APPENDIX
A Note on Thieves’ Cant
The vocabulary given on page 135 contributes no word which may not be found in any cant dictionary, and therefore may appear undeserving of inclusion. But I put it in because I think few people, apart from students of philology, realize the existence of that large section of our language in use among the vagabond classes. Cant and slang, to most people’s minds, are synonymous, but this is an error of belief: slang creeps from many sources into the river of language, and so mingles with it that in course of time many use it without knowing that they do so; cant, on the other hand, remains definite and obscure of origin. Slang is loose, expressive, and metaphorical; cant is tight and correct: it has even a literature of its own, broad and racy, incomprehensible to the ordinary reader without the help of a glossary. Its words, for the most part, bear no resemblance to English words; unlike slang, they are not words adapted, for the sake of vividness, to a use for which they were not originally intended, but are applied strictly to their peculiar meaning.
Although the origin of cant as a separate jargon or language is obscure—it does not appear in England till the second half of the sixteenth century—the origin of certain of its words may be traced. Of those included in the vocabulary on page 135, for example, ken, for house, comes from khan (gipsy and Oriental); fogus, for tobacco, comes from fogo, an old word for stench; maund, or maunder, to beg, does not derive, as might be thought, from maung, to beg, a gipsy word taken from the Hindu, but from the Anglo-Saxon mand, a basket; bouse, to drink (which, of course, has given us booze, with the same meaning, and which in the fourteenth century was perfectly good English), comes from the Dutch buyzen, to tipple. Abram, naked, is found as abrannoi, with the same meaning, in Hungarian gipsy; cassan, cheese, is cas in English gipsy; dimber survives for “pretty” in Worcestershire. Cheat appears frequently in cant as a common affix.
As for autem mort, I find it in an early authority thus defined: “These autem morts be married women, as there be but a few. For autem in their language is a church, so she is a wife married at the church, and they be as chaste as a cow I have, that goeth to bull every moon, with what bull she careth not.”