position and antecedents, must have been a
master of slang in every shape, makes but
little use of it in his conversation. And in
that rogue's epic—that biographia flagitiosa
—the Beggars' Opera—we can understand
Macheath, Filch, Jenny Diver, and Mat of
the Mint without dictionary or glossary.
The only man who wrote slang was Mr, Ned
Ward; but that worthy cannot be taken as
an example of the polite, or even of the
ordinary conversation of his day.

It may be objected to me that although
there may be a large collection of slang
words floating about, they are made use
of only by loose, or at best illiterate
persons, and are banished from refined society.
This may be begging the question, but I
deny the truth of the objection. If words
not to be found in standard dictionaries, not
authorised by writings received as classics,
and for which no literary or grammatical
precedents can be adduced, are to be called
slang—I will aver that you shall not read
one single parliamentary debate as reported
in a first-class newspaper, without meeting
with scores of slang words. Whatever may
be the claims of the Commons' House to
collective wisdom, it is as a whole an assembly
of educated gentlemen. From Mr. Speaker
in his chair to the Cabinet ministers whispering
behind it—from mover to seconder, from
true blue protectionist to extremest radical,
Mr. Barry's New House echoes and re-echoes
with slang. You may hear slang every day
in term from barristers in their robes, at
every mess table, at every bar mess, at every
college commons, in every club dining-room.

Thus, with great modesty and profound
submission, I must express my opinion either
that slang should be proscribed, banished,
prohibited, or that a New Dictionary should
be compiled, in which all the slang terms
now in use among educated men, and made
use of in publications of established character,
should be registered, etymologised, explained,
and stamped with the lexicographic stamp,
that we may have chapter and verse, mint
and hall-mark for our slang. Let the new
dictionary contain a well-digested array of the
multitude of synonyms for familiar objects
floating about; let them give a local habitation
and a name to all the little by-blows of
language skulking and rambling about our
speech, like the ragged little Bedouins about
our shameless streets, and give them a settlement
and a parish. If the evil of slang has
grown too gigantic to be suppressed, let us at
least give it decency by legalising it; else,
assuredly, this age will be branded by
posterity with the shame of jabbering a broken
dialect in preference to speaking a nervous
and dignified language; and our wits will be
sneered at and undervalued as mere
wordtwisters, who supplied the lack of humour by
a vulgar facility of low language.

The compiler of such a dictionary would
have no light task. I can imagine him at
work in the synonymous department. Only
consider what a vast multitude of equivalents
the perverse ingenuity of our slanginess has
invented for the one generic word Money.
Money—the bare, plain, simple word itself—
has a sonorous, significant ring in its sound,
and might have sufficed, yet we substitute for
it—tin, rhino, blunt, rowdy, stumpy, dibbs,
browns, stuff, ready, mopusses, shiners, dust,
chips, chinkers, pewter, horsenails, brads.
Seventeen synonyms to one word; and then
we come to species—pieces of money.
Sovereigns are yellow boys, cooters, quids; crown-
pieces are bulls and cart-wheels; shillings,
bobs, or benders; sixpenny-pieces are fiddlers
and tizzies; fourpenny-pieces, joeys or bits;
pence, browns, or coppers and mags. To say
that a man is without money, or in poverty,
some persons remark that he is down on his
luck, hard up, stumped up, in Queer Street,
under a cloud, up a tree, quisby, done up, sold
up, in a fix. To express that he is rich, we
say that he is warm, comfortable, that he has
feathered his nest, that he has lots of tin, or
that he has plenty of stuff, or is worth a
plum.

For the one word drunk, besides the authorised
synonyms tipsy, inebriated, intoxicated,
I find of unauthorised or slang equivalents
the astonishing number of thirty-two, viz.: in
liquor, disguised therein, lushy, bosky, buffy,
boozy, mops and brooms, half-seas-over, far-
gone, tight, not able to see a hole through a
ladder, three sheets in the wind, foggy,
screwed, hazy, sewed up, moony, muddled,
muzzy, swipey, lumpy, obfuscated, muggy,
beery, winey, slewed, on the ran-tan, on the
re-raw, groggy, ploughed, cut and in his
cups.

For one article of drink, gin, we have ten
synonyms: max, juniper, gatter, duke, jackey,
tape, blue-ruin, cream of the valley, white
satin, old Tom.

Synonymous with a man, are a cove, a
chap, a cull, an article, a codger, a buffer. A
gentleman is a swell, a nob, a tiptopper; a
low person is a snob, a sweep, and a scurf,
and in Scotland, a gutter-blood. Thieves
are prigs, cracksmen, mouchers, gonophs,
go-alongs. To steal is to prig, to pinch, to
collar, to nail, to grab, to nab. To go or run
away is to hook it, to bolt, to take tracks, to
absquatulate, to slope, to step it, to mizzle, to
paddle, to cut, to cut your stick, to evaporate,
to vamose, to be off, to vanish, and to tip
your rags a gallop. For the verb to beat I can
at once find fourteen synonyms: thus to thrash,
to lick, to leather, to hide, to tan, to larrup,
to wallop, to pummel, to whack, to whop, to
towel, to maul, to quit, to pay. A horse is a
nag, a prad, a tit, a screw. A donkey is a
moke, a neddy. A policeman is a peeler, a
bobby, a crusher; a soldier a swaddy, a
lobster, a red herring. To pawn is to spout,
to pop, to lumber, to blue. The hands
are mauleys, and the fingers flippers. The
feet are steppers; the boots crabshells, or