the criminal world are probably the Confidence Men, whose complex skills entail a very precise mastery of conventional language but whose inner argot is colourfully arcane. The victim, as we all know, is the mark, but he is also the apple, egg, fink, savage, winchell, chump and (why?) Mr John Bates. On him is played the big con or the short con. The biggest of the big con games is the payoff, and the term is shorthand for a whole scenario. A wealthy mark is led to believe that he has been taken into a deal by which a big racing syndicate is to be swindled. ‘At first he plays with money furnished by the confidence men, then is put on the send for all the cash he can raise, fleeced and blown off.’ There is also the wire, in which a bogus Western Union official convinces the mark that he can delay the transmission of race results to the bookmakers long enough for the mark to place a bet after the race is run. And so on.

Maurer remembers that, while words are the daughters of men, things – which include criminal activities – are the sons of heaven. Glorying in the plenitude of argot, he at the same time deplores the ‘major industry’ which sustains it. America and presumably other nations will only learn to deal with organised crime when they understand its nature, which involves knowing its language. This sounds like the usual social justification of an academic obsession: in a materialist society it is often difficult to defend the pure as opposed to the applied study. Liquidate criminality and part of Maurer’s occupation, or that of his followers, is gone. When he says ‘… we have seen within the last two decades the mass invasion of a definitely criminal subculture by teenagers (and sometimes pre-teens) from the dominant culture – an invasion that has played havoc with the criminal’s culture pattern as well as his argot’ it is as though he were trembling at the situation of an endangered species. Yet who could deny the nobility of his vocation or do other than praise the results of his enquiries among the jug-heavy, forgers, faro bank men, three-shell game operators, pickpockets and junkies? He was a Greene or Dekker with tenure.

 

Times Literary Supplement, 22 January 1982
Review of Language of the Underworld by David W. Maurer
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981)