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Show AN INVENTED LANGUAGE. One of the peculiar types of humanity, says a London correspondent of the St. Louis Post, that are to be met in this metropolis is the coster, or coster-monger. At the present time the costermongers number nearly fifty thousand in London. Their dress is peculiar, generally light, horsey-looking pantaloons, and short, tightfitting [tight-fitting] jacket, with an indescribable skull cap as a capillary covering, from beneath which their closely cropped hair peeps out, having all the appearance of the "jail crop." A coster invariably smokes and drinks, using for the former a highly discolored, short - very short - clay pipe, while his fabulous appetite leads him to indulge usually in deep draughts of porter; after that he betakes himself to gin. What is a costermonger? Well, a costermonger may be defined as a peripatetic vender of vegetables and fruits. The coster's ? consists usually of a donkey, or as they in their slang term the animal, a "moke," and a nondescript kind of vehicle, half way between a hand truck and a spring wagon. Early in the morning the coster starts off to one of the vegetable and fruit markets of the metropolis and displays his keenness in bargaining for the various vegetables of the season, which he can dispose of to his advantage. The costers are an exclusive set. Like other low tribes, they boast of a language or secret tongue in which they hide their earning, movements, and other private affairs. This coster speech offers no new fact or approach to a fact for the philologist. It is not very remarkable for originality or construction, neither is it spiced with low humor, as other slang, but the costermongers boast that it is known only to themselves, that it is far beyond the Irish, and puzzles the Jews. The main principles of this language is spelling the words backward, or rather pronouncing them rudely backward. Sometimes, for the sake of harmony, an extra syllable is prefixed or annexed, and occasionally the word is given quite a different turn in rendering it backward from what the uninitiated would expect. One costermonger told me that he often gave the end of a word a new turn, just as if he had chorused it out with a fol de rol. Besides, the coster has his own idea of the proper way of speeling words and is not convinced but by an overwhelming show of learning. By the time a coster ???? ordinary word of two or ???? in the proper way, and ???? that an? etymologist could unravel. The word generalize, for instance, is considered to be shilling, only spelled backward. Sometimes slang words are introduced, and even these, when imagined to be tolerably well known, are pronounced backward. A few other words, such as gen, a shilling, and fletch, a half penny, help to confuse the outsider. After a time this back slang, as it is called by the costermongers themselves, seems to be regarded by the rising generation of street sellers as a distinct language and it is. The women use it sparingly, but the girls are generally well acquainted with it. The addition of an "s" generally forms the plural [unreadable] this is another source of complication, for instance, woman in the back slang is namow and namus, but namows is woman, not nemow. The coster, then, in rendering the back slang and turning the word namus into English, would have suman, an extraordinary rendering of woman. Where a word is refractory in submitting to the back rendering, as in the case of pound, letters are made to change position for the sake of harmony. Thus we have dunop?, a pound, instead of dnuop, which nobody could very pleasantly pronounce. This singular back slang has been in use nearly fifty years. It is soon acquired, and is principally used by the costermongers for communicating the secrets of their street tradings, the cost and profit of their goods and for keeping their natural enemies in the dark. "Cool the esclop" (look at the police) is often said among them when one of the constabulary makes his appearance. |