Читать книгу Secret and Urgent - The Story of Codes and Ciphers - Анон - Страница 16

Partly this method is inherent in the Teutonic languages themselves, which drop the precision of the Latin tongues for a tendency toward double meanings and involved images. One of the earliest written works in any northern language, the Prose Edda, is a handy manual of involved periphrastic metaphors for the use of poets.

“What shall we call the air?” says one passage. “The air may be called the ravens’ causeway; or the bearer of storms; or the woof of the winds.”

If figures of speech are constantly used, if they be sufficiently farfetched and involved, or if they have reference to something known only to a few persons, this sort of thing can be developed into a code which can be either written or spoken. It is difficult to state positive facts when dealing with so indefinite a subject, but it would seem that the inspiration for the use of this type of code for diplomatic purposes comes ultimately from the very root of the language growing through medieval thieves’ slang, which was already highly developed in the fourteenth century.

“These Babes of Grace,” says an early Elizabethan instruction for the training of young thieves, “should be taught by a master well verst in the cant language or slang patter, in which they should by all means excel.”

A good deal could be and has been written about these peculiar crooks’ codes, about which it is enough to remark here that they seem to have reached their greatest development in the early part of the nineteenth century. This was the period when a pair of initiates could carry on a whole conversation without an eavesdropper catching any more of it than the prepositions. Both Victor Hugo (Les Misérables) and Eugène Sue (Les Mystères de Paris) give some interesting examples, most of them already out of date when they were distilled into the books; and the famous Vidocq, who was on both sides of the law at different times, quotes a long song by means of which young members of the profession were taught its special language, not very good as a song but intended more as a school exercise:

J’ai fait par comblance

Gironde languepé,

Soiffant picton sans lance,

Pivois non maquillé,

Tirants, passe à la rousse,

Attaches de gratousse,

Cambriot galuché.*

The very facts that such a mnemonic rhyme should be necessary and that Vidocq, who was then a member of the police, could record it, marks the decline of thieves’ argot as a language or code, peculiar to the profession.

The fact is that the argot had obeyed the natural tendency all codes have, that of spreading to cover more and more of the possible exigencies of conversation, and in this process it had become so complicated and difficult as to fall of its own weight. The men for whom it was produced simply could not or would not spend the time and effort necessary to learn it. The early nineteenth century was also the period when police science enjoyed its great and rapid development, with most detective forces coming into being. It was instantly evident to such officers as M. Henry in France and Sir Richard Mayne in England that a man who could hang about criminals’ haunts as one of themselves could learn their argot, and through it learn anything else he wished to know about their operations. Smart detectives therefore made a business of learning argot, and the moment this happened it began to decline.