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ROOTS
Slang is the tongue of those who sit in darkness.
Thought is moved in its most sombre depths, social philosophy
is bidden to its most poignant meditations, in the presence of
that enigmatic dialect at once so blighted and rebellious. Therein
lies chastisement made visible.
Every syllable has an air of being marked.
The words of the vulgar tongue appear therein wrinkled and
shrivelled, as it were, beneath the hot iron of the executioner.
Some seem to be still smoking.
Such and such a phrase produces upon you the effect of the
shoulder of a thief branded with the fleur-de-lys, which has suddenly
been laid bare. Ideas almost refuse to be expressed in these substantives
which are fugitives from justice.
Metaphor is sometimes so shameless, that one feels that it
has worn the iron neck-fetter.
Moreover, in spite of all this, and because of all this, this
strange dialect has by rights, its own compartment in that great
impartial case of pigeon-holes where there is room for the rusty
farthing as well as for the gold medal, and which is called literature.
Slang, whether the public admit the fact or not has its syntax
and its poetry.
It is a language.
Yes, by the deformity of certain terms, we recognize the fact
that it was chewed by Mandrin, and by the splendor of certain
metonymies, we feel that Villon spoke it.
That exquisite and celebrated verse--
Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?
But where are the snows of years gone by?
is a verse of slang.
Antam--ante annum--is a word of Thunes slang, which signified
the past year, and by extension, formerly. Thirty-five years ago,
at the epoch of the departure of the great chain-gang, there could
be read in one of the cells at Bicetre, this maxim engraved with
a nail on the wall by a king of Thunes condemned to the galleys:
Les dabs d'antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du Coesre.
This means Kings in days gone by always went and had themselves
anointed.
In the opinion of that king, anointment meant the galleys.
The word decarade, which expresses the departure of heavy
vehicles at a gallop, is attributed to Villon, and it is worthy
of him. This word, which strikes fire with all four of its feet,
sums up in a masterly onomatopoeia the whole of La Fontaine's
admirable verse:--
Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche.
Six stout horses drew a coach.
From a purely literary point of view, few studies would prove
more curious and fruitful than the study of slang.
It is a whole language within a language, a sort of sickly
excrescence, an unhealthy graft which has produced a vegetation,
a parasite which has its roots in the old Gallic trunk, and whose
sinister foliage crawls all over one side of the language.
This is what may be called the first, the vulgar aspect of
slang.
But, for those who study the tongue as it should be studied,
that is to say, as geologists study the earth, slang appears like
a veritable alluvial deposit.
According as one digs a longer or shorter distance into it,
one finds in slang, below the old popular French, Provencal, Spanish,
Italian, Levantine, that language of the Mediterranean ports,
English and German, the Romance language in its three varieties,
French, Italian, and Romance Romance, Latin, and finally Basque
and Celtic.
A profound and unique formation. A subterranean edifice erected
in common by all the miserable. Each accursed race has deposited
its layer, each suffering has dropped its stone there, each heart
has contributed its pebble. A throng of evil, base, or irritated
souls, who have traversed life and have vanished into eternity,
linger there almost entirely visible still beneath the form of
some monstrous word.
Do you want Spanish?
The old Gothic slang abounded in it. Here is boffete, a box
on the ear, which is derived from bofeton; vantane, window (later
on vanterne), which comes from vantana; gat, cat, which comes
from gato; acite, oil, which comes from aceyte. Do you want Italian?
Here is spade, sword, which comes from spada; carvel, boat,
which comes from caravella.
Do you want English? Here is bichot, which comes from bishop;
raille, spy, which comes from rascal, rascalion; pilche, a case,
which comes from pilcher, a sheath. Do you want German?
Here is the caleur, the waiter, kellner; the hers, the master,
herzog (duke). Do you want Latin?
Here is frangir, to break, frangere; affurer, to steal, fur;
cadene, chain, catena. There is one word which crops up in every
language of the continent, with a sort of mysterious power and
authority.
It is the word magnus; the Scotchman makes of it his mac,
which designates the chief of the clan; Mac-Farlane, Mac-Callumore,
the great Farlane, the great Callumore[41]; slang turns it into
meck and later le meg, that is to say, God.
Would you like Basque?
Here is gahisto, the devil, which comes from gaiztoa, evil;
sorgabon, good night, which comes from gabon, good evening.
Do you want Celtic? Here is blavin, a handkerchief, which
comes from blavet, gushing water; menesse, a woman (in a bad sense),
which comes from meinec, full of stones; barant, brook, from baranton,
fountain; goffeur, locksmith, from goff, blacksmith; guedouze,
death, which comes from guenn-du, black-white. Finally, would
you like history?
Slang calls crowns les malteses, a souvenir of the coin in
circulation on the galleys of Malta.
[41] It must be observed, however, that mac in Celtic means
son.
In addition to the philological origins just indicated, slang
possesses other and still more natural roots, which spring, so
to speak, from the mind of man itself.
In the first place, the direct creation of words.
Therein lies the mystery of tongues.
To paint with words, which contains figures one knows not
how or why, is the primitive foundation of all human languages,
what may be called their granite.
Slang abounds in words of this description, immediate words,
words created instantaneously no one knows either where or by
whom, without etymology, without analogies, without derivatives,
solitary, barbarous, sometimes hideous words, which at times possess
a singular power of expression and which live.
The executioner, le taule; the forest, le sabri; fear, flight,
taf; the lackey, le larbin; the mineral, the prefect, the minister,
pharos; the devil, le rabouin. Nothing is stranger than these
words which both mask and reveal. Some, le rabouin, for example,
are at the same time grotesque and terrible, and produce on you
the effect of a cyclopean grimace.
ln the second place, metaphor.
The peculiarity of a language which is desirous of saying
all yet concealing all is that it is rich in figures.
Metaphor is an enigma, wherein the thief who is plotting a
stroke, the prisoner who is arranging an escape, take refuge.
No idiom is more metaphorical than slang:
devisser le coco (to unscrew the nut), to twist the neck;
tortiller (to wriggle), to eat; etre gerbe, to be tried; a rat,
a bread thief; il lansquine, it rains, a striking, ancient figure
which partly bears its date about it, which assimilates long oblique
lines of rain, with the dense and slanting pikes of the lancers,
and which compresses into a single word the popular expression:
it rains halberds.
Sometimes, in proportion as slang progresses from the first
epoch to the second, words pass from the primitive and savage
sense to the metaphorical sense. The devil ceases to be le rabouin,
and becomes le boulanger (the baker), who puts the bread into
the oven.
This is more witty, but less grand, something like Racine
after Corneille, like Euripides after AEschylus.
Certain slang phrases which participate in the two epochs
and have at once the barbaric character and the metaphorical character
resemble phantasmagories.
Les sorgueuers vont solliciter des gails a la lune--the prowlers
are going to steal horses by night,-- this passes before the mind
like a group of spectres.
One knows not what one sees.
In the third place, the expedient.
Slang lives on the language. It uses it in accordance with
its fancy, it dips into it hap-hazard, and it often confines itself,
when occasion arises, to alter it in a gross and summary fashion.
Occasionally, with the ordinary words thus deformed and complicated
with words of pure slang, picturesque phrases are formed, in which
there can be felt the mixture of the two preceding elements, the
direct creation and the metaphor: le cab jaspine, je marronne
que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri, the dog is barking,
I suspect that the diligence for Paris is passing through the
woods.
Le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussiere, la fee est bative,
the bourgeois is stupid, the bourgeoise is cunning, the daughter
is pretty.
Generally, to throw listeners off the track, slang confines
itself to adding to all the words of the language without distinction,
an ignoble tail, a termination in aille, in orgue, in iergue,
or in uche.
Thus:
Vousiergue trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche?
Do you think that leg of mutton good? A phrase addressed by
Cartouche to a turnkey in order to find out whether the sum offered
for his escape suited him.
The termination in mar has been added recently.
Slang, being the dialect of corruption, quickly becomes corrupted
itself. Besides this, as it is always seeking concealment, as
soon as it feels that it is understood, it changes its form.
Contrary to what happens with every other vegetation, every
ray of light which falls upon it kills whatever it touches.
Thus slang is in constant process of decomposition and recomposition;
an obscure and rapid work which never pauses.
It passes over more ground in ten years than a language in
ten centuries.
Thus le larton (bread) becomes le lartif; le gail (horse)
becomes le gaye; la fertanche (straw) becomes la fertille; le
momignard (brat), le momacque; les fiques (duds), frusques; la
chique (the church), l'egrugeoir; le colabre (neck), le colas.
The devil is at first, gahisto, then le rabouin, then the baker;
the priest is a ratichon, then the boar (le sanglier); the dagger
is le vingt-deux (twenty-two), then le surin, then le lingre;
the police are railles, then roussins, then rousses, then marchands
de lacets (dealers in stay-laces), then coquers, then cognes;
the executioner is le taule, then Charlot, l'atigeur, then le
becquillard. In the seventeenth century, to fight was "to
give each other snuff"; in the nineteenth it is "to
chew each other's throats." There have been twenty different
phrases between these two extremes. Cartouche's talk would have
been Hebrew to Lacenaire.
All the words of this language are perpetually engaged in
flight like the men who utter them.
Still, from time to time, and in consequence of this very
movement, the ancient slang crops up again and becomes new once
more.
It has its headquarters where it maintains its sway.
The Temple preserved the slang of the seventeenth century;
Bicetre, when it was a prison, preserved the slang of Thunes.
There one could hear the termination in anche of the old Thuneurs.
Boyanches-tu (bois-tu), do you drink? But perpetual movement
remains its law, nevertheless.
If the philosopher succeeds in fixing, for a moment, for purposes
of observation, this language which is incessantly evaporating,
he falls into doleful and useful meditation.
No study is more efficacious and more fecund in instruction.
There is not a metaphor, not an analogy, in slang, which does
not contain a lesson. Among these men, to beat means to feign;
one beats a malady; ruse is their strength.
For them, the idea of the man is not separated from the idea
of darkness.
The night is called la sorgue; man, l'orgue. Man is a derivative
of the night.
They have taken up the practice of considering society in
the light of an atmosphere which kills them, of a fatal force,
and they speak of their liberty as one would speak of his health.
A man under arrest is a sick man; one who is condemned is a dead
man.
The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four walls
in which he is buried, is a sort of glacial chastity, and he calls
the dungeon the castus.
In that funereal place, life outside always presents itself
under its most smiling aspect.
The prisoner has irons on his feet; you think, perhaps, that
his thought is that it is with the feet that one walks?
No; he is thinking that it is with the feet that one dances;
so, when he has succeeded in severing his fetters, his first idea
is that now he can dance, and he calls the saw the bastringue
(public-house ball).--A name is a centre; profound assimilation.--The
ruffian has two heads, one of which reasons out his actions and
leads him all his life long, and the other which he has upon his
shoulders on the day of his death; he calls the head which counsels
him in crime la sorbonne, and the head which expiates it la tronche.--When
a man has no longer anything but rags upon his body and vices
in his heart, when he has arrived at that double moral and material
degradation which the word blackguard characterizes in its two
acceptations, he is ripe for crime; he is like a well-whetted
knife; he has two cutting edges, his distress and his malice;
so slang does not say a blackguard, it says un reguise.--What
are the galleys? A brazier of damnation, a hell.
The convict calls himself a fagot.-- And finally, what name
do malefactors give to their prison? The college.
A whole penitentiary system can be evolved from that word.
Does the reader wish to know where the majority of the songs
of the galleys, those refrains called in the special vocabulary
lirlonfa, have had their birth?
Let him listen to what follows:--
There existed at the Chatelet in Paris a large and long cellar.
This cellar was eight feet below the level of the Seine.
It had neither windows nor air-holes, its only aperture was
the door; men could enter there, air could not.
This vault had for ceiling a vault of stone, and for floor
ten inches of mud.
It was flagged; but the pavement had rotted and cracked under
the oozing of the water. Eight feet above the floor, a long and
massive beam traversed this subterranean excavation from side
to side; from this beam hung, at short distances apart, chains
three feet long, and at the end of these chains there were rings
for the neck.
In this vault, men who had been condemned to the galleys were
incarcerated until the day of their departure for Toulon.
They were thrust under this beam, where each one found his
fetters swinging in the darkness and waiting for him.
The chains, those pendant arms, and the necklets, those open
hands, caught the unhappy wretches by the throat.
They were rivetted and left there.
As the chain was too short, they could not lie down. They
remained motionless in that cavern, in that night, beneath that
beam, almost hanging, forced to unheard-of efforts to reach their
bread, jug, or their vault overhead, mud even to mid-leg, filth
flowing to their very calves, broken asunder with fatigue, with
thighs and knees giving way, clinging fast to the chain with their
hands in order to obtain some rest, unable to sleep except when
standing erect, and awakened every moment by the strangling of
the collar; some woke no more.
In order to eat, they pushed the bread, which was flung to
them in the mud, along their leg with their heel until it reached
their hand.
How long did they remain thus?
One month, two months, six months sometimes; one stayed a
year.
It was the antechamber of the galleys. Men were put there
for stealing a hare from the king.
In this sepulchre-hell, what did they do?
What man can do in a sepulchre, they went through the agonies
of death, and what can man do in hell, they sang; for song lingers
where there is no longer any hope. In the waters of Malta, when
a galley was approaching, the song could be heard before the sound
of the oars.
Poor Survincent, the poacher, who had gone through the prison-cellar
of the Chatelet, said: "It was the rhymes that kept me up."
Uselessness of poetry. What is the good of rhyme?
It is in this cellar that nearly all the slang songs had their
birth.
It is from the dungeon of the Grand-Chatelet of Paris that
comes the melancholy refrain of the Montgomery galley: "Timaloumisaine,
timaloumison."
The majority of these
Icicaille est la theatre
Here is the theatre
Du petit dardant.
Of the little archer (Cupid).
Do what you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic
in the heart of man, love.
In this world of dismal deeds, people keep their secrets.
The secret is the thing above all others.
The secret, in the eyes of these wretches, is unity which
serves as a base of union. To betray a secret is to tear from
each member of this fierce community something of his own personality.
To inform against, in the energetic slang dialect, is called:
"to eat the bit." As though the informer drew to
himself a little of the substance of all and nourished himself
on a bit of each one's flesh.
What does it signify to receive a box on the ear? Commonplace
metaphor replies:
"It is to see thirty-six candles."
Here slang intervenes and takes it up:
Candle, camoufle. Thereupon, the ordinary tongue gives camouflet[42]
as the synonym for soufflet.
Thus, by a sort of infiltration from below upwards, with the
aid of metaphor, that incalculable, trajectory slang mounts from
the cavern to the Academy; and Poulailler saying: "I light
my camoufle," causes Voltaire to write:
"Langleviel La Beaumelle deserves a hundred camouflets."
[42] Smoke puffed in the face of a person asleep.
Researches in slang mean discoveries at every step.
Study and investigation of this strange idiom lead to the
mysterious point of intersection of regular society with society
which is accursed.
The thief also has his food for cannon, stealable matter,
you, I, whoever passes by; le pantre.
(Pan, everybody.)
Slang is language turned convict.
That the thinking principle of man be thrust down ever so
low, that it can be dragged and pinioned there by obscure tyrannies
of fatality, that it can be bound by no one knows what fetters
in that abyss, is sufficient to create consternation.
Oh, poor thought of miserable wretches!
Alas! will no one come to the succor of the human soul in
that darkness? Is it her destiny there to await forever the mind,
the liberator, the immense rider of Pegasi and hippo-griffs, the
combatant of heroes of the dawn who shall descend from the azure
between two wings, the radiant knight of the future?
Will she forever summon in vain to her assistance the lance
of light of the ideal?
Is she condemned to hear the fearful approach of Evil through
the density of the gulf, and to catch glimpses, nearer and nearer
at hand, beneath the hideous water of that dragon's head, that
maw streaked with foam, and that writhing undulation of claws,
swellings, and rings? Must it remain there, without a gleam of
light, without hope, given over to that terrible approach, vaguely
scented out by the monster, shuddering, dishevelled, wringing
its arms, forever chained to the rock of night, a sombre Andromeda
white and naked amid the shadows!
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