Take an ordinary English word and say it backwards is the simple basic principle. What is it? Well, everybody - in England at least - knows at least one word of it: yob. Eight years later John Hotten published the first back slang dictionary - A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words.
The first reference to it is in Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor in 1851. It was, in fact, invented by costermongers - possibly even a costermonger - in the 1830s or '40s. Think of it as belonging to twentieth century Londonīutchers, pockets of whom still speak it. Ost people who have even heard of back slang As a result of the feedback, and fresh research, enough new information came to light to warrant rewriting the original VW essay, which follows. An interview on the subject was broadcast on the Word Of Mouth programme, January 8th, 2007. From there it was picked up by BBC Radio 4. It was reprinted in the London Daily Mail, October 25th. An essay on back slang was first written for the Victorian Web in the summer of 2006. At the time I assumed it was a kind of game for children, no longer played, and only later did I discover it was yet another Victorian invention which had lingered on well into the twentiethth century.
It had been widely spoken, she said, among her school friends in the 1920s and '30s in what was then the old borough of St Pancras. In the mid-1960s a middle-aged London lady tried to teach me back slang.
0 kommentar(er)
