Slang References

The best reference book on slang I've found is Cassell's Dictionary of Slang. It has more than 85,000 entries and over 1,500 pages. What's particularly useful is that most entries indicate when and where the word was used. For instance, here are the entries under mope:

What's harder is doing the reverse, i.e., finding a slang term for a particular meaning you have in mind. For normal vocabulary, there is of course Roget's Thesaurus. And guess what? There's also a slang version, The American Thesaurus of Slang. I believe this was compiled in the 1930s and '40s. There are a lot of editions around, used, and the prices seem to vary a lot. This is just as advertised, but it is specific to the period when it was compiled. That's a little later than my period of research, so I usually check elsewhere before using something from this.

At Google Books, you can find a number of old sources available online, and searchable. For instance, The American Slang Dictionary by James Maitland. This was published in 1891. It's 300 pages long, with perhaps 6,000 entries. 

The journal Dialect Notes had many pieces on terms used in specific regions and by various occupations. Most of these seem to have been assembled by amateurs, but there was a wonderful study of college slang done in 1900 by Eugene Howard Babbitt. He polled faculty members at various colleges to assemble lists and then compiled a comprehensive index.

It's difficult to determine how often a particular word was used in speech, but I do various searches. You can search Google Books for particular dates, and also the newspaper archives at Google and at the Library of Congress. The Brooklyn Public Library has made The Brooklyn Daily Eagle available online, and I imagine there are other newspapers online elsewhere.

In an earlier post, I discussed how the people of the period seemed attracted to slang, but usually toward exaggerated depictions of folksy language.

Mr. Dooley

It's difficult imagining anything like the phenomenon of Mr. Dooley occurring today. This philosophizing Irish saloon owner was the creation of Finley Peter Dunne, a humorist and Chicago newspaper editor. In Dunne's columns, Dooley gave his interpretation of the events of the day and the concerns of the nation. The columns, written in the vernacular of a working class Irish, originally focused on Chicago. But Dooley became nationally syndicated in 1898 and by the end of the Spanish-American War had achieved immense popularity.

When I first read these pieces, I was put off by the silly (and seemingly forced) vernacular. It sounds more like the cliche Irish of a Pat and Mike routine than anything you'd be likely to hear in a saloon. And many of the topics are esoteric, or too specific to the time and place.

The pieces I appreciate the most are usually on topics I've already read about. For instance, "The Crusade against Vice" captures succinctly the periodic anti-vice campaigns. These would erupt with great fanfare, and much apparent support. Only to peter out as the majority tired of the ever-wider range of acts which needed to be eradicated.

Here is how Dooley puts it:

"As a people, Hinnissy, we're th' greatest crusaders that iyer was-—f'r a short distance. Ou a quarther mile thrack we can crusade at a rate that wud make Hogan's frind, Godfrey th' Bullion look like a crab. But th' throuble is th' crusade don't last afther th' firat sprint. Th' crusaders drops out iv th' procission to take a dhrink or put a little money on th' ace an' be th' time th' end iv th' line iv march is reached th' boss crusader is alone in th' job an' his former followers is hurlin' bricks at him fr'm th' windows iv policy shops. Th' boss crusader always gets th' double cross. If I wanted to sind me good name down to th' ginerations with Cap. Kidd an' Jesse James I'd lead a movement fr th' suppression iv vice. I wud so."

But  I think the best of the pieces I've read is "The Negro Problem". Dunne captures beautifully the hypocrisy of the position of most Northerners: African-Americans needed to accept that they'd be excluded from most employment and social opportunities, and yet couldn't expect be excused for their failure to measure up to their neighbors.

Mr. Hennessy, the only customer who ever seems to visit Dooley's saloon, asks him what will become of the negro:

"Well," said Mr. Dooley, "he'll ayther have to go to th' north an' be a subjick race, or stay in th' south an' be an objick lesson. 'Tis a har-rd time he'll have, annyhow, I'm not sure that I'd not as lave be gently lynched in Mississippi as baten to death in New York. If I was a black man, I'd choose th' cotton belt in prifrince to th' belt on th' neck fr'm th' polisman's club. I wud so."

I assume the reason Dooley only ever had the one customer was all this spewing of his opinions. If you've spent any time in a bar, you know any bartender worth his salt keeps his opinions to himself, unless it's to voice his agreement with yours.

Many of the 700+ Dooley pieces were assembled into bound volumes and these are available online, both at the Hathi Trust and at Archive.org. There's also a paperback collection that was put out by Dover a while back, Mr. Dooley on Ivrything and Ivrybody.

An affection for slang: everyday language in 1900 as seen in the media.

Everyday language is a topic that's been particularly difficult for me. There were no oral histories that I'm aware of, and the actual research done at the time is spotty. People had a fascination with slang, but ironically that's more a hindrance than a help. Slang depicted in newspapers and magazines is usually so exaggerated as to be silly. A prime example is Finley Peter Dunne's character Mr. Dooley, an Irish bartender in Chicago. He appeared in a column published in hundreds of newspapers and compiled in a series of books. Here's a sample of Dooley's speech:

Th' speaker iv th' house burrid his face in his hands, an' sobs shook him partly f'r manny minyits. Thin he raised his head, an' says he, 'Mack,' he says, 'I can't take it,' he says. ''Tis most gin'rous iv ye,' he says, 'but me hear-rt fails me,' he says.

A slightly less egregious example of such speech can be found in a series of books written by "Josiah Allen’s Wife" (Marietta Holley) about a woman from rural New England named Samantha.

Criminals in magazine stories always speak in an exaggerated lingo, while immigrants and African-Americans are depicted as incapable of putting two words together in standard English.

I came to the conclusion that what I saw in newspapers and magazines of the time had little to do with how people actually spoke, and I had this confirmed when I came across the passage below in O. Henry's Cabbages and Kings (1904).  In the story, a telegram was sent to an American in a South American country, and to hide the contents from prying eyes, it was written in exaggerated slang. This is one character describing it:

Tis what they call literature, and that's a system of language put in the mouths of people that they've never been introduced to by writers of imagination. The magazines invented it, but I never knew before that President Norvin Green had stamped it with the seal of his approval. Tis now no longer literature, but language. The dictionaries tried, but they couldn't make it go for anything but dialect. Sure, now that the Western Union indorses it, it won't be long till a race of people will spring up that speaks it.

And here's another O. Henry passage, from Whirligigs (1910), where two characters are discussing the colorful language of a third:

"This tough talk is the very stuff that counts. There is a picturesqueness about the speech of the lower order of people that is quite unique. Did you say that this is the Bowery variety of slang?"

"Oh, well," said Rivington, giving it up, "I'll tell you straight. That's one of our college professors talking. He ran down for a day or two at the club. It's a sort of fad with him lately to use slang in his conversation. He thinks it improves language. The man he is talking to is one of New York's famous social economists."

Speaking of professors, here's an example that touches on both people's interest in slang and their understanding of scientific method. It's from what is supposed to be a list of terms used in the lumber industry compiled by two people at Cornell University and published in an academic journal of the time, Dialect Notes. They took words from a book, letters to newspapers, their own memory, etc., but here's my favorite:

  stent, n. for stint. Marietta Holley (Josiah Allen's Wife), My Wayward Pardner, p. 74.

Their source is a fictional character! And these guys taught at Cornell. Meanwhile, the term peavy (a tool commonly, and uniquely, used in lumbering) isn't mentioned.