World Wide Words -- 02 Jul 11

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 743           Saturday 2 July 2011
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Author/editor: Michael Quinion      US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org               ISSN 1470-1448
-------------------------------------------------------------------
     
      A formatted version of this e-magazine is available 
      online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/jkgf.htm

       Now on Twitter: http://twitter.com/wwwordseditor

     This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font.
   For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON


Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Article: Of thimbleriggers and joculators.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
HOLIDAY BREAK  My month's break is almost over. Normal service will 
be resumed next Saturday, 9 July. This week, I'm reprinting the 
last of four revised versions of pieces that first appeared in my 
book Gallimaufry.


2. Article: Of thimbleriggers and joculators
-------------------------------------------------------------------
One especially widespread entertainment in Victorian London was 
gambling. It took place anywhere that people gathered - in markets, 
fairgrounds, racecourses, pubs, or in the street. Those in charge 
of them usually had some way of diverting a mug from his money by 
less than honest means.

One gambling game required a leather belt, garter or string tied 
into an endless loop. The man in charge twisted it into a figure-
of-eight formation and asked someone to put a finger into one of 
the loops thus made. If the string snagged on his finger when the 
string was pulled away, he won. The trick was that there were two 
ways to make the figure-of-eight. In one, the game was genuine, 
with one loop snagging and the other not; in the other, neither 
did, and the victim always lost. In Britain, from the eighteenth 
century onwards, it was sometimes called pin and girdle, more often 
prick the garter, but it had been known from the sixteenth century 
and after as fast and loose, using "fast" in its sense of something 
fixed or immovable. The expression "to play fast and loose" had 
become an idiom before 1557, the date of its first recorded use. It 
was an obvious progression from the nature of the game to a sense 
of dishonestly or irresponsibly trifling with another's affections.

Another gambling game was thimblerig, also known as pea and 
thimbles (as the shell game in North America, perhaps because the 
game was at times played with half walnut shells in place of 
thimbles) in which you had to guess under which of three thimbles a 
pea was hidden:

    All races, fairs, and other such conglomerations of 
    those whom Heaven had blessed with more money than wit, 
    used to be frequented by minor members of 'The Fancy,' 
    who are technically called "flat-catchers", and who 
    picked up a very pretty living by a quick hand, a 
    rattling tongue, a deal board, three thimbles, and a 
    pepper-corn. The game they played with these three 
    curious articles is a sort of Lilliputian game at cups 
    and balls; and the beauty of it lies in dexterously 
    seeming to place the pepper-corn under one particular 
    thimble, getting a "green" to bet that it was there, and 
    then winning his money by showing that it is not. Every 
    operator at the game was attended by certain of his 
    friends called "eggers" and "bonnetters" - the eggers to 
    "egg" on the green ones to bet, by betting themselves; 
    and the bonnetters to "bonnet" any green one who might 
    happen to win - that is to say, to knock his hat over his 
    eyes, whilst the operator and the others bolted with the 
    stakes.
    [The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims, by Andrew 
    Steinmetz, 1870. Cups and balls was the larger-scale 
    version of thimblerig. Green here means a naive player; a 
    flat-catcher caught flats, Victorian slang for a mug or 
    sucker, so named because he was the opposite of sharp. 
    The sharp ones, or sharpers, were in charge of the games 
    - in this case, he might be called a thimblerigger. The 
    thimblerigger used sleight-of-hand to ensure that the 
    peppercorn was not where it seemed to be when the punter 
    came to make his choice.]

A common name for this type of swindler or confidence trickster was 
magsman, from "mag", a slang term for a chatterbox, good verbal 
skills being a vital part of the technique (it may derive from 
"magpie", a noisy, chattering bird).

Another gambling game was spin-em-rounds, usually played in the 
street; it was mentioned by Henry Mayhew in his London Life and the 
London Poor of 1851. Another name for it was wheel-of-fortune, in 
earlier times the name for the drum in which lottery tickets were 
spun before drawing. A slang dictionary of 1859 described it as

    a street game consisting of a piece of brass, wood, or 
    iron, balanced on a pin and turned quickly around on a 
    board, when the point, arrow shaped, stops at a number 
    and decides the bet one way or the other. The contrivance 
    very much resembles a sea compass, and was formerly the 
    gambling accompaniment of London piemen. The apparatus 
    was then erected on the tin lids of their pie cans, and 
    the bets were ostensibly for pies, but more frequently 
    for "coppers," when no policeman frowned upon the scene, 
    and when two or three apprentices or porters happened to 
    meet.
    [A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words, 
    by John Camden Hotten, 1859. "Coppers" here referred to 
    the copper coins of small change; since Mr Hotten was 
    staid in his writing, I suspect that he wasn't making a 
    pun on "copper" in the sense of a policeman, so called 
    because he "copped" criminals, or more prosaically caught 
    them.]

The opportunity for cheating might seem less here, but, taking a 
line through crooked roulette wheels, there was no doubt much 
advantage to be got by a clever person in charge.

A game called three-up was also described by Mayhew. It was usually 
played in pubs: 

    "Three-up" is played fairly among the costermongers; 
    but is most frequently resorted to when strangers are 
    present to "make a pitch", - which is, in plain words, to 
    cheat any stranger who is rash enough to bet upon them. 
    "This is the way, sir," said an adept to me; "bless you, 
    I can make them fall as I please. If I'm playing with Jo, 
    and a stranger bets with Jo, why, of course, I make Jo 
    win." This adept illustrated his skill to me by throwing 
    up three halfpennies, and, five times out of six, they 
    fell upon the floor, whether he threw them nearly to the 
    ceiling or merely to his shoulder, all heads or all 
    tails. The halfpence were the proper current coins - 
    indeed, they were my own; and the result is gained by a 
    peculiar position of the coins on the fingers, and a 
    peculiar jerk in the throwing."
    [London Labour and the London Poor, by Henry Mayhew, 
    1851.]

The most famous of such crooked games is find the lady or the 
three-card trick, which is still widely played. Three playing 
cards, one of which is often the Queen of Hearts (hence one name 
for the game) or a king (sometimes known as "the gentleman") were 
shown face up and then laid face down and rapidly moved about by 
the sharper. Somehow the mark never found the vital card. One way 
to disguise the final position was to collect the three cards in an 
open stack between the joints of thumb and second finger. With some 
practice, the dealer could release whichever card he wanted as he 
flicked your hand across the table and so confuse even someone 
watching closely. The game is often called three-card monte in 
North America, a name taken from "monte", a Spanish game using 45 
playing cards, which was once common in Mexico and California.

Such gambling games existed alongside street entertainers of many 
kinds, singers, hurdy-gurdy players, joculators (an elevated term 
for a jester or minstrel, from Latin "joculatorem", a jester), 
engastrimyths (a ventriloquist, another highfalutin term, from 
Greek "gaster", belly, and "muthos", speech, an exact translation 
of the Latin "ventriloquist"), plus blind fiddlers, dancing dogs 
and performers of strange and exotic feats of strength and 
endurance. 

Street entertainment in London at the end of the nineteenth century 
was recalled by a writer many years later:

    At one point you would find a Highlander (probably 
    from Camden Town) with bagpipes, and a lady partner doing 
    the sword dance. A few yards away a man and woman doing a 
    thought-reading act. Then a trained horse spelling "corn" 
    and "hay" from lettered cards. ... Then a one-man band - 
    a man who carried and worked with mouth and with 
    different limbs, a big drum, a triangle, Pan-pipes, 
    cymbals, and concertina. Then a contortionist and 
    escapist being roped and manacled. Then a weight-lifter; 
    an Italian woman with a cage of fortune-telling 
    budgerigars; a tattooed sailor advertising a tattooist - 
    in short, a small Bartholomew Fair every Saturday night, 
    and a gusto to it which is, or seems to be, absent even 
    from the Bank Holiday Fairs of to-day." 
    [London in my Time, by Thomas Burke, 1934. Bartholomew 
    Fair had once been one of London's most important summer 
    fairs, trading in cloth and other goods as well as 
    providing entertainment. It was suppressed in 1855 for 
    encouraging debauchery and public disorder.]

He might also have mentioned the hokey-pokey man, who sold ice-
cream on the street, with his cry of "Hokey-pokey, a penny a 
lump!", whose name may be from "hocus-pocus", though some have 
pointed instead to the Italian "O che poco!", "Oh, how little!" 
Incidentally, the dance called the Hokey-Cokey ("You do the Hokey-
Cokey and you turn around / That's what it's all about", in the 
version I know best) was originally the "Hokey-Pokey" (as it still 
is in North America) or perhaps the "Hokee-Pokee", definitely from 
"hocus-pocus". Other foods were sold by the muffin-man, who in the 
winter usually sold crumpets instead, and the orange-girls of 
street and theatre, of whom Nell Gwyn is the most famous.

A journalist asked a workhouse master about the performers fallen 
on bad times who came through his doors:

    I really believe we might give a very decent 
    entertainment to our old people, if it was the time for 
    their annual treat, without hiring a single professional 
    from outside. We have at present in the house two 
    families of acrobats, a sword-swallower, the fellow that 
    eats burning tow with a fork [and] the black man who 
    throws the half-hundred weight.
    [Mysteries of Modern London, James Greenwood, 1883. 
    Tow is a bundle of untwisted fibres.]

It occurred to the workhouse master with some surprise that he had 
never entered a Punch-and-Judy man on the parish books, which he 
suggested was remarkable, considering that for more than a quarter 
of a century Punch had been supposed to be on his last legs. What 
had vanished, he commented, was the gallanty show (possibly from 
the Italian "galante", courteous or honourable, which also gave us 
"gallant"). Punch-and-Judy men of a previous generation had found 
it to be a good way of earning money after dark. It was a shadow-
puppet show, using silhouette figures projected on a white sheet 
stretched across the front of the booth, with a lantern or candles 
behind.

Another common public entertainment in towns and cities was the 
theatre or music-hall. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 
any cheap playhouse was a gaff (from Romany "gav", a town, which 
could also mean a fair or exhibition). The very cheapest sort, the 
lowest-life relative of the music-hall, was the penny-gaff, from 
the price of admission, mostly patronised by young people. Every 
social investigator who described such places was appalled by them:

    The true penny gaff is the place where juvenile 
    Poverty meets juvenile Crime. We elbowed our way into 
    one, that was the foulest, dingiest place of public 
    entertainment I can conceive. ... The odour, the 
    atmosphere, to begin with, is indescribable. The rows of 
    brazen young faces are terrible to look upon. It is 
    impossible to be angry with their sauciness, or to resent 
    the leers and grimaces that are directed upon us as 
    unwelcome intruders. Some have the aspect of wild cats. 
    The lynx at bay, has not a crueller glance than some I 
    caught from almost baby faces.
    [London: A Pilgrimage, by Blanchard Jerrold, 1872.]

A cheap theatre that presented lurid melodrama was given the slang 
name of blood-tub, from the vessel into which an animal's blood was 
drained after slaughtering:

    "I'd no idea there was a theatre in Bursley," she 
    remarked idly, driven into a banality by the press of her 
    sensations. "They used to call it the Blood Tub," he 
    replied. "Melodrama and murder and gore - you know."
    [Hilda Lessways, by Arnold Bennett, 1911.]


A. Subscription information
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, 
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm 

You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of 
commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org:

  INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS

This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is 
at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .

Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ .


B. E-mail contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should 
  be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to 
  respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. 
* Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org .
  Submissions will usually be acknowledged.
* Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should 
  be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't 
  use this address to respond to published answers to questions - 
  e-mail the comment address instead).
* Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list 
  server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To
  allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail
  me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself.


C. Ways to support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you 
would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do 
so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights 
reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing 
lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include 
the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts 
of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from 
the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). 
-------------------------------------------------------------------