Slang in Literature

Enriiiiiiiiiiiiique:
I think "Slang in Literature" could be an interesting study/discussion as well.

Obvious starting points: the invented slang of A Clockwork Orange and Riddley Walker, or the kind of dialect/slang Irvine Welsh re-created in Trainspotting; those works come immediately to mind, I'm sure there's lots more examples.

booksfallapart
Riddley Walker and Trainspotting may be my two favourite books in the English language, and A Clockwork Orange is not far behind.

Perhaps we could start with a list of 10 books which feature slang heavily as part of the discourse. We've already got:

A Clockwork Orange
Riddley Walker
Trainspotting

I'd like to add Catcher in the Rye, which for whatever its merits and demerits, nevertheless put slang out there in literature in American English.

A list, I say. We need Cap'n Mac.

Why, Chèr Tomcat, that would be impossible because every good book will add some slang to add a touch of reality. We see that in JJ's Ulysses but also in the seaman's slang of Long John Silver by Stevenson as in Stephen King's books.

But, In french argot I would cite : Chéri Bibi by Gaston Leroux, who describes prisoners who are exiled to devil's island in the 1930's or

Martians Go Home by the great Frederic Brown. The Martians speak 1940 American slang and it is quiet funny.

ooops. I knew I needed to start a new thread! :)

Ring Lardner, replete with argot and slang, still makes me laugh my head off. For those who like baseball, I recommend You Know Me, Al, with its World Serious.

allen ginsberg howl (the other beats used slang, but ginsberg was the best writer of the bunch, maybe the only writer).

"Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah" - the beatles.

This is pretty early stuff from François Villon:

LE JARGON OU JOBELIN DE MAISTRE FRANÇOIS VILLON.

BALLADE I.

A Parouart, la grand Mathe Gaudie,
Où accollez sont duppez et noirciz,
De par angels suyvans la paillardie,
Sont greffiz et prins cinq ou six.
Là sont bleffeurs, au plus hault bout assis
Pour l'evagie, et bien hault mis au vent.
Escevez-moy tost ces coffres massis!
Ces vendengeurs, des ances circoncis,
S'embrouent du tout à néant...
Eschec, eschec, pour le fardis!

Brouez-moy sur ces gours passans,
Advisez-moy bien tost le blanc,
Et pictonnez au large sur les champs:
Qu'au mariage ne soyez sur le banc
Plus qu'un sac de piastre n'est blanc.
Si gruppez estes des carireux,
Rebignez-moy tost ces enterveux,
Et leur montrez des trois le bris:
Que clavés ne soyez deux et deux...
Eschec, eschec, pour le fardis!

Plantez aux hurmes vos picons,
De paour des bisans si très-durs,
Et, aussi, d'estre sur les joncs,
En mahe, en coffres, en gros murs.
Escharricez, ne soyez durs,
Que le grand Can ne vous fasse essorer.
Songears ne soyez pour dorer,
Et babignez tousjours aux ys
Des sires, pour les debouser...
Eschec, eschec, pour le fardis!

ENVOI.
Prince Froart, dit des Arques Petis,
L'un des sires si ne soit endormis,
Levez au bec, que ne soyez griffis,
Et que vous n'en ayez du pis...
Eschec, eschec, pour le fardis!

Villon was in contact with the criminal organisation known as the Coquillards. There he must have picked up their vocabulary, which is also known through the acts of the trial of the bandits. From http://www.archive.org/stream/jargonofmasterfr00vill/jargonofmasterfr00vill_djvu... (with help of the djvu version to correct the OCR)

At Paris stands the Gallows tree,
Where hang the thieves in sad array;
The Archers failed to set them free,
Last night carouse and hanged to-day;
But let me from the Dungeons fly —
For there, the Brothers swing on high —
Let me away before too late,
For ear-cropped Cut-throats, it 's no use
To take to flight, they're marked, just wait-
Beware, Beware the Hangman's noose.

I'm off while still the chance I see.
For I'll not stay to play the fool;
The fields are wide, there I walk free,
In all the Towns the Gallows rule.
The Scaffold creaks, the Rope is tight.
Those hanging there are limp and white.
Seize those who spy upon our Band;
Make them afraid their tongues to loose:
The Prisons yawn, hold not your hand —
Beware, Beware the Hangman's noose.

Hide under ground whatever ye take,
For fear of Dungeons bitter cold;
On beds of straw ye'll stay awake,
Within those walls grown dank with mould.
Best take to flight and disappear.
The Grand Provost is ever near.
Take care, ye Dreamers, what ye say;
Take care, ye Plotters, watch your ruse;
When Burghers must be made to pay —
Beware, Beware the Hangman's noose.

Envoi

Prince Froart of the Little Dice,
Not all ye rob will stand abuse;
Take care that ye may not be caught —
Beware, Beware the Hangman's noose.

Excellent. Any ideas who the translator is, Pim?

Jordan Herbert Stabler, working in 1918, so probably there is more recent research that would lead to different choices in translation. I have a Dutch translation by Ernst van Altena, from the 60's, but I didn't want to bother anyone with that (plus, I'd have to type it).

The scanned pages are also available as pdf, I can recommend them:

http://ia311007.us.archive.org/0/items/jargonofmasterfr00vill/jargonofmasterfr00...

Middleton and Dekker's play The Roaring Girl contains canting - a 16th/17th century underworld slang. According to my edition of RG, Dekker probably got most of his cant second hand from Robert Copeland's Highway to a Spitalhouse, Thomas Harman's A Caveat for Common Cursitors and others. It has been suggested that Dekker's knowledge of canting was out of date.

I would argue that canting works much like "signifying" discussed in Gates' book The Signifying Monkey.

What about William Gibson? Does the language he uses in Neuromancer, for example, count as slang?

Another candidate Londonstani - slang or dialect? If you have not read it, I don't recommend it. It is interesting, but neglects the big question it raises about identity.

It depends what you mean by 'literature'. Some canonical figures are of course very productive: Shakespeare (whose love for double entendres sometimes makes you think he would have made a great scriptwriter for 'Carry On' movies), James Jovce and Dickens, just to offer three major figures, have all given me over 1000 cites apiece, and playwrights like Middleton, Dekker (who wrote a good deal about cant), and Robert Greene (who wrote a series of 'coney-catching pamphlets'; coney-catching being confidence trickery) and Shadwell (who wrote 'The Squire of Alsatia', Alsatia being a an area of London which was basically a sanctuary for 16th/17th entury villains) and many, many more all contribute heavily. And as urania1 points out, there are a variety of canting glossaries, most of which (although Dekker was probably among the better researchers) tended simply to plagiarise their immediate predecessor. There are also such pioneering sociologists such as Henry Mayhew ('London Labour and the London Poor') and the lesser-known James Greenwood (a slightly later follower of Mayhew).

I find that in researching not just for slang words, but citations of their use, I have evolved what one might call an 'anti-canon'. Not all of the print sources are books: there are pulps, and dime novels, and hundreds of anonymous works, such as the collections of bawdy songs such as 'The Frisky Vocalist' or 'The Icky-Wickey Songster' that were sold round the London pubs c. 1830. It is a vast library and I wouldn't remotely claim to have exhausted it.

Here is a sample of the heavy hitters, at least as regards providing slang citations - some well-known, some less so - and they are but from the top of my head (the books section of the bibliography runs 6000-plus titles):

Seth Morgan ('Homeboy')
Irvine Welsh
Donald Goines
Jim Thompson
Mezz Mezzrow ('Really the Blues')
George Ade
Nelson Algren
‘A-No. 1’ (pseud. A.R. Livingston, and writer of hobo reminscences)
Chicago May Sharpe
Bartimeus’ (pseud. L.A. de Costa Ricci, naval stuff set in World War I)
Sapper ('Bulldrog Drummond' books)
P.G. Wodehouse
Rolf Boldrewood (bushrangers)
Samuel Foote
Edward Bunker
Malcolm Braly
Helen Green ('At The Actor's Boarding House')
Clarence Cullen ('Tales of the Ex-Tanks')
Nell Kimball
Iceberg Slim
Charles Van Loan
Edwin Torres
‘Hugh McHugh’ (pseud. George Vere Hobart
Chauncey M’Govern
Harlan Ellison (esp. as Hal Ellson)
Tim Dorsey
George V Higgins
Harry Whittingdon
Edward Dyson ('Fatory 'Ands')
Clarence Cooper
'Banjo' Patterson
Robert L Bellem
Thomas Thursday

and on it goes.

Jonathon - another interesting post.

Now why are those you have listed above so important? Is it because they have insight into the language of a particular time, place and class or occupational group?

And how do you know the words they provide are genuine?

As an Aussie by birth I am pleased to see Banjo Patterson and Rolf Boldrewood. Do you work on New Zealand and Australian slang as well? I remember reading an autobiographical piece by Partridge in which he appeared mildly outraged that Australian and New Zealand accents could be conflated by the outside world. Similarly with slang I would say that the two antipodean countries have overlaps which might seem the same to outsiders, but jealously guarded differences as well.

ETA: I welcomed Jonathon in our other Slang thread earlier. Jonathon is an LT author, specialising in Slang Lexicons. We are pleased to see you on this thread as well Jonathon.

So where was Alsatia then, as a former Londoner, I'm interested in the actual boundaries of this place.

Dickens I know was very interested in slang and all forms of exotic language use. Here is an example from Dombey and Son of boxing slang:

'The Chicken' is a boxer (Dickens is so funny!)

The Chicken himself attributed this punishment to his having had the misfortune to get into Chancery early in the proceedings, when he was severely fibbed by the Larkey one, and heavily grassed. But it appeared from the published records of that great contest that the Larkey Boy had had it all his own way from the beginning, and that the Chicken had been tapped, and bunged, and had received pepper, and had been made groggy, and had come up piping, and had endured a complication of similar strange inconveniences, until he had been gone into and finished.

Jonathon, could you point us to other examples of slang like this in Dickens?

Isn't there a lot of cant/argot in Oliver Twist?

A funny example of cant that I remember was in Howard Pyle's The Adventures of Robin Hood where Robin Hood tries to become a beggar and is immediately discovered because he does not understand the lingo.

Little Gavroche and the criminals in Miserables speak large amounts of cant and slang. I wonder what the French originals were and what differences there were between Wilbour's rendition, Fahnstock's version and the versions of the other translator's. May need to stop at the bookstore and compare...

slick: Project Gutenberg has a French version of Les Misérables, and you can compare the French to whatever translation you have. Of course, in the book Hugo has an entire section entitled "argot". I have not read it, but lilisin has discussed the argot in Hugo's Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné, which, apparently, is prison argot.

And I missed Life in London by Pierce Egan (1821), which at the time was one of the great best-sellers and introduced the duo of Tom and Jerry to the world. There were a whole set of rip-offs: notably Real Life in London (1821) by 'Jon Bee' who was really John Badcock, like Egan a sporting journalist, and who constantly plagiarised or at least paralleled his superior. So he also produced, in 1823, a Dict. of The Turf, The Ring, the Chase, The Pit, Of Bon Ton and the Varieties of Life....' which is fascinating but maybe not that good lexicographically. Egan had meanwhile produced a revision of Grose's Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue (1785, 1788, 1796). More pertinent to boxing slang was Egan's journal Boxiana which came out in 1810s-20s; it has biographies of all the greats and almost literally blow-blow-blow accounts of their fights; which gives a good deal of slang. (Dickens' Chicken is, presumably, a nod to the real-life 'Game Chicken', properly Henry 'Hen' Pearce, a champion c.1805). The other big fight fan was Tom Moore, Byron's friend (and Byron liked to spar as well) who wrote in 1819 'Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress' (the Congress of Europe that was), a long verse accoubnt, allegedly by real-life champ Tom Crib, of a fight between 'Long Sandy' and 'Georgy the Porpus' (Tsar Alexander and George IV I assume); the slang is wonderfully dense.

As for Dickens, I don't believe there's much other boxing slang, but Oliver Twist, as noted, is full of cant; while the other books I've gutted include Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, Nicholas Nickleby... the great thing about CD is that when his characters use slang they use it because they ought to, and it sounds natural; the problem with someone like his contemporary Harrison Ainsworth (one of the Newgate novelists like Bulwer Lytton who has the same problem), let alone the early 17th century playwrights, is that they tended to trot out their slang/cant vocabulary as a sot of animated glossary - 'look how smart I am - and then its back to standard English.

Alsatia: Alsatia had formerly been the site of the old monastery of Whitefriars which runs between Fleet Street and the Thames. It was basically a criminal slum, predating such successorsd as St Giles (near today's Centre Point, and Saffron Hill, where Fagin had his lair). Unlike them, however, it was an official criminal 'sanctuary' for around a century (granted to villains by Elizabeth I) and was one of the contemporary no-go areas for any form of authorirty. Once inside, they could never hope to extract you. As well as Shadwell's 'Squire of Alsatia' Walter Scott (borriwng heavily from TS's vocabulary) wrote about it in The Adventures of Nigel, in the chapters where his hero has to escape the King's wrath and flees to Alsatia. Again, I've written a long piece about it and it's on offer if anyone so desires.

Jonathon - fascinating.

Have you read London in the Nineteenth Century by Jerry White? I found it to be a goldmine of stories about London and its peoples.

I rather think you could write something along the same lines with your rich understanding of those classes dwelling below the lines of propriety...

Why is London so rich in slang? Is it simply its size or is it also a function of the fact that it attracts so many immigrants from outside its boundaries?

Why are they important? setting aside the delights of the language and the pure pleasure of reading the books, in the most basic sense they're important to my researches because they are among those authors who provided me with anything from 500-1000 slang citations each.

The book covers all anglophone slang: UK/US/Aus./NZ/S. Afr/Caribbean/Eire

I'm not sure how many Aus + NZ authors I have looked at, but it would be a few hundred. You don't mention Edward Dyson (above) but I reccomend him. His 'Factory 'Ands' isn't online but its sequel 'Benno and the Rest of the Push' is. A few others (dictionaries such as those of Sidney Baker aside): Dal Stivens, Marcus Clarke, 'Miles Franklin', Frank Hardy, Eric Lambert, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, C.J. Dennis, Lawson Glossop, Joseph Furphy, Henry Lawson and the first 30 yrs of the Bulletin.

Jerry White: indeed.

Funny you should mention a book. I have been trying to persuade a publisher to take something on the symbiotic relationship of London and its slang for a few years. They haven't bitten yet.

London's rich in slang because slang is quintessentially urban and London is the big city. I would almost suggest no cities - no slang. The immigrants, whether from the UK or elsewhere undoubtedly enrich the slang, but again that's because they too are drawn to the big city.

The slang collector John Camden Hotten made it clear in 1859:

‘Slang represents that evanescent, vulgar language, ever changing with fashion and taste,...spoken by persons in every grade of life, rich and poor, honest and dishonest...Slang is indulged in from a desire to appear familiar with life, gaiety, town-humour and with the transient nick names and street jokes of the day....Slang is the language of street humour, of fast, high and low life...Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding, and excitement, and artificial life.’

Jonathon, the idea of no cities/no slang is intriguing. Confirmed I guess by the JCH quote that slang is associated with 'ever changing fashion...', and 'of fast,high and low life...'and 'excitement and artificial life.'

Now I have an equal interest in the British (English?) pastoral ideal, Arcadia etc. But in reality, prior to the 20th century, rural england did not change from one decade to the next, the cycles came and went with associated festivals and ritiual. There were few incomers or outgoers, things stayed in a fairly fixed rhythm.

Does this mean that slang had no use? Were the words and way of expressing oneself the same as that used by one's father and father's father? Because it also strikes me that slang may help distinguish from the preceding generation (as evidenced by the birth of the concept of the teenager for e.g.).

By the way, your book proposal sounds splendid. Have you published books other than lexicons before?

Arcadia as manifested in the obsession with the development of the English gardens - nature as perfectly and artfully controlled - amongst the wealthier landed classes? and contrasted against the later development (esp. in the US) w/ the later luminist painters, offshoot of romanticism/Hudson river school, who traveled all over the N&S American continent seeking the drama of the wilderness landscapes untouched (by Europeans/Americans) ? (In the US there was the ideological/aesthetic "conflict" between a Jeffersonian "Arcadian" lived in landscape - really more of an enlightenment ideal - though the Hudson river artists mostly worked further north - their pastoral landscapes/seascapes, rolled up bales of hay, fishing boats off in the distance @ sea (not in the same paintings, usually ;-)

By the mid/later 19th C and the development of the complex national RR network i'd thought substantial internal population migration - the typical rural -> urban emigration patterns had become established? That's not to say there weren't major rural areas that remained "set" but by 1882, for instance, the British ed. of Chambers Encyclopedia notes that the RR network had made possible the growth of major, new industrial centers, concomitant loss of rural population and (interestingly) after noting the commercial benefits of the RRs "it is not less conspicuous that the 'railway interest' has become a formidable power in the state, and is able to carry lines almost anywhere, in disregard of land-proprietors and town-authorities, as if the destruction of rural amenity were matters of perfect indifference...Making every allowance for the high social value of the RR, it has certainly reached a point of despotic overbearance that requires some species of control more effectual than that which is embraced in the irregular action of parliamentary committees."

That there were large regional population shifts in the first half the 19th C in GB is well established (Arthur Redford 1926(?) - the individual movements that created these new patterns has been more problematic. The initial analysis (certainly backed by readings of vital stats records) indicated that the regional migrant and family typically took a series of geographical short "migratory steps" that after a generation of two led to significant population reallocation. I think more recent demographers have documented rather longer moves among internal Brit migrants but i'd have to go to UNC's grad library to cite chapter and verse..if indeed my memory isn't totally out to lunch. Redford was the god of Brit, historical demography (justifiably so) back when I last took a course ~ 1066..no, 1976 and i haven't read much over decades since

Absolutely fascinating discussion! I have nothing to add to it (at the moment) except to say how wonderful it is to be learning so much from everyone.

Re cities and slang: how about the Studs Lonigan trilogy? It was in my father's collection, and I read it when it was probably not age-appropriate. Great conversations, peppered with what is/was certainly accurate Chicago-Irish slang.

Forgot to mention that: possibly the third book I gutted for cites when I started gathering them seriously in 1998, after dealing with Kerouac's 'On the Road' and Burroughs' Junkie. Dos Passos 'USA' is another good one
(as are all early Dos P.) and more recently David Simon's Homicide and, even better The Corner. Richard Price. George Pelecanos. George V. Higgins. All very urban.

I've searched through this thread and see that Emile Zola's name has not surfaced, forgive me if I've overlooked it. I'm no expert on Zola, so perhaps someone who is could comment further, but I've read the introduction to L'Assommoir(The Dram Shop) this weekend, and in to the book a ways, and Zola used slang up the ying-yang, and apparently it was quite shocking at the time, (I quote):

"...to his bourgeois readers because it reveals the inner life of this woman whom most of them would suppose to have none. Can a laundress think and feel and hope? Can a laundress be touching and lovable? Can a laundress be tragic?

"She thinks and feels in the everyday language of her class, which is why Zola also felt obliged to offend the sensibilities of his readers by the use of slang. This was not his own everyday speech and he researched it as conscientiously as he did the locations for the novel. He turned mainly to two monographs, Alfred Delvau's slang dictionary, Dictionnaire de la langue verte (1866) and Denis Poulot's Question sociale, le sublime, ou le travailleur comme il est en 1870 et ce qu'il peut etre (1870)."