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

[Robin Hamilton]

> Matsell may not have been dumb, but he was certainly out to make a buck
> (worth so much more in spending power then),

I wouldn't argue that -- but does this clash with his abilities as a
lexicographer?

> and surely he
> was linguistically and lexicographically naive.

That, I suspect, is the crux of our disagreement -- and you'd have Julie
Coleman on your side.  Neveretheless ...

I'm not sure how far we'd disagree over what there actually *is in the
glossary element of the _Vocabulum_ -- a melange of Harman cant, later
English cant, and some local American/New York material, some from yiddish,
etc.  And that a major source for much of the non-contemporary material
would be an earlier edition of Grose.  Julie Coleman opts for the 1811
edition; I'd rather it were Piers Egan's 1823 edition -- but given that Egan
in 1823 was working from the 1811 edition, it might not be possible to
discriminate.

So this would come down to how far Matsell was *aware of the disparate
nature of his material.  I'd argue that he *was -- I mean, apart from
anything else, Grose himself knew and discussed the variety of sources he
was working from, and Matsell had at the very least read one (possibly even
more) editions of Grose.

(Here I was struck, just after I pasted in the beginning of the Flash Panny
Piece, by one particular sentence:

        "... who couldn't pad the hoof for a single darkman's without his
bloss to keep him from getting pogy."

-- "bloss" --  the least familiar of three possibilities Matsell could have
picked for this place, "blowing", "blowen", and "bloss".  Perhaps "blowing"
is out, since I don't think it occurs in the 1811/1823 editions (but Byron
had used it in _Don Juan_ in 1812, if I remember the date correctly), but
picking the unusual "bloss" rather than the really-to-be-expected "blowen".
Well ...

Then there's "A Hundred Stretches Hence", which I'd argue clearly shows that
Matsell was aware of Blackwoods (hardly surprising given that Shelton
MacKenzie was publishing his edition of the Noctes, and the works of Maginn,
out of New York  about the time Matsell was connected with the printing and
publishing business there.  ("A Hundred Stretches" is pretty clearly
modelled partly on "A Hundred Years Since", a traditional Scottish song sung
by Maginn in his character of Ensign O'Docherty in one of the episodes of
the Noctes.)

All that seems to me to clash just a little with the idea that Matsell 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.

So you should.  Tut, tut.  (Apart from anything else, I can't see Matsell
paying anyone good money for something he could have done himself. <g>  And
he had time on his hands, having been bounced from the police in the wake of
the Metropolitans vs. State Policing affair, where Matsell sided with
Fernando Wood.)

I suspect we may not differ too much over what we see in Matsell's work, but
diverge radically over the conclusions we draw as to what lies behind the
text.

> Virginia Woolf famously reported that "On [sic] or about December, 1910,
> human nature changed."
>
> *I'm* ready for the centennial!  Are you?

I'm still recovering from the nasty doze of scepticism I caught from the
Millenium Bug.

Robin

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