MONEY SLANG

Grey River Argus, 17 June 1925, Page 6

MONEY SLANG

DEFINITIONS ALMOST FORGOTTEN. Money slang has fallen upon evil days, declares Bassett Digby, in the Daily Mail. I was qui'-tc startled recently when an omnibus conaucoor asked in e if I had six coppers lor a tizzy. A tizzy! Why, 1 had not heard that delightful word since 1 was a boy, when i*t, was quite as often used in London as tanner. "Now ano again, too, 2(J or 30 years ago, a. sixpenny bit used still to be known as a kick or a bender. Two or three decades before H.hat it was a tester or .•> 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 for a dcdlar ,and has been so for a >c-U' while. A 5s piece, in my young days, was still called a cartwheel, but no ionp;er a taske-roon 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-ieg, gen or teviss, stag, cleaner, hog and levy. Ono still says, ‘‘Oh, that pul the !<:■- bosh on it!’’ meaning “ knocking it. on the head,” or “rendered it inipos sible.” Kybosh used to bo- the slaii;.’. word for one-and-sixpcnce, but tl'-'. amusing or dramatic incident ‘tJml once brought it into the limelight—and the English argot—appears to have been quite forgotten. 'Hie sovereign had a lot of slang names with seemingly equal cnances oi survival—a portrait, a yello-w boy. a goldfinch, a canary, a janies, a eou'ter, a foont, a poona. a bean, iv quid, and a thick u’n ; yet only the last two are now used. At the other end of the scale, coppers has now become the most respectable of all modern slang. Bishops and judges who would never ask the bookstall man at Waterloo to change a flimsy, a quid. « bob, or a tanner—let alone defile their dignified lips by requesting the courtesy ot five tizzies for two-and-a-kici< ! —nave no hesitation about sa' i n - ‘•' vou mind coppers?” Coppers nowaday, comprise both pence and ha’pence, but they used to mean only pence. If you wainted ha'pence you asked for browner mags, or poshes or raps. When vou exclaim in annoyance over some contretemps, tliat you don t care a rap, that rap. though you do ih'*. know it, is simply the slang word tor ha’penny in your grandfather’s tim ■. For the word money itself, in M d Victorian England, actually more than 10 slang terms were in common use. Eew are the survivors. Chink, tmand dibbs survive merely in schools, those strongholds of conservatism. Rhino is seldom heard in oldfashioned comic songs. Brass has i treated to the Midlands and th dustriid North. The ready ami needful alone are pretty gencraly understood to mean money.