In this idiom everything is savage.  The syllables which begin or end the words are harsh and curiously startling.  A woman is a trip or a moll (une largue).  And it is poetical too:  straw is la plume de Beauce, a farmyard feather bed.  The word midnight is paraphrased by twelve leads striking—­it makes one shiver!  Rincer une cambriole is to “screw the shop,” to rifle a room.  What a feeble expression is to go to bed in comparison with “to doss” (piausser, make a new skin).  What picturesque imagery!  Work your dominoes (jouer des dominos) is to eat; how can men eat with the police at their heels?

And this language is always growing; it keeps pace with civilization, and is enriched with some new expression by every fresh invention.  The potato, discovered and introduced by Louis XVI. and Parmentier, was at once dubbed in French slang as the pig’s orange (Orange a Cochons)[the Irish have called them bog oranges].  Banknotes are invented; the “mob” at once call them Flimsies (fafiots garotes, from “Garot,” the name of the cashier whose signature they bear).  Flimsy! (fafiot.) Cannot you hear the rustle of the thin paper?  The thousand franc-note is male flimsy (in French), the five hundred franc-note is the female; and convicts will, you may be sure, find some whimsical name for the hundred and two hundred franc-notes.

In 1790 Guillotin invented, with humane intent, the expeditious machine which solved all the difficulties involved in the problem of capital punishment.  Convicts and prisoners from the hulks forthwith investigated this contrivance, standing as it did on the monarchical borderland of the old system and the frontier of modern legislation; they instantly gave it the name of l’Abbaye de Monte-a-Regret.  They looked at the angle formed by the steel blade, and described its action as repeating (faucher); and when it is remembered that the hulks are called the meadow (le pre), philologists must admire the inventiveness of these horrible vocables, as Charles Nodier would have said.

The high antiquity of this kind of slang is also noteworthy.  A tenth of the words are of old Romanesque origin, another tenth are the old Gaulish French of Rabelais.  Effondrer, to thrash a man, to give him what for; otolondrer, to annoy or to “spur” him; cambrioler, doing anything in a room; aubert, money; Gironde, a beauty (the name of a river of Languedoc); fouillousse, a pocket—­a “cly”—­are all French of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  The word affe, meaning life, is of the highest antiquity.  From affe anything that disturbs life is called affres (a rowing or scolding), hence affreux, anything that troubles life.

About a hundred words are derived from the language of Panurge, a name symbolizing the people, for it is derived from two Greek words signifying All-working.

Science is changing the face of the world by constructing railroads.  In Argot the train is le roulant Vif, the Rattler.