"fork *up*" (July 1837), and other slang

[Jonathan Lighter]

Matsell may not have been dumb, but he was certainly out to make a buck
(worth so much more in spending power then), and surely he
was linguistically and lexicographically naive. It is even conceivable that
he had one of his minions compile _Vocabulum_ for him, but that's a
gratuitous conjecture for which I apologize.

Virginia Woolf famously reported that "On [sic] or about December, 1910,
human nature changed."

*I'm* ready for the centennial!  Are you?

JL




On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Robin Hamilton <
robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Robin Hamilton <robin.hamilton2 at BTINTERNET.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "fork *up*" (July 1837), and other slang
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> > I wouldn't call it a send-up, just a diverting exercise.
> >
> > Cf.: "A rag-happy skivvy-waver and a rock-happy bellhop were chipping the
> > ivories with a zoomie and a doughfoot.
>
> Ah, but a guess, I'd place that as a post-1900 pastiche.  I have A Theory
> as
> to why the world changes in 1900.  <g>
>
> Matsell's was a diverting exercise, sure (but we're talking about the
> author
> of "A Hundred Stretches Hence", which manages to sew together Villon,
> Blackwood's Magazine, and contemporary cant about fifty years before Henley
> gains fame and fortune for that very thing in "Villon's Straight Tip to All
> Cross Coves") but what impresses me is the way Matsell starts from a base
> of
> strict Harman cant terms (which form the dominant linguistic markers at the
> start) and later modulates (after the passage I quote) into contemporary NY
> 1850s.
>
> That, and the register-jumping, both *between cant and non-cant registers,
> and *within the cant register.
>
> It's possible I over-rate Matsell here, as elsewhere, but anyone who
> managed
> to alienate quite so many different constituencies, from Ike Rynders at one
> end of the spectrum to the Abolitionist Movement on the other, and survived
> a sustained hate campaign by the New York Times over a period of years, and
> *still ended up back in charge of the New York Police, had to have
> something
> going for him.
>
> He might have been 300 lbs of blubber and malice (but look what happened to
> Mike Walsh), but he was anything but dumb.
>
> Robin
>
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