Page:Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant (1889) by Barrere & Leland.djvu/25

 a churl (also an old miser). Its true root is probably in the Anglo-Saxon cneov, cnuf, or cnûvan (also cneav, knave), to bend, yield to, cneovjan (genuflectere). If country boors or peasants be therefore the meaning of gnoffes, it would be in Yiddish keferim. This remarkable dialect is now spoken by some thousands of persons in London, and there are one if not two newspapers published in it. The editor has not only the German-Jewish Chrestomatie of Max Grünbaum, and many books written in Yiddish, but also eleven vocabularies of it, one of which, a MS. of about 3000 words, is by far the most extensive ever compiled. It seems not unlikely that the word poker, as a game of cards, is derived from Yiddish, since in it pochger (from pochgen) means a man who in play conceals the state of his winnings or losses, or hides his hand. This is so eminently characteristic of poker that the resemblance seems to be something more than merely accidental There have always been Jewish cardplayers enough in the United States to have given the word. The most remarkable and desperate game of poker within the writer's knowledge (in which not only a fortune but a life were risked) occurred on board a Mississippi steamer, its hero being a Jew.

Of late years many Anglo-Indian and pidgin-English, or Anglo-Chinese words, have become familiar to the public. For the former our chief authority has been the "Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms," by Col. Henry Yule and the late Arthur Coke Burnell (870 pp. 8vo, London, John Murray, 1886), a copious work, as remarkable for extensive erudition as for sagacity, common-sense, and genial humour. For pidgin-English we have used the only work extant on the subject, viz., "Pidgin-English Ballads, with a Vocabulary," by C. G. Leland (London, Triibner & Co., 1887). This remarkable dialect, owing to the ease with which it is acquired, is now spreading so rapidly all over the East that Sir Richard Burton thinks that it may at no distant date become the lingua-franca of the whole world.

Anything like a distinct history of the development of English slang has hitherto been impossible, owing to the ignorance of most of those who have put themselves forward as its analysts and lexicographers. Samuel Rowlande told the world that gypsy and canting had resolved themselves into one and the same thing, and following his lead, one authority after the other, such as the author of the "Life of Bampfylde Moore Carew," gave us as "Gypsy" vocabularies, works in which hardly a trace of Romany was to be found. In vain did Grellmann, Hoyland, and George Borrow explain that