[Ads-l] Ghost cant

[Jonathan Lighter]

Robin, here's a factoid that only you will be able to appreciate fully. You
might find it worth mentioning.

The made-for-TV movie _The Lost Battalion_ (2001) tells a fact-based (and
you know what that means) story of Americans in the First World War.

One of the characters is a NYC gangster who affects long-obsolete terms
taken directly from old cant glossaries! One diagnostic case is
"Daisyville."
One of the other characters even comments on it!

Don't know where writer Jim Carabatsos picked these up. Partridge? Asbury?
He must have been pretty proud of his research (the curse of the amateur).

Anyhow, will watch the movie when it's on again in a couple of weeks and
give you a full (but thankfully brief) list.

BTW, are you aware of the several authentic folksongs in tinker's cant that
appear in Kennedy' _Folksongs of Britain and Ireland_?  They were collected
orally in the 1950s. Some of the vocab. is in Partridge, and some isn't.

Jon



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org