The Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo (1950)
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008Some friends of mine picked up this volume at a used bookstore while on vacation and we had a lot of fun reading through it. It’s “bilingual,” so the first half defines thousands of slang terms and phrases, while the second half advises you on what to call a cemetery (bone-orchard), how to affectionately describe the electric chair (old monkey), and tips on how to resist (stick and slug) arrest (booby-pinch).
When vacation ended, they were kind enough to let me have it (after much whining) because I wanted to post interesting entries online. But was it still in copyright?
Here’s the citation:
Goldin, Hyman E., Frank O’Leary, and Morris Lipsius, eds. Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo, New York: Twayne, 1950.
When I got the book home I looked up Twayne (they’re now owned by Gale/Cengage), and checked their online catalog. It wasn’t in there, but that only means it’s out of print, not out of copyright.
Enter yesterday’s release of U.S. copyright renewals by the Google Books team. Since the dictionary was published between 1923 and 1963, the absence of its appearance in the renewals data strongly suggests that it’s public domain. Not so strongly that I’d just grab the content and re-print it, but enough that I feel comfortable posting some excerpts here now and then.
This time, we’ll start with the “Advisory Board”:
- Bad Bill - arrested on a variety of criminal pursuits
- Big Department - extortionist, police impersonator, jewel thief among the NYC elite
- Bubbles - robber, forger and burglar
- Butch - bank robber, strike breaker, election fraud boss, car thief, pinball and slot-machine operator
- Chink - purse-snatcher, safe-robber and armed holdup man
- Chop Chop - strong-arm terrorist [sic], burglar and robber
- Dippo - pickpocket from age 14 to 39
- Duke - pickpock, con man, carnival thief
- Hal the Rebel - various
- Iggy - robber, carnival thief, con man
- Jo Jo - robber and burglar
- Red Mack - robber and burglar
- Slim - counterfeiter and forger
- Stubs - larcenist, forger and swingler
- The Colonel - con man ["He requests that no further details be made public"]