The language of criminals

The English language is, as English would have it, an odd duck.  Its nuances are capricious — to the non-native, maliciously so — but its lyricism widely praised. My preoccupation with language possibly stems from my first profession, that of a stage actress (throughout the course of this esteemed career, I made literally hundreds of dollars). Trained to mimic accents from public school Brit to Dixieland Southern belle, I was continually delighted by regionalisms. When I ceased auditioning and commenced scribbling, my fascination with ripe local slang never left me.

When I decided to pen the tale of day one, cop one of the New York City Police Department, I hit the triple cherry jackpot of language freaks: the NYPD’s first Chief, George Washington Matsell, wrote a dictionary called Vocabulum, or The Rogue’s Lexicon in which he recorded ‘the secret language of crime.’ I was instantly fascinated.  Matsell wrote the lexicon as a guide for his less slang-savvy officers, so that they could comprehend the argot used by New York City’s professional rogues and rascals.