One of the keys to the success of the English language is its flexibility — over time it has proven rather adept at borrowing and stealing from other languages. Of course, as the language adapts and evolves it sheds lesser used words and phrases. For writers this is a double-edged sword — new words enable an author to delve into the contemporary lexicon, but some beautiful old words fall out of favor and daily use.
From the New York Times:
A “slumgullion” is a stew of leftovers, and while the dish has been described as “watery,” the word itself is delectably unusual and juicily descriptive. Alas, you won’t find many people cooking up anything with that name these days, so we’re denied the pleasure of rolling the lovely sounds of slumgullion — let alone its more questionable flavors — on the tongue.
A certain kind of novelist — my kind — looks for opportunities to use such interesting bits of English, and one way to do that is to set a novel in the past. My predilection for stories of squalor and glitter, hysteria and moral complexity, led me most recently to 19th-century New York, which offers interesting parallels to the present-day city, and a dragon’s pile of linguistic loot. It’s an era recent enough that its speech is still comprehensible, but it’s sufficiently long ago to offer up lost words and expressions that reinvigorate language and make the past come alive.
The problem for a writer who has seized upon a story set in the past is how to create a narrative voice that conjures the atmosphere of its historical times, without alienating contemporary readers. It’s a complicated sort of ventriloquism. The worst perils and most intense attractions lie in dictionaries.
The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, guardian of the mother tongue, regularly offers up such treasures as “I’ll misguggle your thrapple! I’ll mashackerel ye to rights!” This dazzling way of saying, “I’ll choke you,” was written by the Scottish playwright James Bridie, in his 1930 play “The Anatomist,” using language first documented a hundred years earlier.
My favorite of all dictionaries is “The Secret Language of Crime” a mother lode of forgotten words. This little volume was published in 1859 by the New York City police chief, George W. Matsell. Mr. Matsell was also the editor of a newspaper, The Police Gazette, which fed New Yorkers a steady diet of murder, rape, abduction and thievery.
He kept notes on the slang of thugs and criminals, and wrote up a guide, so his cops and reporters would know what the bad guys were talking about when they went on like this: “He told Jack as how Bill had flimped a yack, and pinched a swell of a spark-fawney.” In other words, “He told Jack that Bill had hustled a person, and obtained a watch, and also robbed a well-dressed gentleman of a diamond ring.”
According to Mr. Matsell, a “shickster” was a woman. “A shake” was a prostitute. A “shoon” was a lout. And that’s just three words in the “sh” section. His “vocabulum” or “Rogue’s Lexicon” is a mash-up of all the languages that have made American English the vibrant and evolving idiom we know, with words derivative of Irish, Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, German. “Shickster,” for example, is probably how Chief Matsell heard “shiksa,” the Yiddish word for a non-Jewish woman. A “fen” he defines as “a common woman” but in Ireland, a “fen” is a boggy marsh — which gives us a good idea of how an insult seeds itself and germinates on new soil.
But woe to the novelist who succumbs entirely to such specialized vernacular, whether it be a “rogue’s lexicon,” modern street slang or regional dialect. There’s no faster way to alienate a reader than to write, as Matsell did in his lexicon: “Jack speeled to the crib, when he found Johnny Doyle had been pulling down sawney for grub.” (Translation: “Jack fled home and saw that Johnny had stolen some bacon to eat.”) That’s far too much “vocabulum” to wade through, and readers have little patience for such thickets of gobbledygook. Novels overburdened in this way make good projectiles for heaving at the wall.
The best writers — from Charles Frazier in “Cold Mountain” to Junot Diaz in “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” — deploy foreign or arcane words sparingly, to give a realistic flavor of an era or a culture, but they also channel the atmosphere of time and place through the rhythms of speech.
“I am an old gimper,” says Knucks, a character in “The Waterworks,” E.L. Doctorow’s novel of New York in the 1870’s. “I must live by wits alone… and the wits tell me a man mustn’t show himself too inquirous about such dark matters.”
Reading this bit of dialogue, we know we’re not in the present. The word “gimper” is not in common use, but needs no translation. The syntax, too — “a man mustn’t show himself too inquirous” — is stiffer and more formal than a contemporary speaker’s. Certainly Doctorow’s characters talk in a manner true to their times, but his own narrative voice hews to a more contemporary English, and his work never crosses the line into overkill.
For novelists to get a realistic feel for “what it was like” in the past, reading original texts of the period is invaluable. Old newspapers, for example, full of advertisements for medicines like “liver invigorator,” or devices like the “toilet mask,” and headlines screaming about the crimes of a certain “Hag of Misery,” or “The Ghoul of Chatham Street,” help color the imagination with a sense of how the world looked and sounded, what people dreamed of and feared, how they went about their lives while wearing cage crinolines, deerstalker hats and whalebone corsets, before they were turned all sepia-tinted by time.
By perusing period novels, magazines, advice books, letters, medical texts and sermons, contemporary novelists can conjure up a fresh narrative voice not only out of the vocabulary of bygone days, but from the rhythms of speech, the values of an era. A 19th-century “swell” is not going to speak the “secret language of crime,” but will have his own “vocabulum,” one that will reflect a worldview. For example, the Rev. Charles Loring Brace, who founded the Children’s Aid Society in 1853, referred to homeless children as a “happy race of little heathens,” or “flibbertigibbets,” which reflected the 19th-century belief that such children were lighthearted and “merry.”
Read the entire article here.