Metaphor is an enigma, wherein the thief who is plotting a stroke, the prisoner who is arranging an escape, take refuge.
No idiom is more metaphorical than slang: devisser le coco (to unscrew the nut), to twist the neck; tortiller (to wriggle), to eat; etre gerbe, to be tried; a rat, a bread thief; il lansquine, it rains, a striking, ancient figure which partly bears its date about it, which assimilates long oblique lines of rain, with the dense and slanting pikes of the lancers, and which compresses into a single word the popular expression: it rains halberds.
Sometimes, in proportion as slang progresses from the first epoch to the second, words pass from the primitive and savage sense to the metaphorical sense.
The devil ceases to be le rabouin, and becomes le boulanger (the baker), who puts the bread into the oven.
This is more witty, but less grand, something like Racine after Corneille, like Euripides after ?schylus.
Certain slang phrases which participate in the two epochs and have at once the barbaric character and the metaphorical character resemble phantasmagories.
Les sorgueuers vont solliciter des gails a la lune—the prowlers are going to steal horses by night,—this passes before the mind like a group of spectres.
One knows not what one sees.
In the third place, the expedient.
Slang lives on the language.
It uses it in accordance with its fancy, it dips into it hap-hazard, and it often confines itself, when occasion arises, to alter it in a gross and summary fashion.
Occasionally, with the ordinary words thus deformed and complicated with words of pure slang, picturesque phrases are formed, in which there can be felt the mixture of the two preceding elements, the direct creation and the metaphor: le cab jaspine, je marronne que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri, the dog is barking, I suspect that the diligence for Paris is passing through the woods.
Le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussiere, la fee est bative, the bourgeois is stupid, the bourgeoise is cunning, the daughter is pretty.
Generally, to throw listeners off the track, slang confines itself to adding to all the words of the language without distinction, an ignoble tail, a termination in aille, in orgue, in iergue, or in uche.
Thus: Vousiergue trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche? Do you think that leg of mutton good?
A phrase addressed by Cartouche to a turnkey in order to find out whether the sum offered for his escape suited him.
The termination in mar has been added recently.
Slang, being the dialect of corruption, quickly becomes corrupted itself.
Besides this, as it is always seeking concealment, as soon as it feels that it is understood, it changes its form.
Contrary to what happens with every other vegetation, every ray of light which falls upon it kills whatever it touches.
Thus slang is in constant process of decomposition and recomposition; an obscure and rapid work which never pauses.
It passes over more ground in ten years than a language in ten centuries.
Thus le larton (bread) becomes le lartif; le gail (horse) becomes le gaye; la fertanche (straw) becomes la fertille; le momignard (brat), le momacque; les fiques (duds), frusques; la chique (the church), l‘egrugeoir; le colabre (neck), le colas.
The devil is at first, gahisto, then le rabouin, then the baker; the priest is a ratichon, then the boar (le sanglier); the dagger is le vingt-deux (twenty-two), then le surin, then le lingre; the police are railles, then roussins, then rousses, then marchands de lacets (dealers in stay-laces), then coquers, then cognes; the executioner is le taule, then Charlot, l’atigeur, then le becquillard.
In the seventeenth century, to fight was “to give each other snuff”; in the nineteenth it is “to chew each other’s throats.”
There have been twenty different phrases between these two extremes.
Cartouche’s talk would have been Hebrew to Lacenaire.
All the words of this language are perpetually engaged in flight like the men who utter them.
Still, from time to time, and in consequence of this very movement, the ancient slang crops up again and becomes new once more.
It has its headquarters where it maintains its sway.
The Temple preserved the slang of the seventeenth century; Bicetre, when it was a prison, preserved the slang of Thunes.
There one could hear the termination in anche of the old Thuneurs.
Boyanches-tu (bois-tu), do you drink?
But perpetual movement remains its law, nevertheless.
If the philosopher succeeds in fixing, for a moment, for purposes of observation, this language which is incessantly evaporating, he falls into doleful and useful meditation.
No study is more efficacious and more fecund in instruction.
There is not a metaphor, not an analogy, in slang, which does not contain a lesson.
Among these men, to beat means to feign; one beats a malady; ruse is their strength.
For them, the idea of the man is not separated from the idea of darkness.
The night is called la sorgue; man, l’orgue.
Man is a derivative of the night.
They have taken up the practice of considering society in the light of an atmosphere which kills them, of a fatal force, and they speak of their liberty as one would speak of his health.
A man under arrest is a sick man; one who is condemned is a dead man.
The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four walls in which he is buried, is a sort of glacial chastity, and he calls the dungeon the castus.
In that funereal place, life outside always presents itself under its most smiling aspect.
The prisoner has irons on his feet; you think, perhaps, that his thought is that it is with the feet that one walks?
No; he is thinking that it is with the feet that one dances; so, when he has succeeded in severing his fetters, his first idea is that now he can dance, and he calls the saw the bastringue (public-house ball).—A name is a centre; profound assimilation.—The ruffian has two heads, one of which reasons out his actions and leads him all his life long, and the other which he has upon his shoulders on the day of his death; he calls the head which counsels him in crime la sorbonne, and the head which expiates it la tronche.—When a man has no longer anything but rags upon his body and vices in his heart, when he has arrived at that double moral and material degradation which the word blackguard characterizes in its two acceptations, he is ripe for crime; he is like a well-whetted knife; he has two cutting edges, his distress and his malice; so slang does not say a blackguard, it says un reguise.—What are the galleys?
A brazier of damnation, a hell.
The convict calls himself a fagot.—And finally, what name do malefactors give to their prison?
The college.