[anecdote] misuse of slang in 1828

[Jonathan Lighter]

_The Night Watch_ (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 2 vols., is an anonymous collection of humorous and sentimental nautical yarns cited occasionally by Partridge (via the late Col. Alfred Moe, USMC, ret.) but not, I think, by OED.  The author's name seems to be nowhere verifiable, but the two volumes I have at hand from the Main Library of the U. of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana each bear the fly-leaf autograph, "W S Witham / With the Authors Compts."

  The following amusing anecdote suggests that "slang books" could be ready to hand even in well-to-do homes of the period. It shows that the inappropriate use of slang sounded just as ridiculous then as now, though it is hard to know whether the inappropriateness here is stems from the diction itself or from the fact that the speaker is a Frenchman at a time when Britons found the French especially ridiculous. Probably both. Vol. II, pp. 91-92:

  "Since I saw you, the butler told the French valet that I was a widow, and he had somewhow or other picked up a slang book in the house; and when Mister Crapaud came to me yesterday,...I saw the book in his waistcoat pocket, half open by three of his fingers. 'Madame,' said he, 'I am sorry very moach, but on dit, but dey say, Madame (and I saw him look in his pocket), dat your husband have kicked de bocket....dat is, Madame, he has hopped de twig; dat is, I say, he is gone to Davy's locker.' I screamed and ran off in a fit, and he called after me, 'Mort! mort! mort!' Oh, how I laughed, Thomas. I wish you had been there."

  JL







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