New Addition: Bohemian Publisher's Dictionary of Argot

Lucien Rigaut, Dictionnaire d'argot moderne (Dictionary of Modern Jargon). 1888. Second Edition, with supplements. Paul Ollendorff: Paris. Hardbound Quarter-Leather Sextidecimo, 407 pp.

This dictionary has already led to the solution of some tricky translation riddles, especially those of stories of the avant-comedian Alphonse Allais. This is scarcely a coincidence, for the book derives precisely from Allais' experimental Bohemian milieu; the publisher, Paul Ollendorf, was Allais' own publisher throughout most of his career. Ollendorf was heavily immersed in the Bohemian avant-garde, and his press specialized in work by writers associated with the Chat Noir Cabaret and the Chat Noir, Fumistes, Hydropathes, Hirsutes, Incohérents, and other groups that partook of both intellectual and urban 'degenerate' culture. It is to precisely such writers (and their future translators) that a dictionary such as this caters.

Though the word argot can be translated as slang, it has a more specific sense in French, and particularly in counter-cultural discourse of the 19th Century. Argot often carries the sense of a system or relatively coordinated lexicon specific to a particular milieu – echoes of the medieval the medieval Thieves' Jargon. The early avant-garde was distinguished by their conscious development of a specifically 'romanticist argot' inspired by both vernacular street jargon and Masonic coded language, which made their conversations nearly incomprehensible to others. Much of this system of vocabulary was adopted by the emerging Bohemian subculture, from thence to wider Parisian street-slang, and appears herein. The dictionary's title indicates that its main focus is not the rich history of Parisian slang reaching back past Villon, but the modern developments since the democratization of culture during the 19th Century – providing a linguistic snapshot of the intersection of hyper-intellectual and lower-class culture during a period of immense social change.