Word: cante
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Thus, in 1934, spoke a gunman sentenced to ten years in San Quentin for a shooting. He was talking a venerable underworld cant rooted 400 years deep in Anglo-American history. Britain's Eric Partridge, a lexicographer who has strayed off the fairways of the English language to rummage in the rough (A Dictionary of Slang, Shakespeare's Bawdy), shows in his massive new Dictionary of the Underworld that even in 18th Century London a beak was a magistrate, a college was a prison, and to frisk was to search. But U.S. criminals, no mere copycats, have made...
Roughing It. Criminals originally coined cant (itself a 16th Century underworld verb meaning "to speak") to conceal their plans from eavesdroppers. When cant words pass into popular slang, as they do in the U.S. far more rapidly than Lexicographer Partridge seems to be aware, new mintings are made. Yet "the main body of cant is [more] conservative" than most people realize...