THE LANGUAGE OF CRIME. 833 



Some of tlie expressions are very descriptive. To run from a 

 police officer is to do a hotfoot. A person who is always listening 

 to other people's conversation is called a rubher-neck. The word 

 push, meaning a crowd, is occasionally seen in the newspapers. 

 To be arrested is to be pinched; to be convicted is to fall. To 

 refuse a person's appeal is to give him the marble heart. Such 

 expressions require no explanation. 



There is a disposition among all uneducated people to use a 

 single verb both in a transitive and an intransitive sense. The verb 

 " to learn " is used very commonly for " to teach." " To set " is 

 used for " to sit/' and " lay " for " lie." In the argot the same rule 

 applies. The verbs to kill and to die are both expressed by the 

 one term " to croak," and the grim humor of the class appears in 

 the word croaker, which means doctor. The argot has no syntax ; in 

 the verbs there is scarcely any distinction of tense. ' The present 

 tense is used for the imperfect and for the past. " I win a dol- 

 lar " may mean I am winning a dollar, but it is equally probable 

 that it means I won a dollar or I have won a dollar. There seems 

 to be an effort to eliminate everything possible from the lan- 

 guage, to reduce its vocabulary to the minimum. It is a natural 

 endeavor for a listless and enervated people. In some cases there 

 may be an attempt to use the past form of the verb, but the forma- 

 tion is very apt to be incorrect, although regular. Thus the gro- 

 tesque terms used by children as " bringed," " catched," and even 

 strange plurals and comparatives as " foots " and " worser," are 

 very commonly found. 



This dialect has, as we have been shown, mutilated the mother 

 tongue ; it has also borrowed liberally from other languages, but 

 without method or etymology. Criminals are not grammarians. 

 Neither are they linguists, and at first sight it would seem strange 

 that they should import words from other countries. We will 

 find, however, that in any prison the percentage of inmates of 

 foreign -birth will be large; in America it is about fifteen per 

 cent. A foreign expression which seems apt or an improvement 

 on the one in present use is rapidly diffused through the prison. 

 In cases where it is especially descriptive it may become perma- 

 nent, but its life is usually short. The argot of the crime class 

 changes materially every two or three years. It is ephemeral, as 

 shifting as its users. Victor Hugo exaggerates only slightly 

 when he says, " The argot changes more in ten years than the 

 language does in ten centuries." 



This mutability is common to all languages, but recognized 

 tongues change more slowly in a generation, not in a year. 

 Words are born, live, and die as we do. They have their 

 youth, their virility, their old age, and their second childhood. 

 They have a reason, there is an element of reflection which 



TOL. L. 63 



