I’ve tired to find an answer to this, but my google fu seems to be weak today.
Lots of bits of fiction have specific confidence scams presented as if the International Brotherhood of Liars, Cheats and Scammers meet every year and adopt a unified standard of terminology. Books like American Gods, movies like Ocean’s Whatever and so on all have something of a thieves’ cant to discuss certain formulaic con jobs.
My question is, are these simply an invention of fiction, or would a con man from London be able to know exactly what a con man from Florida meant if he talked about wanting to pull off “the pigeon drop”? And if so, how the heck did this sort of thing get created and standardized, are we talking peer-tutoring in prisons, or something?
It wouldn’t start in the criminal world, it’d start more with the papers. For example, Ponzi schemes were named after Charles Ponzi, who made (and swindled) millions from unlucky investors. When he was finally arrested it put the name into the public consciousness.
Some of the names are from the local cons. Some are from the police. It’s easy to say “pigeon drop” after a few “pigeon drops” rather than describing the details each and every time. I’m sure some come from the cons themselves as their various techniques spread from place to place.
Newspapers are also involved trying to sound “in the know” and from there, it may spread around the public at large. For example, who came up with the rather recent term “phishing”?
Well then, back to my earlier question, is this sort of thing standardized? Would a guy from London be able to talk to a guy from California, and using the same lexicon, know exactly what the other guy was talking about?
It also seems a bit different from broad categories such as phishing. The way fiction generally presents it, each con game has its own name. So I suppose that it would be like, instead of just calling it ‘phishing’, every method of phishing had its own name. “Ah, you set up a fraudulent login page to try to get someone’s username and password, that’s the Skittly Wumps.”
It pretty much all comes from The Big Con by David W. Maurer. Khadaji cited the book above, but let me clarify the pedigree of this source. David W. Maurer wasn’t a crime writer or a reporter. He was a linguist. He made contacts in multiple criminal subcultures and he was interested in the relationship between the argot and the professional and social attitudes and knowledge of criminal sub-groups. His information comes from multiple sources, and post-Maurer studies have born out his findings.
The short answer is “yes”. The slightly longer answer: As far back as we are able to tell, “professional” thieves have learned from the tutelage of other thieves. Note that the concept of a Professional Thief as described in Sutherland’s classic study is not undisputed. But much of the skepticism I’ve seen concentrated on particulars rather than the broad outline. The big picture, however, is that in addition to a bunch of clowns who just go around committing thefts, there exist associated but not organized cultures of thieves who share common argot, tutelage and mores that mark them as professionals rather than as just criminals. This is consistent with what Maurer found with con men, and pickpockets just to name two such subcultures.
Maurer’s remarkable study of pickpockets, Whiz Mob, never captured the imaginations of Hollywood writers, but The Big Con was first of all the basis for the movie The Sting (about which there was a lawsuit), and a guy I know who does screenwriting has told me it’s considered required reading for anyone thinking of writing about writing a con film. But as fascinating as it is, it’s a study put out by a professional academic for professional academics. It ends up as a compelling story because of Maurer’s attempt to show the argot in the context of the world that uses it rather than just as a list of vocabulary.
As for whether a guy from London and California would speak the same professional argot, chances are pretty high. American argot has a long history that goes back to England, and the world hasn’t gotten any bigger. What the connection is with criminal subcultures of non-English speaking countries has not, as far as I’ve been able to find, been studied except where certain inter-sections have brought new loanwords into English argot: shiv, from the Rom, say, or Gun (meaning ‘pickpocket’) from the Yiddish ‘gonif’.
Thanks much Johnny.
I’d love to see more elaboration on that, so I guess short of having a staff column written, I may have to pick up the book some time.
Cheers
It’s jargon. Propagation is the same as for any profession: some terms catch on because of timing and utility, some don’t. The ones you hear are the ones that caught on.