*The Big Con

The Big Con - David W. Maurer

I read this book because it's the text that they based The Sting off of, and it was great, full of that talkie newsie humor I love so much, in the same realm as You Can't Win by Jack Black, but with grifters instead of hobos riding the rails. Even as academic as the book strives to be, it's hard to be anything but engaging and colorful with this subject matter.

"The grift has a gentle touch. It takes its toll from the verdant sucker by means of the skilled hand or the sharp wit. In this, it differs from all other forms of crime, and especially from the heavy rackets. It never employs violence to separate the mark from his money. Of all the grifters the confidence man is the aristocrat."

Though much of the book is a history it also intends to be a record of the language of the con-man.

"It is a peculiar fact that every professional criminal group has its own language...It is a mark of professional affiliation, a union card, so to speak, which requires several years to acquire and which is difficult to counterfeit."

"But con men, as contrasted to other professional criminals, have creative imagination. Their proclivity for coining and using argot extends much beyond the technical vocabulary. They like to express all life-situations in argot, to give their sense of humor free play, to result against conventional language."

It anything this is a book that shows language stretching to communicate new actions, clear evidence of the malleability of English.

This got me thinking a little about how strongly representational a new invented word can be. For the most part the con man lingo in this book had been confined in its use to a relatively narrow historical period, and if not that, then fairly specific technical actions and players. In creating language they could divorce the words from their historical weight. Maybe a new word is a counterpoint to the ambiguous word ("love" as in the Thomas Mann quote from The Magic Mountain in my earlier post), no better or worse, but another tool maybe. and perhaps to create that sort of precision the word must be connected to a concrete reality, an action for example, or maybe any precision is fleeting as any action shifts in time from reality to perception and memory. I guess all this is obvious though...

A good book though, cleanse your palate of Proust, or maybe read this and cleanse your palate with Proust, it's fun stuff, a really good glossary to boot.

The cackle-bladder - A method of blowing off recalcitrant or dangerous marks after they have been fleeced. The inside-man shoots the roper with blank cartridges on the pretense that the roper has ruined both the mark and the inside-man. He then hands the mark the gun, while the roper spurts blood on the mark from a rubber bladder he holds in his mouth. The mark flees, thinking he is an accessory to murder. The inside-man keeps in touch with him for some time and sends him to various cities on the pretext of avoiding arrest. (Big Con.) Cf. to cool a mark out.