The Wit’s Guide to Secret Languages

Or, argot to be kidding

Detail from the Comics … Stripped! Chapter of Schott’s Significa

What the hell are they going on about? This may be the only sane response to the world today, and this week a good answer finally landed on my desk. Schott’s Significa: A Miscellany of Secret Languages is the gloriously designed return of Ben Schott, though like most professional returns, he never really went away. Schott is the polymathic Brit who had a publishing sensation in the early aughts with several volumes of Schott’s Miscellany, then went on to revive Jeeves as an undercover spy among many other things. Now he’s compiled an obsessively researched guide to 53 subcultures, each with its own curious conventions. Though we’ve still got a month to go, I’m gonna call it: This is the Get Wit Quick Book of the Year.

“The grain of real knowledge is concealed in a vast deal of esoteric chaff.”
— Alfred Rupert Hall

I don’t hesitate to acknowledge that Schott’s obsessions mirror my own. I’ve gone shallow on internet in-jokes (GWQ No. 94), Harlem vernacular (No. 135), cowboy jargon (No. 176), coded obituaries (No. 195), proverbial wisdom (No. 276), compound pejoratives (No. 300), and mnemonic devices (No. 334). He glosses glossaries on influencers, graffiti writers, fox hunting, dog walkers, and Venetian gondoliers. (Though do you need to specify Venetian? For blinds, sure, but gondoliers? And did you know that a gondolier who falls into the water three times in one day earns the nickname Niagara?)

“Give people a new word, and they think they have a new fact.”
— Willa Cather

Media theorists have said that printed newspapers will likely stick around for quite a while specifically to serve the elderly and the elite. Are reference books the same? I would not say, as Graydon Carter does in a blurb, that this is “the Rosetta Stone for modern times,” because that’s ChatGPT. But I would wholeheartedly agree with Annie Rauwerda, who says that “each chapter is a dinner party next to a delightfully peculiar guest.” It’s less reference than recreation, more like an analog rabbit hole.

“We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words.”
— Niels Bohr

There are two types of shoptalk in this book that deserve to leave the shop and enter the wider world: Those hyperspecific insults that can be levelled against unsuspecting miscreants, and the inspiring terms of art that celebrate and elevate dedication to craft.

“Bring on the empty horses!”
— Michael Curtiz, Hungarian-American film director who issued this order during the filming of The Charge of the Light Brigade. His crew laughed because of course he meant to say riderless horses, causing him to retort:
“You think I know fuck-nothing, when I know fuck-all!”

First, the mean stuff. A spoofulated wine is manipulated for bigger flavour, also described as wearing too much lipstick. A Gertrude is an overly demanding Starbucks customer (Starbies custie), and if male, they’re a Gertdude. Diamond sellers of all ethnicities will use Yiddish slang (mame-loshn, the mother tongue) to distinguish between the schnorer (who begs for deals), the shleper (who pays late), and the shtinker (who never pays). And here’s one for Kaplan: at Sammy’s Roumanian Steak House in Manhattan, staff refer to an old Jewish man with his girlfriend as “Mr. Schwartz and his niece.”

“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language.”
— E. M. Cioran

And now the craftsmanship. When Savile Row tailors criticize someone, they’ll admit their own fallibility by ending the remark with the word “barring.” When a British tabloid wants to call something “acceptably pornographic,” it’s saucy, sizzling, steamy, raunchy or eye-popping. When it’s unacceptable, it’s dirty, filthy, seedy, vile, smutty, or shocking. And one glorious bit of argot from across the service industry is “promoted to customer.” When a server flubs the dub so badly that the only recourse is immediate termination, they’ve earned the one title that makes all the rest make sense. It softens the blow of failure and elevates the profession. One day, I will promote myself to Get Wit Quick reader. But not today!

“Language is not the frosting, it’s the cake.”
— Tom Robbins

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“One of the difficulties in the language is that all our words from loose using have lost their edge”
— Ernest Hemingway

The clichéification of everything is at the root of boredom. New words for familiar things make new things! And as we enter December, we must ask: Now what?

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Americans comprise 48% of this newsletter’s readership, and to you on this day of giving thanks (albeit a month late), here is the next Aphoristick for paid subscribers. Never forget the ice cream!

Get Wit Quick No. 346 is in good spirits (seriously ill) and looking forward to resting comfortably (being unconscious). This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If reading this caused you to drop your marmalade, tap the ❤️ below.