Language has always served the conspirator - but we too have our own private codes
The first collections of secret language involved the vocabulary or “cant” of criminals in the 16th century. Its very nature meant that documenting it wasn’t easy: one magistrate, intent on exposing these “counterfeit cranks” who sought to hoodwink, or “honeyfuggle”, honest citizens, threatened to whip those who came in front of the bench unless they revealed their code.
, the lexicographer John Camden Hotten wrote that “the new dead-meat market” was “strongest in the way of pure… back slang”. Appropriately, for butchers, “pig-Latin” was the insider’s code: a complicated business involving words spelled backwards as well as extra syllables tagged on – thus “yennom” was “money”, “fil-heath” a thief, and a “hel-bat” a table.
Often of course, the coded lingo is our own, only we fail to realise it’s private at all, in the same way as we always see ourselves as the only ones without an accent. Any group united by a profession, passion, or family will have their own tribal language. When a paramedic blues a patient into hospital with GCS 3 and possible ETOH , or a cyclist soothes an “endo” with some vitamin I , they are each dipping into a standard protocol that is swift, succinct, and pragmatic. It’s also instinctive.
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