Page:Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant (1889) by Barrere & Leland.djvu/40

 false characters are concocted, and other plans are matured for robbing employers. These places are chiefly alehouses kept by discarded servants; as the subscriptions are enforced monthly on those in place, the funds are very large, and each academy keeps a staff of well-educated teachers who are well experienced in all the craft of trade and well-appointed agencies are kept up in all the manufacturing towns, acting as references, and to give good written characters. A "gammoning academy" is a reformatory for juvenile criminals.

Acceleration (vagrants). "He died of acceleration," he died of starvation.

Accelerators, the union relieving officers, from their frequent refusal to give food to the dying outcast, whose miserable career of want often ends in death. In such cases the jury invariably accompany their verdict of natural death with the rider " Accelerated through the want of the common necessaries of life."

Accommodated (thieves), sentenced to a term of imprisonment.

Accommodation houses (common), brothels. Their female frequenters are termed "Ladies of accommodating morals," being a trifle more genteel than their sisters, the street prostitutes.

Accommodation shops (city). The officers of certain "Finance Joint Stock Companies" who practise the accommodation swindle on "Lloyd's Bonds," Debentures, Preference, and all other shares.

Accommodators (thieves), chiefly ex-police constables who negotiate a compounding of felonies and other crimes by bribing witnesses and prosecutors.

According to Cocker (common), proper, according to rule, according to the best authority. This phrase refers to a famous writing-master of the name of Cocker, who in the time of Charles II. composed and published an elaborate Treatise on Arithmetic.

This work commences with a "Provena," or Preface, which ends thus: "All the Problems and Propositions are well weighed, pertinent, and clear, and not one of them taken on trust throughout the tract; therefore now

Professor De Morgan writes that the phrase as a popular