[Ads-l] 'gee', to inform 1932

[Geoffrey Nunberg]

Partridge has it as British slang from 1996 (“from the initial letter of GRASS (to inform)”), but there’s a nice earlier eg in Orwell’s essay “Clink” (1932), which obligingly provides a definition.

> People had scrawled their names, offenses and the lengths of their sentences all over the walls of my compartment; also, several times, variations on this couplet:
> 
> Detective Smith knows how to gee;
> Tell him he’s a cunt from me.
> 
> (“Gee” in this context means agent provocateur.) 


Geoff





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