MONEY SLANG

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 119, 23 May 1925, Page 16

MONEY SLANG

DEFINITIONS ALMOST FORGOTTEN.

Money slang has fallen upon evil days, declares Bassett Digby, in the "Daily Mail." 1 was quite startled recently when an omnibus conductor asked me if X had six coppers for a tizzy. A tizzy: Why, I had not heard that delightful word since I was a boy, when it was quite as often used in London as tanner. Aow and again, too, twenty or thirtyyears ago, a sixpenny bit used still to bo known as a kick or a bender. Two or three decades before that it was a tester or a cripple, half a hog, a sow's baby, a pig, a fye-buck, or a lord of the manor. A buk, of course, is American slang for a dollar, and has been so for. a long while.

A 5s piece, in my yonng days, was still called a cartwheel, but no longer a taskeroou or a bull. How meagre is our slang for a shilling in these times. A mere bob. Ye.t at the time of the Crimean War bob was only one of a number, of terms, such as twelver and breakylog, 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." Jvybosh used to be the slang word for one-and-sixpence, but the amusing or dramatic incident that once brought it into the limelight— and the English argot—appears to have been quite forgotten. *

The 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 router, a'foout, a poona, a bean, a quid, and a thick 'un; yet only the last two are now used. At the other end of the scale, coppers has now become tho most respectable of all modern money slang. Bishops and Judges who would never ask the bookstall man at Waterloo to change a flimsy, a quid, a bob, or a tanner—let alone defile their dignified lips by requesting the courtesy of five tizzies for two-and-a-kick!—have no hesitation about paying, "Oh, do you mind coppers?" Coppers nowadays comprise bjitb peuce and ha'pence, but they used to mean only, pence. If you wanted ha'pence ynu nsked for browns or mags, or poshes or raps. When you exclaim, in annoyance over some contretemps, that you don't care a rap. that rap, though ypi) do not Unqw it, is simply tho slang word for a, ha'penny in you? grandfather's time.

Foi- the word money itself, in MidVictorian JSngland; actually more than 40 slang' terms were in common use. Few are the survivors. Chink, tin, and dibbs survjvp 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 mean money.