MONEY SLANG.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19505, 13 June 1925, Page 8

MONEY SLANG.

DEFINITION’S ALMOST FOE'rOTTEN. Money slang lias fallen upon evil days, declares Bassett Digby, in the Daily Mail. I was quite startled recently when an omnibus conductor asked mo if I 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. Now and again, too, 20 or 30 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, half a hog, a sow’s baby, a nig, 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 young days, was still called a cartwheel, but no longer a taskeroon of 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 wa a only one of a number of terms, such as twelver and breaky-leg, gen and teviss, stag, deuner, 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, 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 chance® of survival — a portrait, a yellow boy, a goldfinch, a canary, a James, a couter, a fount, 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 the most respectable of all modern money slang. Bishops and judges who would never ask the bookstall man at AVatcrloo 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 saying, "Oh, do you mind coppers?” Coppers nowadays comprise both pence and ha’pence, but they used to mean only pence. If you wanted ha’pence you asked for browns or mags, or poshes or raps. When you exclaim, in annoyance over some contretemps, that yon don’t care a rap, that rap, though you do not know it, is simply the slang word for a ha'penny in your grandfather's time. . Bor the word money itself, m MidViotoriau England, actually more than 40 slang terms were in common use. Few are the survivors. Chink, tin, and dibbs sur-_ vive merely in schools, those strongholds of conservatism. Hhino 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 arc pretty generally understood to mean money.