For the following I am indebted to the courtesy of the Rev. J. W. Horsley, Chaplain to H. M. Prison, Clerkenwell, who, in his highly interesting _Prison Notes_ makes the following remarks on thieves’ slang: “It has its antiquity, as well as its vitality and power of growth and development by constant accretion; in it are preserved many words interesting to the student of language, and from it have passed not a few words into the ordinary stock of the Queen’s English. Of multifold origin, it is yet mainly derived from Romany or gipsy talk, and thereby contains a large Eastern element, in which old Sanscrit roots may readily be traced. Many of these words would be unintelligible to ordinary folk, but some have passed into common speech. For instance, the words bamboozle, daddy, pal (companion or friend), mull (to make a mull or mess of a thing), bosh (from the Persian), are pure gipsy words, but have found some lodging, if not a home, in our vernacular. Then there are survivals (not always of the fittest) from the tongue of our Teutonic ancestors, so that Dr. Latham, the philologist, says: ‘The thieves of London’ (and he might still more have said the professional tramps) ‘are the conservators of Anglo-Saxonisms.’ Next, there are the cosmopolitan absorptions from many a tongue. From the French _bouilli_ we probably get the prison slang term ‘bull’ for a ration of meat. Chat, thieves’ slang for house, is obviously _château_. Steel, the familiar name for Coldbath Fields Prison, is an appropriation and abbreviation of Bastille; and he who ‘does a tray’ (serves three months’ imprisonment) therein, borrows his word from our Gallican neighbours. So from the Italian we get _casa_ for house, filly (_figlia_) for daughter, donny (_donna_) for woman, and omee (_uomo_) for man. The Spanish gives us _don_, which the universities have not despised as a useful term. From the German we get durrynacker, for a female hawker, from _dorf_, ‘a village,’ and _nachgehen_, ‘to run after.’ From Scotland we borrow _duds_, for clothes, and from the Hebrew _shoful_, for base coin.
“Considering that in the manufacture of the domestic and social slang of nicknames or pet names not a little humour or wit is commonly found, it might be imagined that thieves’ slang would be a great treasure-house of humorous expression. That this is not the case arises from the fact that there is very little glitter even in what they take for gold, and that their life is mainly one of miserable anxiety, suspicion, and fear; forced and gin-inspired is their merriment, and dismal, for the most part, are their faces when not assuming an air of bravado, which deceives not even their companions. Some traces of humour are to be found in certain euphemisms, such as the delicate expression ‘fingersmith’ as descriptive of a trade which a blunt world might call that of a pickpocket. Or, again, to get three months’ hard labour is more pleasantly described as getting thirteen clean shirts, one being served out in prison each week. The tread-wheel, again, is more politely called the everlasting staircase, or the wheel of life, or the vertical case-grinder. Penal servitude is dignified with the appellation of serving Her Majesty for nothing; and even an attempt is made to lighten the horror of the climax of a criminal career by speaking of dying in a horse’s nightcap, _i.e._, a halter.”