newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-
purchase tout-in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless
parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from
the community, and, what should justify him according to
our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering.
I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets
him in a different class from other people, or gives most
modern men the right to despise him.
Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? -
for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the
simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In
practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless,
productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it
shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy,
efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning
is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of
it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this
test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one
could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would
become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar,
looked at realistically, is simply a business man, getting
his living, like other business men, in the way that comes
to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold
his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing
a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.
XXXII
I WANT to put in some notes, as short as possible, on
London slang and swearing. These (omitting the ones
that everyone knows) are some of the cant words now
used in London:
A gagger-beggar or street performer of any kind. A
moocher-one who begs outright, without pretence of
doing a trade. A nobbler-one who collects pennies for a
beggar. A chanter-a street singer. A clodhopper -a street
dancer. A mugfaker-a street photographer. A glimmer-
one who watches vacant motor-cars. A gee (or jee-it is
pronounced jee)-the accomplice of a cheapjack, who
stimulates trade by pretending to buy
something. A split-a detective. A flattie-a policeman. A
dideki-a gypsy. A toby-a tramp.
A drop-money given to a beggar. Funkumlavender or
other perfume sold in envelopes. A boozer -a public-
house. A slang-a hawker's licence. A kip -a place to
sleep in, or a night's lodging. SmokeLondon. A judy-a
woman. The spike-the casual ward. The lump-the casual
ward. A tosheroon-a half-crown. A denner-a shilling. A
hog-a shilling. A sprowsie-a sixpence. Clods-coppers. A
drum-a billy can. Shackles-soup. A chat-a louse. Hard-
up-tobacco made from cigarette ends. A stick or cane -a
burglar's jemmy. A peter-a safe. A bly-a burglar's oxy-
acetylene blow-lamp
To bawl-to suck or swallow. To knock off-to steal. To
skipper-to sleep in the open.
About half of these words are in the larger diction-
aries. It is interesting to guess at the derivation of some
of them, though one or two-for instance, "funkum" and
"tosheroon"-are beyond guessing. "Deaner" presumably
comes from "denier." "Glimmer" (with the verb "to
glim") may have something to do with the old word
"glim," meaning a light, or another old word "glim,"
meaning a glimpse; but it is an instance of the formation
of new words, for in its present sense it can hardly be
older than motor-cars. "Gee" is a curious word;
conceivably it has arisen out of "gee," meaning horse, in
the sense of stalking horse. The derivation of "screever"
is mysterious. It must come ultimately from scribo, but
there has been no similar word in English for the past
hundred and fifty years; nor can it have come directly
from the French, for pavement artists are unknown in
France. "Judy" and "bawl" are East End words, not
found west of Tower Bridge. "Smoke" is a word used
only by tramps. "Kip" is Danish. Till quite recently
the word "doss" was used in this sense, but it is now
quite obsolete.
London slang and dialect seem to change very
rapidly. The old London accent described by Dickens
and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has
now vanished utterly. The Cockney accent as we know
it seems to have come up in the 'forties (it is first men-
tioned in an American book, Herman Melville's
White
Jacket
), and Cockney is already changing; there are few
people now who say "fice" for "face," "nawce" for
"nice" and so forth as consistently as they did twenty
years ago. The slang changes together with the accent.
Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the
"rhyming slang" was all the rage in London. In the
"rhyming slang" everything was named by something
rhyming with it-a "hit or miss" for a kiss, "plates of
meat" for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even
reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct.' Perhaps
all the words I have mentioned above will have van-
ished in another twenty years.
The swear words also change-or, at any rate, they are
subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the
London working classes habitually used the word
"bloody." Now they have abandoned it utterly, though
novelists still represent them as using it. No born
Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish
origin) now says "bloody," unless he is a man of some
education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social
scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of
the working classes. The current London adjective, now
tacked on to every noun, is ---------
. No
doubt in time---, like "bloody," will find its way into
1 It survives in certain abbreviations, such as "use your
twopenny" or "use your head." "Twopenny" is arrived at like
this: head-loaf of bread-twopenny loaf-twopenny.
the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.
The whole business of swearing, especially English
swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is