FORGOTTEN MONEY SLANG

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 199, 23 May 1925, Page 20

FORGOTTEN MONEY SLANG

Money slang has fallen upon evil days. I was quite startled recently when an omnibus conductor asked me if I had six coppers for a tizzy. A tizzy! Why, I have not heard that delightful word.since I was a bov, when it was quite as often used in London as tanner. Now and a’gain, too, twenty or thirty years ago, a sixpenny bit used still to be known’ as a kick or a bender. Two or three decades before that it was a tester or a cripple. A ss. piece, in my young days, was still calle.d a cartwheel, but no longer a taskeroon or a bull. How meagre is our slang for a shilling in these times. A mere bob. Yet at the time of the Crimean War bob was only' one of a number of terms, such as twelver and breaky-leg, gen and teviss, stag, deaner, hog and levy. One still says, “Oh, that put the kybosh on it!” meaning “knocked it on the head” or “rendered it impossible.” Kybosh used to be the slang word for one-and-sixpence. 'Hie sovereign had a lot of slang names with seemingly equal chances of survival —a portrait, a yellow boy, a goldfinch, a canary, a james, a couter, a foont, a poona, a bean, a quid and a thick ’un; yet only’ the last two are now used.

For the word money itself, in MidVictorian England, actually more than 40 slang terms were in common use. Few are the survivors. Chink, tin, and dibbs survive merely in schools, those strongholds of conservatism. Rhino is seldom -heard except in old-fashioned comic songs. Brass has retreated to the Midlands and the industrial North. The ready and the needful alone are pretty generally understood to meal’ money,—“Daily Mail.”