832 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Many authors have found it analogous to the elementary lan- 

 guage of primitive peoples, and the frequent onomatopes give 

 some apparent solidity to this theory. The describing of a sub- 

 ject by one of its attributes is characteristic of all early races and 

 even to-day of children. The child who describes a dog as a 

 " bow-wow " is following a primitive instinct. The infant may 

 call a train a " poo-poo," an onomatopoetic expression for its puff- 

 ing ; the thief calls a train a rattler. The analogy is not complete 

 but suggestive. Its very incompleteness illustrates exactly the 

 objection to the theory stated above. The child creates, but the 

 thief adapts. The slang of the criminal is not a creation of a 

 primitive language ; it is the attempt to reduce a matured lan- 

 guage to an elementary stage. It is a destructive and not a crea- 

 tive process. 



Notwithstanding the able arguments of the theorists referred 

 to, the observer can not but remark the very serious difficulties 

 that arise when we attempt to consider the argot of the thief as a 

 primitive language, tongues " which are always serious, never 

 ironical, never mirthful, never seeking to sully the object of the 

 thought, simple in their metaphor, abundant in grammatical 

 forms." Every language has a syntax peculiar to itself, but in the 

 patois of the criminal no attempt is made of changing anything 

 but the lexicon. It bears the same resemblance to the parent 

 language that a pile of cogwheels does to a watch. They are not 

 a watch, but neither are they a new machine. Thus we must 

 regard the argot only as a dialect in which debased terms replace 

 the words of the parent tongue, in which the innate laziness of 

 the criminal has effaced all words of any length and has simpli- 

 fied the pronunciation wherever the correct form requires any- 

 thing but an elementary combination of sounds. 



Let us examine some of these transformations and synonyms. 



The general tendency of the criminal to reduce the abstract to 

 the concrete, to denote the substantive by one of its attributes, is 

 shown very clearly in his synecdochical phraseology. Thus a 

 purse is a leather ; a street car is a short, comparing its length 

 with a railroad car; a handkerchief is a tvipe; and a pair of 

 shoes a pair of kicks. 



Again, some of the terms appear to be purely arbitrary, and, 

 were it not that the creative power is absent in criminals as in 

 women, I should not hesitate to state it as a fact. But it seems 

 wiser to conclude merely that the origin of these terms has become 

 obscured. To suppose that they were created would be in too 

 distinct contradiction to all obtainable evidence, indirect though 

 it may be. Such expressions are to kip, meaning to sleep ; to 

 spiel, to make a speech; jerve, a waistcoat pocket; thimble, a 

 watch ; to do a lam, meaning to run. 



