Thieves' cant

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

modern times
.

Thieves' cant (also known as thieves' argot, rogues' cant, or peddler's French)

fantasy role-playing
, although individual terms continue to be used in the criminal subcultures of Britain and the United States.

History

"Egyptians", and Cock Lorell, of the "Quartern of Knaves" - at The Devil's Arse, a cave in Derbyshire, "to the end that their cozenings, knaveries and villainies might not so easily be perceived and known".[2]
gull-groping, and gaming tricks, and the descriptions of low-lifes
of the kind which have always been popular in literature.

Harman included a canting

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 of 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 as a real character in later literature. The ceremony for anointing the new king was taken from Thomas Harman and described as being used by

]

Sources

It was commonly believed that cant developed from

Welsh Romani show high commonality. This record also distinguished between Romany and Cant words and again the attributions of the words to the different categories is consistent with later records.[3]

There is doubt as to the extent to which the words in canting 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. The transmission has almost certainly been in both directions. The Winchester Confessions indicate that Roma engaged in criminal activities, or those associated with them and with a good knowledge of their language, were using cant, but as a separate vocabulary - Angloromani was used for day to day matters, while cant was used for criminal activities.[3] A thief in 1839 claimed that the cant he had seen in print was nothing like the cant then used by Roma, thieves and beggars. He also said that each of these used distinct vocabularies, which overlapped; the Roma having a cant word for everything, and the beggars using a lower style than the thieves.[4]

Examples

  • ken – house
  • bob ken - a house that can easily be robbed[5]
  • boozing ken – alehouse
  • stauling ken - a house that will receive stolen goods[6]
  • lag – water; as a verb, penal transportation
  • bene – good
  • patrico – priest
  • autem – church
  • darkmans – night
  • glymmer – fire
  • mort – woman
  • cove – man[7]
  • cully - a victim[8]
  • bung - a purse[8]
  • fence - a person who buys stolen goods[9]
  • fencing cully - a person who will receive stolen goods[10]
  • fambles - hands; also goods that are probably stolen[11]
  • bite - to cheat or cozen[10]
  • prog - meat[12]
  • scowre - to run away[12]
  • cuttle-bung - a knife with a curved blade[13]
  • foin - a pickpocketing technique in which conversation and deception are used to steal a purse from a victim; also someone who uses this technique[14]
  • nip - pickpocketing by slashing and palming a purse; also a person who uses this technique[8]
  • knuckle - a young pickpocket[8]
  • stall - a person who identifies and manoeuvres a victim so that their purse can be stolen[8]
  • bulk the cull to the right! - an instruction by a pickpocket to a stall to distract a cully by striking them on their right breast, so that their purse may be stolen[8]
  • budge - a person who breaks into houses to allow entry for their gang.

Equivalent of thieves' cant in other languages

See also

References

  1. ^ Mikanowski, Jacob (5 December 2013). "The Tongues of Rogues: How secret languages develop in closed societies". Slate.
  2. ^ Rid, Samuel (1610). Martin Markall, the Beadle of Bridewell, as quoted in Reynolds, Bryan (2002). Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England. John Hopkins University Press. p. 33.
  3. ^
    ISSN 1528-0748. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 4 October 2011.
  4. Salford
    Gaol
  5. ^ But 2017.
  6. OCLC 985451914.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  7. ^ Harman, Thomas. A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors (1814, [1566]), p. 65.
  8. ^ a b c d e f McMullan 1984, p. 100.
  9. S2CID 64940066
    .
  10. ^ a b Sorensen 2017, p. 28.
  11. ^ Sorensen 2017, pp. 28, 50.
  12. ^ a b Sorensen 2017, p. 48.
  13. ^ McMullan 1984, p. 101.
  14. OCLC 9619815
    .

Bibliography

Further reading

External links