The currently accepted etymology of the word slang lies in early modern pedlars and the distance they were seen to walk, based in turn on an accepted measurement of medieval field lengths. The slang was a long, narrow piece of land running between other, larger sections1, and an associated verb slanger, meant to linger, to loaf. Factor in a Scandinavian phr. på slænget, which translated as ‘(out) on the slang’,2 and one sees how a rural measure was adopted to mean a traveller’s ‘beat’ or ‘turf’. From there the meaning moved from a physical area, the backdrop to a pedlar’s selling, to a spoken vocabulary, small but important, prototype slang as the jargon, the occupational words that accompanied those who wandered the country so as to sell in the roads and streets.
In addition one finds Danish slæng, a group of associates, a gang plus, in English, slang meaning a hawker’s license. Thus, just as French argot came to mean the language of the argot, the (sometimes criminal) pedlars, so too was the English synonym the language of the same group, here now as the slang.3 It does not, however, link to French langue, language, for all that that word seems to be shouting so eagerly for notice. As for representing the theft of SE language, gelded of half its characters and prefixed with an ‘s’ which allegedly stands for ‘secret’ (giving s-lang), this popular theory offers nothing other than a quick (or rather quack) cure for an ancient conundrum. What does not enter into the progression, however crime-related, was one more meaning: a chain (as in prison)4 or fetters and Dutch still uses the word for a necklace or other chain-based jewelry as it does slange for the visually similar snake.5
The chain I offer above has no conscious criminal associations. It is a length of lavatory chain, used when cisterns were fixed high above the pan, all the better to offer a powerful flush, and one pulled on such chains, more or less ornate, to activate them. It is wholly basic, bog-standard as I cannot resist. But this particular chain comes from my earlier researches into slang, in that Holy of Holies, the special and fragile collections book room of the New York Public Library.6 Here, as I had found at the ‘dirty table’ of the North Library at the old BL (the books one needed, not the surface), one’s reading came supervised. I had already fallen foul of this a decade or so earlier. Wishing to read the Public Library’s collection of Playboy - truly, I had no love for their roseate corn-fed, milk-plumped cheerleaders, but their celeb interviews were good for the dictionary of quotes I was compiling - I called them up. Yes, I was told, but not this week: there was no-one free to stay my hands from self-pollution. Ticket-tied, I had to wait till I was back in London, and thence Oxford’s Bodleian Library where another collection seemed to have been massed (‘Mr Green, you’ll find your pornography waiting in Duke Humphrey’), to get that which I so desired.
Back at Bryant Park on 42nd Street, itself always a centre for lovers of the printed text, had books ever been so cossetted? No pen permitted, only a pencil. (I assume that laptops are allowed these days). The book was opened, possibly after being unwrapped from its own taped-up, purpose-built solander box7, and laid between two wedges of dense foam. No spines cracked here as the covers sat at 30 degrees from the horizontal. Nor did one use any old weight to hold the pages down. A snake, what the city’s long-dead hogen-mogen ruler, Peter Stuyvesant, still attuned to his butterbox lexis, would have called a slang, two feet or so of velvet sewn into a tube and stuffed with lead shot, lay gently across the print. Soft without and hard within. There are bodily comparisons and slang offers 1,450 varieties of the main one. The atmosphere established - care, reverence, biblophilia in 3D - one worked.
Ensconced in London I hunted for my own. Velvet: easy. Shot: no so much. I visited a smart gunshop. ‘Of course, sir, how many boxes would you need.’ ‘?’ ‘Boxes, sir, of shells for your shotgun.’ Very, very tentatively I explained that while no bird was about to be harmed, I would prefer that the same prohibition extend to myself. How we laughed. ‘Very simple, sir. Just open up the cartridges8 and pour out the shot.’ Open it up. Should I saw off my non-existent 12-bore while I was at it? Rub the shot with garlic? Cut a cross into each tiny sphere? I made my excuses and left. I imagine we were both equally relieved.
Returned home, where we had just moved from the hell of Holloway to the wonders of the West End, my builder was adjusting the kitchen windows. What’s that, I asked. Oh, a bit of toilet chain, I’m using it to help lower the window. A light went on. Any…spare? There was and it is what I picture above.
It lacks the velvet cladding, nor offers the feel of the shot - crunchy yet smooth at the same time - and of course my sole supervisor is myself and I am a standard-free zone, but it holds down the pages I need. The books survive. No literary discectomy down Mr Slang’s.
But while the work is unremitting and loved as ever, it covers far, far fewer physical books. The chain sits, dwarfed by three screens, gathering dust and a memorial of different days. Of a life and work to which I am, oh the clichés, bound unto death. The same but so very different. Or written largest, a world when the concept ‘reference publishing’ was as tangible and necessary as the Public Library’s snakes. We are told by the self-satisfying incels of AI — moving fast, vandalising, making nothing beyond their own wealth — that, hey, just do it. Join the party. We were the schoolyard nerds, now we get to declare who’s odd, and thus ‘out’. If everyone cheats with our tricksy, plagiaristic invention, if all the billions we make are based on work that in its creators’ hands is, we’re telling you, without any value, then what any longer is honest? Real, even? True? And don’t even think of ‘trust’.
OK, boomer? No. I think not. Not at all. Fuck you, boys and girls. You and the right wing you continue to ride on.
I meant, on turning 77 the other day in a world in which I can see no point in turning 78, nor in any other of such moments as remain, to write something quite different. Maybe about that arc in which I have lived, from the recently dead Fuhrer through to the auto-resurrected Felon. Or maybe you’d rather I stick to words.
Apologies. I’ll try harder next time. You only get one life.
Since we are measuring, I should find a place for the rarely found chain, which along with rods, poles and perches, was firmly established in England’s (and thanks to colonisation the world’s) mensuration from the early 17th century on. Etymologically it came from the synonymous Old French chaeine and back to Latin catena. Like much of its type, it took a while to settle, but as of 1623, and laid down by the mathematician Edmund Gunter (as in ‘according to Gunter’) the distance was established as 66 feet, or 22 yards (best-known as the distance between stumps on a cricket pitch). A surveyor’s chain held 100 links, 10 chains made a furlong and 80 chains (eight furlongs) a mile.
or did. The online translator Deepl has it as a Danish phrase meaning ‘the old gang’
Far more common for such language, as has been noted here before, the word was cant, from Latin cantare, to sing (as in recite one’s prayers ina sing-song manner, here extended to whining beggary) and those who spoke it were the canting crew.
or in a celebratory City dinner: thus slang’s alderman double-slang’d or in chains, a roast turkey garlanded with sausages (which are intended to represent his golden chain; the bird’s girth should make its role self-evident).
I claim no originality in these prefatory lines. When in 2014 I was writing my small guide to slang for the OUP, I was urged to look at Anatoly Liberman’s Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology. Among those words he covers in depth is slang. What he offers has been put forward before, but never in so concrete, worked out form. It is, until new evidence overturns his suggestions, the best attempt we have for an etymology of what Eric Partridge once termed a ‘prize-problem word.’ Everything you have read so far relies on his findings. Professor Liberman is a professional etymologist, associated closely with the OED, and a recognised authority. He has the benefit of being able to select those etymologies on which he works, but that is only to excuse my own failings (I must see what can be offered for each of the 165,000 entries in my own work), and in no way to impute any to him.
What was I reading therein, shamefully I have no idea. The most litrally fragile of anything I have ever read for GDoS was the work of the self-styled ‘A-No. 1’ (properly Leon Ray Livingston) a self-promoting hobo ‘King of the Road’ who sold piles of pamphlets on his tramping life. Larded, as demanded by contemporary morality, with the obligatory minatory titles - The Curse of Tramp Life (1912) or The Snare of the Road (1916) - since his wide-eyed youthful readers were not supposed to follow his actual footsteps, but never averse to a little name-dropping — From Coast to Coast with Jack London (1917) whom he has down as his supplicant prushun, a neophyte learning the road thanks to…A-No. 1 — he wrote twelve in all. Priced at a dime a pop, they went like a gump-filled mulligan in a jungle. The problem was that eight decades on they were some way beyond fragile. Today you could find them all digitised, back around 1997 one made the trek, ordered the text and…faced pages that began to crumble almost as one glanced, and certainly as one turned from one to the next. But they had no claim on the velvet chains and foam wedges of spec. colls. Restoration would never attend their yellowed, barely tangible pages. Hobos, slang, mere ephemera on every level…perleeze. I paused, but not for long. Carefully, but undeniably, reader, I turned them.
from the Swedish botanist D. C. Solander (1736–1782) who designed these containers for his own collection
I resisted regaling him with tales of one of France’s pioneer argotiers, the early 18th century robber-highwayman Louis-Dominque Cartouche, i.e. ‘cartridge’ (the origin is in Italian, cartoccio, a paper cone). Yer actual fantasy gentleman of the road, all pinching sir’s money while kissing madam’s hand. Play with the old demand ‘Stand and deliver’ as you will. He was written up in verses titled ‘La Vice Puni’ (‘vice punished’; it had a slang glossary) and things didn’t end well. Short life but a happy one as the myths demand. Death was to be broken on the wheel which was just what it says.
Don't hold back. See you soon.
Thank you. Now if only I'd known that 25 years ago...