Slang and its analogues past and present, volume 2 [of 7] : $b A dictionary, historical and comparative, of the heterodox speech of all classes of society for more than three hundred years. With synonyms in English, French, German, Italian, etc.

Description

How to speak with the dead by Sciens is a historical slang dictionary written in the late 19th century. It compiles the “heterodox” speech of many classes over centuries, pairing definitions with origins, dated citations, and synonyms across several European languages. The likely focus is tracing how nonstandard English—cant, colloquial, and criminal argot—developed and was used rather than offering a narrative. The opening of the work sets out the title matter for Volume II (covering C to early F) and immediately begins alphabetized entries starting with cab, cabbage, cad, and their many offshoots. Each headword is broken into numbered senses (often obsolete or regional), with thorough etymologies, abundant illustrative quotations, cross-references, and long synonym lists (including French, German, Italian, Spanish, and thieves’ cant). Representative entries show the range: cab as a schoolboy “crib” and an obsolete term for a brothel; cabbage as tailors’ pilferings, a “crib,” a cigar, a body-part vulgarism, and a verb “to pilfer”; cackle for idle talk and a cluster of theatrical derivatives; cad for ill-bred persons and omnibus conductors; and calaboose for jail. Scattered throughout are rhyming slang (Cain and Abel = table), school and university usages (call, calx), military and nautical phrases, and American and Australian colloquialisms, signaling the volume’s comparative, documentary method from the outset. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Subjects

• English language -- Slang -- Dictionaries
• Slang -- Dictionaries
• PE