Page 210 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

To bawl—to suck or swallow. To knock off—to steal. To
skipper—to sleep in the open.
About half of these words are in the larger dictionaries.
It is interesting to guess at the derivation of some of them,
though one or two —for instance, ‘funkum’ and ‘tosher-
oon’—are beyond guessing. ‘Deaner’ presumably comes
from. ‘denier’. ‘Glimmer’ (with the verb ‘to glim’) may have
something to do with the old word ‘glim’, meaning a light,
or another old word ‘glim’, meaning a glimpse; but it is
an instance of the formation of new words, for in its pres-
ent sense it can hardly be older than motor-cars. ‘Gee’ is a
curious word; conceivably it has arisen out of ‘gee’, mean-
ing horse, in the sense of stalking horse. The derivation of
‘screever’ is mysterious. It must come ultimately from scr-
ibo, but there has been no similar word in English for the
past hundred and fifty years; nor can it have come direct-
ly from the French, for pavement artists are unknown in
France. ‘Judy’ and ‘bawl’ are East End words, not found west
of Tower Bridge. ‘Smoke’ is a word used only by tramps.
‘Kip’ is Danish. Till quite recently the word ‘doss’ was used
in this sense, but it is now quite obsolete.
London slang and dialect seem to change very rapidly.
The old London accent described by Dickens and Surtees,
with v for w and w for v and so forth, has now vanished
utterly. The Cockney accent as we know it seems to have
come up in the ‘forties (it is first mentioned in an American
book, Herman Melville’s WHITE JACKET), and Cockney
is already changing; there are few people now who say ‘fice’
for ‘face’, ‘nawce’ for ‘nice’ and so forth as consistently as

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