From “Down and Out in Paris and London” (1933) by George Orwell, in which he writes about the street slang of the homeless in London:
About half of these words are in the larger dictionaries. It is interesting to guess at the derivation of some of them, though one or two—for instance, ‘funkum’ and ‘tosheroon’—are beyond guessing. ‘Deaner’ presumably comes from. ‘denier’. ‘Glimmer’ (with the verb ‘to glim’) may have something to do with the old word ‘glim’, meaning a light, or another old word ‘glim’, meaning a glimpse; but it is an instance of the formation of new words, for in its present sense it can hardly be older than motor-cars. ‘Gee’ is a curious word; conceivably it has arisen out of ‘gee’, meaning horse, in the sense of stalking horse. The derivation of ‘screever’ is mysterious. It must come ultimately from scribo, but there has been no similar word in English for the past hundred and fifty years; nor can it have come directly from the French, for pavement artists are unknown in France.
Who could have guessed that twelve years of forced education in the near-dead Irish language would ever bear fruit?
Verb
scríobh
to write
It’s pronounced “skree-of”. It’s not often that one knows something that Orwell doesn’t!
This book might be of interest: “How the Irish invented slang“, by Daniel Cassidy:
“The words and phrases of Ireland are as woven into the clamour (glam mor, great howl, shout and roar) and racket (raic ard, loud melee) of American life as the hot jazz (teas, pron j’as, cd’as, heat, passion, excitement) of New Orleans.”
Mr Cassidy hopes to waft the winds of change in studies of English – but reminds readers that academics have long harboured a snobbish attitude to Irish. HL Mencken, author of The American Language, said the Irish had contributed very few words to Americans. “Perhaps speakeasy, shillelah and smithereens exhaust the list,” Mencken wrote.
Mr Cassidy points out that West used the word “babe”, meaning a physically attractive woman, in 1926 – and that the Irish word ‘bab’ meant a baby, woman or a term of affection. And baloney, meaning nonsense – a word synonymous with America if ever there was one – is derived from the Irish beal onna, meaning foolish talk.
So the idea that the Irish have contributed zilch (word meaning nothing or zero, origin unknown) to American English could be bealonna (baloney after all.” – Margaret Canning