Natural Criminology

An Essay On the Fiddle

JASON DITTON

Professor in Criminology

Sheffield University

PressGang

Glasgow

Jason Ditton

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First published 1996, reprinted 1999. Webbed in 2000.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Ditton, Jason

Natural Criminology: An Essay on the Fiddle

I. Title

ISBN 0 946025 01 1

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Ditton, Jason

Natural Criminology: An Essay on the Fiddle/

Jason Ditton

Includes bibliographical references

1. Criminology 2. History 3. Linguistics

I. Title

Typeset by

Samual Phillips

28 Belmont Street,

Glasgow G20

Printed and Bound in Great Britain by

University of Glasgow Printing Department, Glasgow.

Contents

Acknowledgements iv

1 The Paradox

Triviality Revealed 1

Triviality Researched 4

Triviality Recollected 8

2 Natural Criminology

Semantic Diachronics: A Model 17

Fiddle: A Natural Criminology 32

Implications: A General Approach? 63

A Chronologicall of Dictionaries 67

A Bibliography of Secondary Texts 74

Acknowledgements

My thanks especially to Kathleen Davidson for typing an initial draft from hideous handwriting, and latterly to Julie Prescott for computer generating camera-ready copy.

Chapter One: The Paradox

Triviality Revealed

“Do you feel like a criminal?”

“Don’t be fucking daft!”

“No, but it’s breaking the law, isn’t it?..... So why don’t you feel like a criminal?”

“..... nobody even thinks of it”.

Why not? Why don’t we? A problem for those who try to research (or, indeed, try to stamp-out),[1] those thefts which are called “fiddles” is that such thieves simply refuse to see their thefts as serious ones. This segment from the transcription of a tape-recorded interview I had with a taxi driver in 1976 is representative of the response I have collected from some 51 individuals (from an assortment of occupations)[2] - all of whom agreed to talk to me about their “fiddles”. In fact, I soon learned to make the question: ‘Do you feel like a criminal?’ my final one, as the interviews usually ended shortly afterwards at the request of the respondent. Typical also (yet regrettably only unsystematically recorded), were looks of incredulity, bafflement, and sometimes even anger.[3] In many cases, had I chosen to delete the expletives, I would have had, like ex-President Nixon, almost nothing on record. The taxi-driver, by the way, had just finished telling me how he worked (officially undeclared) nights in a taxi whilst on the dole, and not only regularly overcharged customers, but also systematically neglected to hand in to the boss a portion of the metered ‘take’ for each night’s work. Before he terminated the interview with me (as he did shortly afterwards), he neutralised the psychological consequences of the activities he had just described at length by apologetically citing a few justifications:

“.. there’s a fiddle wherever you go... the boss knows what you’re doing... you know, taxes... I mean, look: they pay you 30p. an hour driving a cab, would you do that? ... what would you fucking do for that wage?... work ten hours, at night, and take home £3? ... you must be fucking joking!...”[4]

I have described a fuller list of justifications, and analysed the ability that their application to theft has in neutralising the psychological consequences of infraction elsewhere.[5] But that analysis was based upon considering the effects of justification within a specific and small work group of baker’s roundsmen. Curiously, no members of my subsequently and eclectically collected ‘sample’ of respondents from a broad range of occupations have been able to suggest any justifications unknown to the roundsmen at the Wellbread Bakery. Now, this might be treated as some general validation of the original classification of justifications. Instead, I prefer to see it as presenting another research problem: if, as the evidence suggests, these justifications are generally known and widely used by the incumbents of a large number of separate and disparate occupations, where can the origins of these justifications be located? In short, where does the idea that some thefts are “trivial” come from?

One possible answer might be that such thefts are, perhaps, statistically or financially insignificant. Possibly, only a trifling proportion of, say, an industrial workforce is involved in “fiddling”. Unfortunately, available studies of “fiddling” amongst employees point to the involvement of a majority of the workforce in each case.[6] Well, perhaps merely a trivial number of occupations allow “fiddling” by their practitioners? Yet again, collected evidence supports the inverse proposition: no occupation appears systematically to disallow some form of “fiddle”.[7] Perhaps, then the notion of triviality stems from the belief that occupational theft is distinguished from other forms of theft on the grounds that its practitioners only steal trivial accounts on each occasion?

Again, unfortunately, although it may commonly be the case that “fiddlers” take small amounts on each separate occasion, it is also commonly the case that those who rob or burgle frequently only loot small amounts.[8] As well as this, sometimes quite large sums can be stolen by employees either on one occasion or on a collated collection of several, and yet the word “fiddle” is nevertheless used to describe the event.[9] Well, finally, perhaps those who “fiddle” only spend a trifling proportion of their time engaged in this activity? Again, though, the converse is true. Those who “fiddle” spend a greater proportion of their lives so doing, than those who rob banks or burgle houses spend robbing banks or burgling houses.[10] The baker’s roundsmen who I studied in some depth regularly stole from different victims up to 200 times each working day.[11]

In sum, there is a common and curious contradiction. And crucially, it is one regular enough to be reflected structurally. Burglary and robbery (both of which are commonly held to be serious forms of theft) generate losses in Britain estimated in 1974 to be around £80 millions per year. “Fiddling”, by blue-collar workers alone, was, in the same year, estimated to have cost over £600 million per year - or, over seven and a half times as much: a curious sort of “triviality”, to say the least![12]

But this simple contradiction becomes a paradox when another relevant structural dimension is considered. If we take policing costs (as some measure of official definitions of seriousness), we find that out of a total policing outlay on theft-control; burglary and robbery (an £80 million a year loss) attract over £450 million a year in control funds, whereas “fiddling” (an estimated £600 million a year loss) only has £50 million spent every year to control it.[13] To put it another way: for every pound robbed or burgled, £5.62 was spent on policing in 1974: for every found “fiddled” (blue-collar workers alone), only £0.12 was spent on policing in the same year. So, where does this idea of “triviality” come from?

Triviality Researched

I have already referred to my interviews with an eclectically collected ‘sample’ of respondents informed about fiddling, and representing a broad range of occupants. These were collected between 1975 and 1977 as part of a project[14] designed to use the methodology of analytic induction in order to build upon the base of a successful production of a specific universal definition of fiddling, generated in an earlier study,[15] to work out a general universal definition of the same phenomena. It was not easy.

A major reason why the project was not only uncompleted, but also, in principle, uncompletable, was a design flaw. I only report this sad tale here because its development is instructive and its conclusion provocative. An epistemological difficulty appeared quickly in this research project. Searching for universals within an unconstructed natural sample is one (successful) thing: looking for universals in an artificially constructed one is quite another. In fact, in the second case, analytic induction becomes enumerative induction. In other words, to quote Znaniecki:

“Induction from this point of view (i.e. enumerative) is an attempt to discover some final truths about a certain class of empirical data, circumscribed in advance, by studying a number of cases belonging to this class.”[16]

Thus, (ibid) “you can find nothing in the definition of a class that you have not already put into it”. Under these circumstances, discovery:

“will be purely illusory, will consist at best in making explicit what was already implicit in the definition... There is not a single sociological generalisation applicable to all the data of a class and only to the data of a class defined in advance that is not implied in this very definition.”[17]

Naturally, such realisations and transformations left me in something of a vacuum. More specifically, I had both a commitment to a field of substantive content (“fiddling”), and a lingering attachment to at least the principle of universality (rather than that of frequency of probability) in explanation - in other words, a dedication to what Turner calls the philosophy of analytic inducation. This is not so much to deny the problems associated with analytic induction’s as to reconsider them.[18]

So, again, what is “fiddling”? What would count as a satisfactory rough universal general definition? One avenue would be to glance at the attempts that others have made to define the concept. David Downes suggests that: “‘Fiddling’ is the adult practice of enlarging income tax-free by theft from one’s work-place.”[19] Gerald Mars uses the word to refer to the hotel “industry’s institutionalisation of pilferage”,[20] and Terence and Pauline Morris tell us that, “fiddling... may be defined as an organised illicit enterprise which attempts to supply some good or service at economic cost which is (a) not officially supplied or supplied in restricted quantities by the prison authorities, or (b) is expressly forbidden by them.”[21] Stuart Henry notes that for him, “fiddling is more appropriately the description of action taken to conceal some form of illicit money-making, from either employer, or customer, and which makes such money-making possible, or at least successful,”[22] and Mitchell has defined a fiddle as, “any benefit which accrues to an employee, with or without the explicit or implicit consent of those in higher authority, which is not shown as an obvious employee benefit in audited accounts.”[23]

It is possible to notice several common features in this clutch of definitions. They are all deductively referential for a start. Within them, “fiddle” is reified as a grammatical formulation - usually a verb, sometimes a noun - of the researcher’s meaning of a type of act spotted by him, and enacted (it would logically follow) by a researched subject "fiddler". Notice that it is a ‘thing’ rather than a ‘word’ which is the subject of the definitions.[24] Further, that each definition is operational and ad hoc: each constructed to handle a different, and temporary research situation. Downes studied working-class communities in London, Mars and Mitchell worked in hotels in the Midlands, the Morrises in Pentonville Prison, and Henry around amateur trading networks in South London. Their applicability outside those contexts of generation and use is uncertain. In fact, the definitions are, perhaps, best viewed as temporary stopping places rather than intellectually definitive graves over which little last stands should be made. It is footling to attempt to extend specific definitions to general status (although this is a common sport): better to abandon them, and start afresh.

On this footing, it must be a ‘word’ rather than a ‘thing’, to which definition attends. And further, aping Bridgman’s axiom: “the true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, and not by what he says about it.”[25] In addition, definition is not so much an operational preliminary as an analytic objective. As J.S. Mill put it, “the meaning of a term actually in use is not an arbitrary quantity to be fixed, but an unknown quantity to be sought.”[26] Now, Robinson was distinguished seven types of possible word definition.[27] On his terms, three definitions I have just cited emerge as principally denotative and perhaps ostensive; whereas the form sought here is preferably analytical and rule-giving. In fact, a “fiddle”, as I shall use the word here, is a non-referential concept. In other words, accepting a definition of it comes not from examining the quality of correspondence between the definition and something in the world, but through noting the grammar of its use in natural language. My general definition can be stated here.

I will use the word “fiddle” for any “theft defined as trivial”,[28] but this definition did not emerge immediately. When I began researching, my initial definition of the “fiddle” (gleaned from the earlier, specific study) didn’t seem to have much relevance in life outside the Wellbread Bakery. In fact, elsewhere, I encountered widespread and irreverent use of the word “fiddle” to describe an apparently diverse and seemingly unclassifiable set of incidents. A quick scan of daily newspapers revealed that the word “fiddle” was used in connection with: cheating in exams, pirating books, forging diplomas, faking phone calls for radio phone-in programmes, faking art works, adding lead weights to fish during a competition, inventing scientific results, fixing Union elections, casting more than one vote each in a House of Commons division, supplying arms to Arab countries in spite of an export restriction, and so on.[29] But even when restricted to theft court cases involving employees as defendants, the grounds for the application of the “fiddle” epithet were still not apparent. A few headlines taken almost at random from my files show that restricting the word “fiddle” to those working in the service industries is unfair: and an unwarranted imposition of a pre-conceived classification.[30]

“GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY BY THE BUFFET CAR FIDDLERS: Fiddles by Stewards on restaurant and buffet cars are costing British Rail thousands of pounds a year”

“FIDDLE ON THE CREDIT CARDS: Motorists were urged yesterday to be on their guard for ‘Forecourt Fiddlers’ when paying for their petrol by Credit card.”

“DOOR OPEN TO FIDDLES TRIBUNAL TOLD”

“£600 BEEF OVER A BULL FIDDLE”

“COUNCILLOR FIDDLES HIS EXPENSES”

“BETS SHOP FIDDLERS LOSE THEIR GAMBLE: Staff at a betting shop planned to make a killing”.

“SEVEN RAN B.R. DINER FIDDLE: The £66,000 dining-car “fiddle” operated by seven British Rail Stewards”

“‘FIDDLING’ DIRECTOR LOSES APPEAL”

“SCHOOLS HIT BY COAL FIDDLE: Two men operated a coal delivery racket and cheated schools out of winter fuel”.

“£200,000 MADE IN FORD SCRAP FIDDLE”

“£46 ‘FIDDLE’ RUINS CAREER OF POLICE CHIEF”

“EX-MAYOR FINED FOR FIDDLE.... XXX XXX obtained £413 of rate-payers money by fiddling loss-of-earnings claims”

“GREAT TYNE FERRY FIDDLE: The revenue from fares rocketed by 25% when police stamped out the racket”

“HOOVER ‘IN F.B.I. FUND FIDDLE'”

“SOFTLY, SOFTLY DRINKS FIDDLE IS UNCOVERED: Wholesale systematic thefts from a North Brewery clocked up massive stock losses over a two-year period”

“PAY OUT GIRL RANG UP £1,6000 FIDDLE”

“DOLE CRITIC WAS BIGGEST FIDDLER OF ALL”

“STOREMAN IN FIDDLE TO BOLSTER WAGES” [31]

Untidy reality was putting up a terrific resistance to the pleasingly neat (albeit theoretically “rough”) definition that I had prepared for it. What did usages of the word “fiddle” have in common.

Triviality Recollected

To ask what usages of a word have “in common”, is ultimately to ask what the word means. What is not clear, however, is that given the two elements of the proposed definition (“trivial” and “theft”), and that that concern rests at the moment with an analytic form of definition, which element is crucial? Consider an Aristotelian version. Here, the question emerges as: should be view the summum genus as theft, and the species as “fiddle” (with the word “fiddle” being thus defined in terms of the genus proximum, or generic, of theft; with the differential specifica of being defined as trivial)? Or, the other way round, with the summum genus as triviality, one species of which also being also theft?

A solution is offered by the way that semiotics has refashioned J.S. Mill’s terms, connotation and denotation. For Mill, the connotation of a word referred to the criteria by which any referent is judged in terms of its possible membership of the class in question, and the denotation merely to the sum of the true referents. Since then, connotation (close to definition for Mill) is now more usually held to imply association.[32] This latter elision allows the resolution of a peculiar and particular dilemma: that of how substantive “triviality” may be a formally essential and definitive element,[33] with the denotation of theft now one of a larger class (which also, for example, includes violins) which may acceptably be called “fiddles”. This latter formulation is ultimately (as the second part of this book will demonstrate) inductively true,[34] and is merely brought forward - rather than asserted here. Inevitably, an induced historiography of meaning is preferred to an imposed hierarchy. Of the latter, Volosinov has unequivocally asserted:

“Such discriminations as those between a word’s usual and occasional meanings, between its central and lateral meanings, between its denotation and connotation etc., are fundamentally unsatisfactory. The basic tendency underlying all such discriminations - the tendency to ascribe greater value to the central, usual aspect of meaning, presupposing that that aspect really does exist and is stable - is completely fallacious.”[35]

The “tendency” to which Volosinov refers, is certainly to be avoided; yet the distinction from which it does not necessarily grow is itself an essential tool. I will use the denotation/connotation distinction (sometimes as the referent/meaning pair), without implying that either is necessarily more basic, real, essential, usual, central or stable than the other. In fact, as will later be shown for the word “fiddle”, taken diachronically, the connotation of triviality threads more than one stage of the word’s life, and yet what is denoted for any synchronic view may certainly be more forceful upon any separable occasion, but changes regularly, and only in a final phase refers to theft.

Another dimension of definition should be addressed here (definitional content criteria being easily arranged)[36]: that of definitional form. Is the outcome a nominal definition, defined by Eaton, as “the declaration of intention to use a certain word or phrase as a substitute for another word or phrase”?[37] or a real one, defined by Bierstedt as “a proposition announcing the conventional intention of a concept”?[38]

Fortunately, in a sense, there is not an authentic choice. Sociological definitions are inevitably nominal, reflecting, as they do, what Gallie refers to as the “essential contestability” of social concepts.[39] The first use that we may make here of the concept of contestability may be termed the egalitarian notion. Gallie tells us:

“We find groups of people disagreeing about the proper use of the concepts.... When we examine the different uses of these terms and the characteristic arguments in which they figure we soon see that there is no one use... which can be set up as its generally accepted and therefore correct or standard use.”[40]

Since real definitions depend upon demonstrating the “conventional intention” of the concept in question, they will be inappropriate when that intention is contested. Thus, circumventing the egalitarian notion of contestability is at least empirically unlikely. With the second and stronger use of the concept of contestability (termed here the reactive notion), circumvention is positively impossible. This is because every concept in practice involves some version of itself. So, the problem of defining “fiddling” is complicated (endlessly) by the fact that every “fiddler” “fiddles” in terms of his definition of what constitutes “fiddling”. MacIntyre captures with well with the words:

“Such disagreements are of course expressed quite as much in behaviour as in utterance. Their embodiment in practice is not secondary to, nor expressed independently from, their articulation at the level of utterance, even at the level of theory.”[41]

Norman Care adds a convenient rider:

“It does not follow that the concepts which are, according to the thesis in question, essentially contestable for the social scientist are also essentially contestable for participants in such particulars.”[42]

Terms which remain inevitably open for analysts, in other words, are easily closed by practitioners. However, even most analysts ignore Znaniecki’s warning (“the way of preserving the proper plasticity of the popular terms used is not to define them at all, but to rely on the context for any shades of meaning one wishes to convey”),[43] forget that sociological definitions are inevitably nominal, and whilst they start with a definition which is genuinely operational, its epistemological status usually slides, by default, into putative “realness”.

Another problem noticeable here is a contradiction between methodology and epistemology. Analytic induction generates universalistic statements (which are real), and yet the above philosophical consideration demands nominal ones. Let me expand: Analytic induction produces “essential” characteristics (as Robinson puts it, “analytic induction leads to certainty without benefit of representative cases because it isolates the “essential” characters which determine the phenomenon under study,”)[44] and essentialist statements are primarily realist ones. Popper puts it like this. Essentialism amounts to:

“the assertion that universal objects, for instance, whiteness, ‘really’ exist, over and above single things and sets or groups of single things... [essentialists] are inclined to formulate scientific questions in such terms as ‘what is matter?’ or ‘what is force?’ or ‘what is justice?’ [or, ‘what is fiddling?’] and they believe that a penetrating answer to such questions, revealing the real or essential meaning of these terms and thereby the real or true nature of the essences denoted by them is at least a necessary prerequisite of scientific research, if not its main task.”[45]

Yet, there is a sense in which the essentialist statements produced by analytic induction have (at any rate, in this particular case) no ontological claims. The definition of fiddle that I have offered (“a theft defined as trivial”) must be nominal in a formal sense. A theft which is trivial would be a real definition (whatever its initial pretensions to nominalism or operationalism). The words “defined as” perform as a nominally regressive phrase, transforming the definition back into nominalism.

This, I think, establishes the formal credentials of the definition of fiddling as “thefts defined as trivial”.[46] An act is deviant (a theft is trivial) if others define it so.[47]

Before producing and justifying these grounds for the definition of triviality, there is a final outstanding difficulty to be dealt with: the “real” pretensions of nominal definitions. The problem is, as Bierstedt puts it, a “human tendency to transform nominal definitions into real ones,”[48] something, if you recall, I mentioned as part of the criticism of the definitions of the word “fiddle” offered by others. I might as well declare here that I am interested in the realist’s “conventional intention” of the concept “fiddle”, but not in the “real” sense that would produce statements citing the probabilistic frequency of acceptance of that definition on the population at large. Instead, my position is in line with MacIntyre’s:

“there is not a finite and determinate set of necessary and sufficient conditions which determine the application of a concept (Waismann) or a word (Putnain); but... in normal circumstances and in standard conditions we can behave as if there were such a finite and determinate set.”[49]

I wish to continue, then, “as if” I could answer the ultimately existentialist question (according to Popper) of what “fiddling” really means - that being a convenient preliminary “fiction”[50] a propos the engagement with data.

At root, then, this is now an etymological paradox. The correct way to formulate this paradox is to suggest that triviality is sometimes a meaning for theft. This may be turned round. Theft, which is a serious, mala in se offence, is on some occasions defined as trivial - in the same way as many mala prohibita offences are.[51] This paradox is further reflected as the simultaneous (and thus impossible) membership of two mutually exclusive common criminological categories. Those who are deemed to have “fiddles” are not quite (or necessarily) white-collar criminals - those who peculations are usually defined to be trivial; and yet neither are they fully stockinged-faced, nor treated as seriously as burglars or robbers.

How may this paradox be unravelled - even now it has been refashioned as an etymological one? One method of doing so is incidentally also a method of heeding the clarion call to historical arms coming from some new criminologists:

“despite the fact that we have continually stressed the need for a sense of history in the kinds of explanations offered out of crime (a sense of history that is almost totally absent in existing criminological theory), we have not had the space here to enter into historical explanations. It is obvious that our endeavours need now to be supplemented with a concrete application of the formal model, resulting from the immanent critique of existing thinkers, to empirical cases”[52]

The procedural difficulty with this appeal is that it provides no structure for its answer (and notice that no model is provided in the text that houses the call). Precisely how does one satisfy the “need for a sense of history”? One especially acute difficulty is that there is an apparently unresolvable hiatus between the archaeological deduction of the motives of those long dead (irrespective of whether or not they were the Whigs or the Hunted; those who constructed Albion’s Fatal Tree, or those who swung from it), and the contemporary phenomenological induction of the motives of those still living - particularly given the acknowledged productivity of the latter (and presumably, yet unacknowledgedly, of the former) to dissemble.[53]

The resource for discovering the motives of those who are living is their everyday conversation, or “natural language”: yet we seem debarred from exhuming the “natural” languages of the dead. This is regularly admitted, indeed, it has presumably provided the recent rationale for working from dictate and dogma rather than from the presumably extinct data and document. But is it true?

One immensely available yet conveniently ignored repository of “natural” meanings and common definitions is the dictionary. As the late Donald Ball has put it:

“dictionaries, as collections of words and their definitions, are compilations of natural sociologies.... furthermore, such definitions are constructed by lexicographers out of the stuff of social reality rather than imposed as a sociological version.”[54]

Inevitably, dictionaries (and their compilers and readers) are part of a social world whose influence they not only record, but ultimately contribute to. And yet such texts have a simple advantage over alternative historical data sources such as dramatic text, personal memorabilia, official record or published tract: the axes that dictionaries grind are those of sharpness, clarification, collation and propagation,[55] and not those of propagandisation, politicisation, proselytisation, policy-formation or pleasure.

In short, dictionaries espouse dissemination rather than dissimulation: they corner words and their meanings, rather than coin them. They contain, as Leo Spitzer delightfully has claimed, the “petrified sediment” of previous ages and their meanings.[56] For example, one defines itself as providing amongst other things, the “vocabulary in use”:[57] the current lexicon, together with their meanings. The important thing about the latter is that they are organised around the separable “conventional intention” of words, rather than upon their utility in falsifying or validating a particular imposed scheme of interpretation. In what sense is this “natural”? Edward Rose considers that we should treat the English language as:

“a body of social facts, as a registry of a vast assay of collective representations of sorts of persons, of actions, and of other social features that are indicated in the common meanings of English words. These notions of society and of persons in society are sociological comprehensions manifest to people themselves involved in society. Such understandings can be called natural if they freely occur without deliberate professional direction. Whether such collections can properly be called “sociologies” depends upon the discovery in them of ordered schemes of awareness in society... Certain stabilities and regularities in modes of recognition of society are revealed over the cause of many centuries by patterns in the development of meanings of English words. These stabilities are the principle indicators [...] of an ordered scheme of sociological awareness naturally expressed through the English language.”[58]

Now, given that one aspect of this enterprise (looking up words in dictionaries) hardly needs extensive programmatic specification, it only remains to elucidate the epistemological like between this form of criminology, and the other - contemporary phenomenological ethnography - with which I have suggested it is compatible and with which, at one time at least, it was closely allied.[59] We may first note that both contemporary fieldword,[60] and etymological exhumation,[61] have been called “natural sociology”. Division of the spoils between the two approaches (which together constitute a full natural criminology) rests upon a distinction which Volosinov has forged between theme and meaning in terms of the “linguistic significance” of any utterance.

The former refers to the “upper, actual limit of linguistic significance, in essence, only theme means something definite,”[62] whereas the latter refers to the “lower limit” of linguistic significance. Meaning, in essence, means nothing; it only possesses potentiality - the possibility of having a meaning within a concrete theme.”[63] This distinction may be held to represent, respectively, that believed to separate contemporary fieldwork from etymological exhumation. Volosinov’s distinction is useful because it illuminates the existence of (and a possible solution to) a core issue: that dictionary definitions are in principle not indexical ones. Indeed, a general problem besetting attempts to arrange a marriage between criminology and history is the unrecollectability of past indexicality.[64] Volosinov refers to theme as this precise potential of an utterance:

“The theme of an utterance is itself individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance itself is individual and unreproducible. The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance. The utterance, “What time is it?” has a different meaning each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a different theme, depending upon the concrete historical situation (“historical” here in microscopic dimensions) during which it is enunciated and of which, in essence, it is a part.

It follows, then, that the theme of an utterance is determined not only by the linguistic forms that comprise it - words, morphological and syntactic structures, sounds, and intonation - but also by extraverbal factors of the situation. Should we miss these situational factors, we would be as little able to understand an utterance as if we were to miss its more important words....”[65]

Yet Volosinov sets up meaning precisely to avoid these difficulties. He continues:

“Together with theme or, rather, within the theme, there is also the meaning that belongs to an utterance. By meaning, as distinguished from theme, we understand all those aspects of the utterance that are reproducible and self identical in all instances of repetition.

Of course, these aspects are abstract: they have no concrete, autonomous existence in an artificially isolated form, but, at the same time, they do constitute an essential and inseparable part of the utterance. The theme of an utterance is, in essence, on the contrary does break down into a set of meanings belonging to each of the various linguistic elements of which the utterance consists.”[66]

The upshot of presenting this distinction is that the relationship between criminology and history is at most a merger: never a full marriage. The link must be forged with meaning (“the technical apparatus for the implementation of theme”,[67] and notice too that the proposed strategy for so doing concentrates upon the vehicles of words rather than upon the utterances in which they are garaged. Given this specificity of attention, an early snide comment on thematic tracing may be apposite. It was made by Horne Tooke:

“Interpreters, who seek the meaning of a word singly from the passages in which it is found usually connect it with the meaning of some other word or words in the sentence. A regard to the individual etymology of the word would save them from this error, and conduct them to the intrinsic meaning of the word, and the cause of its application.”[68]

We can revisit Volosinov to discover a procedure for plotting meaning. Conveniently, it finally coincides with a recommendation already made. He indicates that:

“Investigation of the meaning of one or another linguistic element can proceed, in terms of our definition, in one or two directions: either in the direction of the upper limit, toward theme, in which case it would be investigation of the contextual meaning of a given word within the conditions of a concrete utterance; or investigation can aim toward the lower limit, the limit of meaning, in which case it would be investigation of the meaning of a word in the system of language or, in other words, investigation of a dictionary word.”[69]

Armed with this logical framework (and recalling the proposed definition derived from the scrutiny of a “natural” sample of current of current newspaper usages of the word “fiddle”; that is, as “a theft defined as trivial”), the element of triviality may be seen as the meaning of historical and current uses of the word. Remember, there, that triviality, yet not necessarily theft, was a feature of the newspaper uses of the word “fiddle” which did not report theft court cases. The opening paradox now analytically refashioned as an historical etymological one,[70] where does the meaning of triviality, and its current (and paradoxical) coupling with the theft referent come from?

Chapter Two: Natural Criminology

“Every word has its own history”[71]

Semantic Diachronics: A Model

Let me run a short refresher course on my topic, before temporarily abandoning its substantive for its analytic side. I opened with a paradox. Some thefts of a quite serious nature are felt, for no apparent reason, to be trivial. Defined as trivial, in other words. Definition itself thus became part of the issue, and was explored along conventionally classic Aristotelian avenues. The first section edged towards the proposition that a “fiddle” is “a theft defined as trivial”. But to leave it there would be more tautology.

Yet a problem emerges when the procedure for flying off at an adequate epistemological tangent (an induced historiography) is coupled with the proposed reformulation of the paradox as an etymological one. A dictionary search (in the footsteps of Edward Rose) was proposed (and will be undertaken shortly) as a bridge, and some preliminary authority for that project was discerned in the work of Volosinov, on the basis of his special utilisation of the semiotic approach (over the Aristotelian) in decomposing the semantic structure of history.

Yet at one level, what is still absent is precisely a general epistemology for linking history with criminology. To be exact, what must be designed and elaborated, before any attempt at practical application (in this instance, to the word “fiddle”) is a model for undertaking semantic diachronics - and that, too, even more shortly. For, hors d’oeuvre, thought, a brief linguistically technical version of the word, and the paradox.

Generally, “fiddle”, as a word, is lexical rather than actual,[72] contingent rather than tied,[73] and is specialised rather than referential.[74] The currently polychrestic and polysemic quality[75] of the word fiddle is another way of putting this, although it also allows a relevant distinction to emerge. “Fiddle” is historically ambiguous (it may be used to refer to one or two or more referents),[76] currently equivocal (the referents are interchangeable), and finally, paradoxical (at least two of the referents contradict each other). But what procedure should be employed to explore these problems?

I have, thus far, cited the simple dictionary as the astounding breakthrough in the attempt to link criminology and history. Nothing is that simple. Consider some early, yet apt, remarks:

“It is this continual incorporation of circumstances originally accidental, into the permanent signification of words, which is the cause that there are so few exact synonyms. It is this also which renders the dictionary meaning of a word, by universal remark so imperfect an exponent of its real meaning. The dictionary meaning is marked out in a broad, blunt way, and probably includes all that was originally necessary for the correct employment of the term; but in process of time so many collateral associations adhere to words, that whoever should attempt to use them with no other guide than the dictionary, would confound a thousand nice distinctions and subtle shades of meaning which dictionaries take no account of;... The history of a word, by showing the causes which determined its use, is in these cases a better guide to its employment than any definition; for definitions can only show its meaning at the particular time, or at most the series of its successive meanings, but its history may show the law by which the succession produced.”[77]

So some qualification is needed, and around the key phrase in the above quotation - “no other guide than the dictionary”. Ironically (since it was he who switched linguistics almost entirely from diachronics into synchronics),[78] it was de Saussuse who outlined a brief diachronic programme. “Diachronic linguistics”, he suggested, “requires both a prospective and a retrospective method”. He continued:

“The prospective method, which corresponds to the actual cause of events, is the one we must use in developing any point concerning the history of a language or of languages. It consists simply of examining the available documents.”[79]

Simple, yet impossible. It is practically tortuous to examine all available documents, even if it were theoretically feasible to discover them. Whatever the degree of document digging, there would always be gaps. With this in mind, de Saussue adds that the diachronic linguist:

“must then discard the prospective method - direct evidence - and work in the opposite direction, using the retrospective method to retrace time. This means choosing a particular period and trying to determine, not how a form developed, but the oldest form that could have given it birth.

The prospective method amounts to simple narration, and is based entirely on textual criticisms, but the retrospective viewpoint requires a reconstructive method supported by comparison.”

Yet de Saussuse was not primarily conceived with semantics,[80] and his proposals need slight reformulation for that reason. Firstly, a dictionary is a good entré to prospective work (for reasons noted above), yet cannot be the whole of that work. (Good) dictionaries not only offer a current natural criminology of a word, but also some outdated ones; and further, dated documentary sources of new word coinings or meaning creations, and thus good start to, and a sound framework for, but not the total of, documentary search.[81]

Secondly, several (good) current dictionaries, especially if consulted in harness with many old (and possibly indifferent) ones, can provide the material for a double comparison, and thus the basis for some reconstruction.[82] Thirdly, this is not a recommendation for skating through ordinary dictionaries in search of a quarkish “proper meaning”; but rather for a serious and systematic pilgrimage which goes beyond ordinary dictionaries:

“to the historical dictionaries, and to essays in historical and contemporary semantics, [where] we are quite beyond the range of the ‘proper meaning’. We find a history and a complexity of meanings; conscious changes, or consciously different uses; innovation, obsolescence, specialisation, extension, overlap, transfer; of changes which are masked by a nominal continuity so that words which seem to have been there for centuries, with continuous general meanings, have come in fact to express radically different or radically variable, yet sometimes hardly noticed, meanings and implications of meaning.”[83]

And the first step of this (as in any other) pilgrimage is an exciting one. Raymond Williams, who has widely yet not deeply advertised the method advocated here, recalls thus his first lexicographic experience with culture:

“one day in the basement of the Public Library at Seaford, where we had gone to live, I looked up culture, almost casually, in one of the thirteen volumes of what we now usually call the OED: the Oxford New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. It was like a shock of recognition. The changes of sense I had been trying to understand had begun in English, it seemed, in the early nineteenth century. The connections I had sensed with class and art, with industry and democracy, took on, in the language, not only an intellectual but an historical shape.”[84]

Yet any serious dictionary digger will immediately unearth a chaotic and varied set of entries beside a chosen word. This is inevitably compounded if a series of entries from a pile of dictionaries is collated and compared. There is, of course, some correspondence and overlap; but this more frequently indicates the successive plagiarism which dictionaries epitomise, rather than constitute any form of proof of the validity of the entry in question. Further, the incestuous basis of compilation more regularly repeats common mistakes than eradicates them; and divergence of entry as often illuminates idiosyncratic error as it does singular accuracy. But however much of a problem this might be with an assembled pile of roughly synchronically published dictionaries, it is more of an asset if that pile is of dictionaries published periodically during previous centuries. For it is here that dictionaries reflect language itself, which as Sapir observed:

“moves down time in a current of its own making. It has drift... The drift of a language is constituted by the unconscious selection on the part of its speakers of those individual variations that are cumulative in some special direction. This direction may be inferred, in the main, from the past history of the language. In the long run any new feature of the drift becomes part and parcel of the common, accepted speech, but for a time it may exist as a mere tendency in the speech of a few, perhaps of a despised few... Nothing is perfectly static. Every word, every grammatical element, every sound and accent is a slowly changing configuration, moulded by the invisible and impersonal drift that is the life of language.”[85]

From this, and in cahoots with de Saussure’s recommended reconstruction model, it must be understood that semantic historical recovery of natural sense is inevitably a strategic compromise between, on the one hand, the reality of the ceaseless (and, sadly, mostly unentered) ebb and flow of both word-meaning and word-use; and, on the other, the necessity for an exposition of any word’s “life” which has attended both to the demands of clarity and lucidity, and to those of contemporary relevance and current utility.[86]

In short Sapir’s “drift” must be broken into crucially exemplary and illustrative stages to operate de Saussure’s retrospective method. This will introduce somewhat artificial milestones in any word’s historic passage, which in addition may be placed at points which alternative or subsequent documentary analysis may pre-date or post-date. Yet, artificial does not mean arbitrary; and the former is only even mildly misleading if the slight artificiality goes unrecognised.

From this viewpoint, the “life” of any word may be decomposed into two logically distinct but empirically overlapping dimensions. The semantic (i.e. changes in its meaning), and the cultural (i.e. changes in its use). The semantic range of a word refers to the range of applicability of a word to possible referents. The cultural range refers to the range of utilisation of a word by possible speakers.

Broadly speaking, any change in semantic range may be held to be either a specialisation (a decrease in the range of applicability of a word to possible referents), or a generalisation, which is the natural opposite process, and implies an increase in the range of applicability of a word to possible referents. Somewhat comparably, any change in cultural range may be held to be either a particularisation at one extreme (a point where the utilisation of a given word to apply to a selected referent is accepted only by a sub-set of a language community), or a universalisation at the other. A universalisation may be said to occur when the whole of a given language community uses a word to apply to a selected referent.

Taking the semantic dimension first, one or two examples may help to clarify the nature of the processes which contribute to the ebb and flow within the natural semantic history of any word. Generalisation, a term here taken from Mill,[87] refers not only to an increase in the range of applicability of a word to possible referents but also to a concomitant decrease in the extent of the logical content of that word. This latter feature only applies synchronically. From the diachronic perspective, an increase in one is an increase in the other. The process of generalisation is one which might explain features of the life of the word “knave”, which at one time meant “servant boy”, but which eventually came to be used to refer to the bigger category of “servant”.

The process involved is the subtraction of referent-characteristic “boy” as a necessary part of the referent.[88] For other words, as Sturtevant indicates, generalisation may be achieved by reversing the mechanics of the process. For example, “leg”, originally specifically reserved for the human anatomy, became later applied to tables and chairs. Here, instead of the range of applicability being increased by decreasing the logical content (subtracting the “boy” characteristic of the referent from the word “knave”), the logical content is decreased by increasing the range of applicability (adding the “table” characteristic of the referent to the word “leg”). Either way, the change is created by concentration upon a characteristic of the referent. As Stern notes,[89] this may be either because of the generality of that characteristic, or because of its essentiality or typicality.

It might be noted in passing that referent characteristics may be exchanged (“girl” might have been substituted for “boy” in the example just cited) without changing either the extent of the word’s logical content, or the span of its synchronic range of applicability (there being just about as many girls as boys). Yet this process of alteration is best viewed as a cultural rather than as a semantic matter. For example, the word “weed” may be used to refer to out-of-place (horticultural) plants, yet, alternatively, also for out-of-place (cultural) “plants”. Sutherland notices how non-subcultural persons may be referred to as “weeds in the garden” by underworld members should the former intrude upon the latter.[90]

The opposite of generalisation is specialisation.[91] Here an increase in the extent of logical content decreases the range of applicability of the word in question. For example, according to Stern,[92] a “deer” was originally “any fourfooted animal that was the object of chase”. A word later restricted to any ruminant quadruped with deciduous branching horns.[93]

But, how is this done? (The why issue is not addressed here). By what methods does semantic range move? Mill’s version is adequate as a general level. He said:

“A name is not imposed at once and by previous purpose upon a class of objects, but is first applied to one thing, and then extended by a series of transitions to another and another. By this process ..... a name not infrequently passes by successive links of resemblance from one object to another, until it becomes applied to things having nothing in common with the first things to which the name was given.”[94]

Yet, what sorts of “transitions”? Are there different types of “links of resemblance”? (And is this what has happened to the word “fiddle”?) Gustav Stern has provided the most extensive typology of what he refers to as “classes of sense change”. Other taxonomies and classifications have been provided by others, some before Stern,[95] and some more recent ones which have tried to combine the various alternative models.[96] At a general level, Stern’s model is certainly questionable here and there.[97] Nevertheless, it is adequate for purposes envisaged here, and a discussion his classes follows. Suggested general classification systems already outnumber the few detailed etymologies which have been produced, and for which a classification might be required. I do not intend to add to the classificatory burden in this book.[98]

Each class of sense-change will have a part to play in the etymological examination of the word “fiddle”, which is to be undertaken shortly. Analogy refers to those new meanings which originate outside a particular word, but which, often for reasons of morphological or phonological similarity, later shift into its semantic range. Various types can be distinguished. Analogy may have a combinative base,[99] a correlative base,[100] or one based on phonetic similarity.[101]

Shortening implies the process of either clipping (the shortening of a word)[102] or omission (the dropping of whole words),[103] leaving in each case a “stump” or “headword”, which may perform the same, or even a larger referential task, especially if it has some phonetic or other similarity with an existing word. Nomination is simply the intentional side of naming. This could be the coining of a new word,[104] non-figurative intentional transfer,[105] or transfers based on the use of figures of speech - for example, on metaphor, euphemism or irony.[106] Transfer[107] is only distinct from the first form of naming insofar as here the referential shift is as Stern puts it:

“unintentional use of a word to denote another referent than the usual one, owing to some similarity between the two referents.”[108]

These shifts in verbal and referential relations are not complex in structure.[109] There are more sophisticated taxonomies of rhetoric to be found elsewhere,[110] but the limited scope of the application of the classes here hardly warrants deeper consideration. The first four classes of sense change may be viewed as bases for sense change when the latter is viewed (as it is here) from the subject’s point of view: Criminology’s investment in the connection with history is phenomenological, and thus it is the third category of sense change, the shift of the subjective relation, which is of importance. Thus, sense-change can only emerge after the operation of one of the final two classes of change.

Aside from the criteria of intentionality and similarity (which, although unimportant here, collectively distinguish all other classes of sense-change from both permutation and adequation), the latter two classes may also be separated on the basis of their relationship to the characteristics, of the referents to which they are held to refer. Whereas the first four classes of shift were based upon, or mediated by points of similarity in two different referents, both permutations and adequation are shifts between characteristics of one referent. Permutation implies a shift in the subjective apprehension of one aspect of a phase-referent to another, generating a meaning for a word which was previously outside its range.[111] Stern comments that:

“a shift in the point of view concerning a detail of a total situation, a detail of a phrase referent, the same word being retained to denote it... A shift in the apprehension of a complex referent, denoted by a phrase, will in most cases lead only to another word being employed... But in certain circumstances, as indicated above, the new apprehension of the word referent will, by repeated use, become associated to the word expressing the earlier apprehension of it, and will itself finally become a meaning of that name.”[112]

Adequation again implies a shift in one characteristic of a referent, but this time of a word-referent. Further, whereas permutation involved a shift to a meaning outside the original referential range (and thus a change of referent); adequation involves a shift of attention to an aspect within the original referential range (and, accordingly, only a change of meaning). As Stern puts it:

“Adequation is similar to permutation in being based on a shift of the subjective apprehension of the referent, but it differs from it in various ways. Adequation is an affair of the single word and its referent, permutation can occur only when the referent is an element of a peculiar kind of total. In adequation there is primarily no change of referent, only of meaning; or rather, a shift of attention from one characteristic of the referent to another, which is equivalent to a change of predominant element of meaning; permutation is a change of apprehension involving a change of referent.”[113]

Adequation is a pure adjustment of meaning. As far as the subject is concerned, adequation follows the operation of every other class of sense-change, and inevitably follows even purely technical changes in the referent, or its use.[114] Adequation may follow analogy (‘Belfry’ originally had nothing to do with bells, but denoted a ‘tower used in attacking fortresses’. Owing to the phonetic association with ‘bell’ the word has adjusted normally now to refer to towers containing bells);[115] shortening (after adjustment, the context of original use need no longer be recalled or duplicated for us to know what ‘bus’ refers to); nomination (metaphor and irony fades[116] hyperbole degenerates and euphemism regenerates[117] after a while, and may need re-nomination); transfer (“saddle”, at first transferred only to mountains physically resembling the equine version, may now be used to refer to those slopes which share some other referent to those to which the transfer was originally made); and, even permutation (‘beads’ may now be used to refer to those strings of small balls hung around female necks, used to measure fashion rather than to count prayers).

But this discussion of the effects and methods of achieving change in semantic range cannot yet cope with one possibility. Stern reminds us of a common development wherein,

“the original predominating element does not disappear... the old meaning remains by the side of the new one, as one of several specialised meanings within the range of the word.”[118]

The word ‘horn’ for example (and see fn. (114) supra), may still be used to describe an ‘animal’s horn’ without the hearer believing such animals make music. Yet this is assuming the hearer is part of a given semantic community, rather than a member of a particular language community, (a young child might be a member of the latter, but could feasibly imagine a sheep playing the Trumpet Voluntary on its horns, thus not yet demonstrating his full membership of the former).[119] Nevertheless, within the semantic community, two sorts of “specialised meanings” may be distinguished.

On the one hand, there are those which full “natural” language speakers might be expected to know (e.g. the meanings of ‘horn’ already discussed), but on the other, there are users which stem from a word’s uncommon adoption by a sub-set of the “natural” language community. For example, ‘horn’ “means”: any of the columns of grey matter in the spinal cord (to doctors); the top if a bow (to archers); a symbol of glory (to theologians); a part of the corona of certain milkweeds (to botanists); the ends of main-mast cross-trees (to sailors); a tube of varying sectional area used in some loud-speakers (to radio-technicians); and so on.[120] What distinguishes this second sort of “specialised” meaning from the first is that they each refer to use by a specific occupationally defined sub-set of that language community (‘occupation’ taken very broadly here), rather than, as with the first, a sub-set defined merely by lack of general language-use competence.[121]

What is clearly implied here is the second dimension of a word’s life: the cultural range. One which, as promised earlier and as illustrated in the last example, overlaps empirically with the first (semantic) range. Cultural range is not a purely synchronic issue. Indeed, of importance here is its diachronic relevance. Cultural change refers to the degree to which any particular semantic change spreads into, or withdraws from currency in a given language community. Mill put the former possibility practically and clearly:

“it is natural and inevitable that in every age a certain portion of our recorded and traditional knowledge, not being continually suggested by the pursuits and inquiries with which mankind are at that time engrossed, should fall asleep, as it were, and fade from memory. It would be utterly lost, if the propositions or formulas, the results of the previous experience, did not remain, and continue to be repeated and believed, as forms of words it may be, but of words that once really conveyed, and are still supposed to convey, a meaning: which meaning, though suspended, may be historically traced, and when suggested, is recognised by minds of the necessary endowments as being still matter of fact, or truth... The tide of custom first drifts the word on the shore of a particular meaning, then retires and leaves it there.”[122]

Sturtevant calls attention to the other side of cultural change: the coining of a word (or the creation of a meaning for an existing one), and offers a preliminary analysis of the process thus:

“There may be change... in the speech of the person or persons who at the moment set the linguistic fashion. Such innovations are constantly arising in the speech of each one of us... Most of such innovations are purely momentary and have no influence upon the language... In all such cases there are two processes to be distinguished: the origin of the innovation in an individual speaker may be called a primary change; the spread of the innovation to other speakers may be called a secondary change.”[123]

Sturtevant’s “secondary changes” - constituting, as they do, of cultural as well as semantic changes, follow the myriad of “primary changes” in only a tiny proportion of cases. Bloomfield referred to this minority as “crucial extensions”. He continued:

“A semantic change, then, is a complex process. It involves favourings and disfavourings, and as its crucial point, the extension of a favoured form into practical applications which hitherto belonged to the disfavoured form. This crucial extension can be observed only if we succeed in finding the locutions in which it was made, and in finding or reconstructing the model locutions in which both forms were used alternatively.”[124]

Yet, such “crucial extensions” do not necessarily propel a meaning into universal cultural acceptance. Indeed, a very basic distinction is necessary here.[125] The cultural range of a word’s meaning may be characterised, at any one time, as being either particular or universal. Particular refers to a survival of a meaning, but one either by restriction (immediate cultural limitation after coining or creation), or degeneration (a subsequent use-limitation following a period of universal use), used only by a sub-set of the language community. A sub-set which is, incidentally, capable of being defined in a way other than its use of a word for that meaning.[126]

Universal cultural range applies when the whole of a given language community uses a word to apply to a specific referent. A universal range of acceptance and use of a meaning may follow either an extension (immediate cultural expansion after coining or creation), or regeneration (a subsequent user-expansion following a period of particular use).

Some further distinctions will be useful. The term “lingo” (jargons or argots)[127] is reserved for various particular occupational sub-sets within a linguistic community. The term “slang” (colloquialisms or vulgarisms)[128] is reserved for words which are universally usable, yet not universally used. In addition, “slang” is normally a semantic generalisation, whereas, “lingo” mostly reflects semantic specialisation.

Given such distinctions, it follows that various prototypical utilisation careers are possible for any one word. Some, after coining or creation, drift from the particular to the universal;[129] others, from the universal to the particular.[130] Alternatively, words may drift from universal use into an archaic coma;[131] or from a particular use into a redundant loss.[132]

A final difficulty lies in the selection of a model for the etymology to proceed - even given an allegiance to the several, and possibly arbitrary distinctions and definitions offered above. There exist a number of possibly comparable professional etymological studies of single words.[133] All are in principle capable of providing model analyses.[134] Yet, excessive attention paid to phonological minutiae combined with eclectic (although painstaking and scholarly) diligence generally reduces issues of semantic change to passing suggestions.[135] Indeed, Malkiel characterises the usual approach as possessing:

a zigzagging narrative, with full attention to each new conjecture, and to each fresh facet of an old conjecture newly championed as well as to the miscellaneous reactions such proposals elicit, until the problem has either been solved through a consensus, or, if the discussion grows sterile, been shelved pending the discovery of some new decisive piece of evidence.”[136]

This “annalistic” approach (“at the farthest conceivable remove from austere scientific styling”, ibid.)[137] is in sharp contrast to the “analytic” approach adopted here. Malkiel offers the following definition of this “analytic” etymology, which has:

“the material and matching ideas grouped in more abstract, analytical fashion around the major solutions... The bases advocated may, but need not, follow a strictly chronological line; if they do, that line is either a string of the exact dates of formal scholarly identifications, or a sequence of the approximate dates when assumed bases emerged in actual speech. As an alternative to historicism in either garb, the hypotheses could be arrayed on the basis of source language, word family, derivational structure, or semantic background. From this less narrative, more interpretive treatment one arrives... by deliberate trimming - omission of such conjectures as are of merely antiquarian interest or mark a step backward -at the actual ‘nucleus of the problem’, frequently a restatement of some irreducible dilemma.” [138]

As a way of explicating the currently “irreducible dilemma” of semantic choice between seriousness and triviality for the word “fiddle”, I propose to group the etymological material discoverably in terms of (Bloomfield’s) “crucial extensions” of its meaning and use, citing, where possible, a “first attestation” of the new use.[139] After a slight prologue, the natural history of the word “fiddle” will be grouped into three major approximately consecutive, empirical stages. Each stage successively marks the achievement of a qualitatively different semantic and cultural dimension from its predecessor. Each stage is composed of a primary and secondary step.

At the semantic level, each stage possesses, á la Stern, a primary referential suggestion (i.e. by analogy, shortening, nomination or transfer), followed by a secondary subjective ratification (i.e. by permutation or adequation). Somewhat similarly, but now culturally and á la Sturtevant, each stage also possesses a primary innovated proposal (with its origins in code, cant, jargon or arnot), followed by a secondary disseminated acceptance.[140] Each stage contains firstly name shifts, of the word FIDDLE to the group opened up in the previous “crucial extension”, and then, secondly, the sense extensions which lead to the next “crucial extension”.

FIDDLE: A Natural Criminology

“In attempting to rectify the use of a vague term by giving it a fixed connotation, we must take care not to discard (unless advisedly, and on the ground of a deeper knowledge of the subject) any portion of the connotation which the word, in however indistinct a manner, previously carried with it. For otherwise language loses one of its inherent and most valuable properties, that of being the conservator of ancient experience; the keeper alive of those thoughts and observations of former ages, which may be alien to the tendencies of the passing time. To be qualified to define the name, one must know all that has ever been known of the properties of the class of objects which are, or originally were, denoted by it.”[141]

Prologue

I am bound to declare that the best dictionary in the world - 1901: O.E.D.,[142] admits of the word FIDDLE that “the ultimate origin is obscure”. Yet all is not lost: and some of the speculations the obscurity allows may even constitute a gain. Indeed, early dictionaries were not as timorous. Those with an entry for FIDDLE (and many had not),[143] plumped unanimously (and probably incestuously) for the latin word fidicula as the source.[144] None gives an explanation until 1859: WORCESTER, who comments “[...L.fidicula, a dim. of fides, any stringed instrument.] A stringed instrument of music”. This became conventional for a while, with 1867; DONALD adding a possible earlier origin in the Greek sphidé; of which 1882: ANNANDALE comments, “L.L.fidicula., dim. of L.fides, fidis = Gf. sphidé gut, catgut, string of a musical instrument.”

Yet, later lexicographers were unimpressed. The dismissive comments in 1889: WHITNEY are typical: “... Another derivation, (L.fidicula, commonly pl. fidiculae, a small stringed instrument, a small lute or cythern (dim. of fides, a stringed instrument, a lute, lyre, cither), hardly agrees with the Tent. and not at all with the Rom. forms.” Instead, another latin origin was suggested. To quote 1901:O.E.D., “The Teut, word bears a singular resemblance in sound to its Med.L. synonym vitula, vidula... the supposition that the early Rom. vidula was adopted independently in more than one Teut. Lang. would account adequately for all the Teut. forms. “Many simply translate vitula, vidula as (and 1882: SKEAT is typical) “a viol, fiddle; a word presumably of low Lat. origin.” Others offer a more prosaic account. 1925: HARGRAVE, for example, states: “At first sight there seems little in common between the two words ‘fiddle’ and ‘violin’, although they denote the same instrument.

But the root from which the two words derive is the same, viz: the Latin vidula, from vitulari, skip like a calf, make merry, from vitula, a calf”. Two later specialised etymological dictionaries give even more extravagant origins. 1966: ONIONS claims, “Rom. vitula... f.L. vitulari celebrate a festival, be joyful (cf. vitula goddess of victory and celebration);”[145] and 1966; KLEIN remarks that FIDDLE, “probably derives fr. VL. vitula, name of a stringed instrument, which is of uncertain origin. It is possibly a back formation fr. L. vitulari, ‘to exult, be joyful’, which prob. stands for vi-tulari and orig. meant ‘to lift up one’s voice in joy’, fr. vi, exclamation of joy... and tulo, a secondary form of tollo, ‘I raise’.”

An alternative, adopted by only a few - such as 1862: WEDGEWOOD, and 1873: FERGUSON - but nevertheless very worthy of consideration, is a derivation of FIDDLE from the Old Norse fitla, to touch or twitch with the fingers. This verb possibly transferred uses of the word FIDDLE. Additionally, the early stringed instruments called FIDDLES were not solely played with a bow. Indeed, the earliest dictionary with an entry for FIDDLE, 1659: SOMNER, offers “a crowd” as a synonym. Of “crowd”, 1901;O.E.D. says, “an ancient Celtic musical instrument of the viol class, now obsolete, having in early times three strings, but in its later form six, four of which were played with a bow, and two by twitching with the fingers; and early form of the fiddle”.

Yet whilst the origin of FIDDLE is uncertain, and the subject of some professional dispute, there is greater agreement about its more immediate linguistic ancestors, and over phonetically similar and semantically identical words in other European languages. Whether or not FIDDLE originated in one or other of the suggested Latin sources (with thence presumably independently informed the Italian, Spanish and Portugese viola, the Provence viula, and the French viole) or in the less frequently mentioned, but otherwise perhaps more plausible Old Norse source, is indicated by the greater similarity between the original Old Norse and the Anglo-Saxon, Middle English and Standard English forms of FIDDLE. The Old Norse fitla has some alternative spellings,[146] one of which, fithla,[147] has a close formal resemblance to fithele - the Anglo-Saxon forebear of FIDDLE.

Additionally the word forms having currency in those countries which are geographically closer to Britain (than those with forms which appear to be descendants from one of the original Latin Sources) which are also those whose histories are linked with British history and from whom loan words might have been borrowed, more closely resemble the Nordic than the latin root.[148] For example, the Old Swedish fidhla,[149] the Icelandic fidla,[150] the Swedish fedla,[151] and the Danish fiddel.[152] The various Germanic or Teutonic forms - Old High German fidula,[153] the Middle High German vedel,[154] the low German fidel[155] and the German fiedel[156] all bear, as 1901; O.E.D. claims, “a singular resemblance in sound” to the alleged Latin root, vidula; as indeed does the Dutch vedel or veel.[157]

In any case, and from whatever root, the Anglo-Saxon fithele[158] mutated through various alternative spellings (fithel, fydyll, etc.)[159] before coming to rest with the contemporary FIDDLE. The noun form is held to have originated before 1150 AD, although the earliest occurrence for the written English verb cannot be dated before the period, 1150-1450 AD.[160] At this point it would be stretching the available data to make any detailed claims about the early semantic and cultural ranges of FIDDLE.

Yet, if the Nordic root is taken seriously, then the increased range of applicability of the word to small stringed instruments is a generalisation following the earlier rather specialised restriction to musical instruments with strings some of which are played with a bow and others twitched with the fingers. Similarly, but culturally, the word does not seem to have been restricted to any particular societal sub-group. Of more relevance here is when and how did a word meaning “small stringed instruments” come to mean “theft”? Three semantic “crucial extensions” are involved, so I have grouped the relevant materials into three stages which collectively constitute an “analytic” etymology.

Stage I: From Musical Instruments to Sex

To start, there was a gradual shift in the use of the name FIDDLE to cover actors, activities and artefacts already within the referential range associated with “small stringed instruments”. In fact, and giving some more slight support for a Nordic over a Latin root, the first dated use of any sort is for FIDDLER - the player of the instrument in 1100,[161] followed by FIDDLE for the instrument in 1205,[162] with the verb to FIDDLE being first dated in 1377.[163] The FIDDLESTICK appeared in the fifteenth century,[164] as did FIDDLING (playing the violin) which is first noticed in 1460.[165]

After a slight gap, FIDDLE-CASE can be dated at 1647,[166] with the FIDDLES as the band of musicians known from 1676,[167] although a FIDDLE as a single player is unknown before 1773.[168] Before then, the FIDDLEMAKER - the craftsman making the musical instruments - appears from 1680,[169] with FIDDLESTRING making an appearance in 1728.[170] The FIDDLE-BOW is unknown before 1827,[171] several centuries after FIDDLESTICK. FIDDLE-DIDDLE, the sound produced when all these artefacts and actors are put together is first dated at 1827,[172] with the FIDDLE-FATHER - or bass viol - completing this little musical family in 1878.[173]

Gradually, but from this base, the word FIDDLE shifted to senses outside the original referential range. In Elizabethan England, most people’s sole experience of FIDDLING was at the hands of wandering minstrels, all “seeking to change musicke for money.”[174] They tended to arrive unexpectedly, and hence the expression FIDDLER’S BIDDING - a last minute, or belated invitation.[175] They were, additionally, a source of information as well as music, although the news they brought was often as unreliable as it was stale: the first captured in the expression FIDDLER’S TALES,[176] the second is FIDDLER’S NEWS.[177] Yet these expressions are now archaic, and there is no evidence to suggest that they ever became semantically ratified or culturally disseminated. None has found a place in a national dictionary: and for each the first attestation is prefaced by a regional location, to which their cultural range was presumably limited.

Two other features of minstrels generated sense extensions for the word FIDDLE. In each case, a semantic ratification is complemented by cultural dissemination; yet neither sense extension is “crucial”, and both are now archaic. Both, too, relate to the remuneration given to music-makers. Sometimes they received nothing but politeness. Indeed, FIDDLER’S WAGES, datable at 1597,[178] means “thanks” (and nothing else). Slightly later, by 1608, FIDDLER’S FARE implied the more generous payment-in-king of “meat, drink and money”.[179] Alternatively, this might be reduced to FIDDLER’S PAY - “thanks and wine”[180] - or to FIDDLER’S MONEY, the seemingly most authoritative definition of which is “small change, small silver coins”.[181] The latter monetary sense seems to have predominated (at the stage of ratification and dissemination) over the former, vaguer uses. By the late eighteen century, a FIDDLER was a slang term for a farthing;[182] and fifty years later, it had become slang for sixpence, either as FIDDLER, or as FIDDLE.[183]

Pursuing perhaps another element of FIDDLER’S FARE, by the middle of the nineteenth century one could become as DRUNK AS A FIDDLER,[184] or even worse, as DRUNK AS A FIDDLER’S BITCH,[185] or in Scotland, FIDDLER-FOU.[186] This was later semantically ratified, and again through permutation (yet possibly only in America, and even there at best as slang) as FIDDLED - drunk.[187]

But it was yet another feature of the public definition of itinerant Elizabethan musicians which fueled the “crucial extensions” which both completes this stage in the development of the word FIDDLE’s life, and provides a model extension for the subsequent adequated gradual name shift at the beginning of the next stage. Aydelotte considers the following quote from Stubbes to contain a good picture of the life of the Elizabethan minstrel:

“I think that all good minstrelles, sober and chast musicians (speking of suche drunken sockets and bawye parasits as range the Cuntreyes, ryming and singing of vncleane, corrupt, and filthie songs in Tauernes, Ale-houses, Innes, and other publique assemblies,) may daunce the wild Moris thorow a needles eye. For how should thei bere chaste minds, seeing that their exercyse is the pathway to all vncleanes. There is no ship so balanced with massie matter, as their heads are fraught with all kind of bawdue songs, filthie ballads and scuruie rynes, seruing for euery purpose, and for euerie Cumpanie.”[188]

Indeed, this reputation for entertaining with “bawdy songs, filthy ballads and scurvy rhymes” led to an extension of the verb to FIDDLE to mean “to take liberties with a woman” as early as 1632.[189] The grounds for the sense extension however were probably different. Whilst some (e.g. 1925: WEEKLEY, and 1937: PARTRIDGE) consider that this sense of the verb derives directly from the Old Norse root, fitla, to touch with the fingers, and whilst there is a persuasive yet otherwise unsupported suggestion that ‘strumpet’ derives from the low and now obsolete verb ‘strum’ - to have sexual intercourse,[190] with ‘strum’ in turn deriving from a literal sense of to play a musical instrument; it is at least as plausible (and in my opinion, much more so) that it was the sheer ironic resemblance between the antiquarian symbol for woman (a ‘figure of eight’ shape, with the bottom bulge larger than the top, with or without a hole in the lower middle) and the actual shape of the violin which, as the shared referent characteristic of each, fostered the crucial transfer.

Some support for the latter interpretation is additionally available in a later noun use of FIDDLE for the female pudendum, first known in 1817,[191] and a use of both FIDDLESTICK and FIDDLE-BOW as an equivalently vulgar (and now defunct) euphemism for the penis.[192] It was with this early transfer as a model, that the name FIDDLE was subsequently and gradually shifted to an enormous range of artefacts or activities which somehow resembled either part of all of the musical instrument of the bow, or the musicians playing them.

Stage II: From Sex to Nonsense

Indeed, one of the first transfers to social activities resembling the minstrel in action retained a shadow of the model transfer to sexual activity. By the early eighteenth century, to FIDDLE had become also to mean ‘to scratch’. Initially, as early as 1700, this was known as the WELSH FIDDLE,[193] and later as the SCOTCH FIDDLE.[194] Further, 1972: PARTRIDGE claims of the expression, to PLAY THE SCOTCH FIDDLE, “To work the index finger of one hand like a fiddle stick between the index and middle finger of the other... To do this ‘provokes a Scotchman in the highest degree it implying that he is afflicted with the itch’ (Hotten).” This description is identical to the copulatory gesture more recently labelled the Forefinger Insertion gesture.[195] Slightly later the verb FIDDLE shifted also to mean, more plainly but perhaps more directly transferred from the musician (insofar as two shared referent characteristics facilitate the transfer: the action and the sound) “to saw”.[196]

This development is complemented by a slightly earlier noun use of FIDDLESTICK to mean ‘a spring saw’, a shift which, if one of several speculative etymological links are acceptable,[197] might be identical to the otherwise confusing and idiosyncratic entry in 1959: HOTTEN for FIDDLE as ‘a whip’.[198] Also resembling the rapid arm movements of the musician in action, the verb FIDDLE shifted, in America, to a pugilistic context wherein it meant either “to move the arms forward and back, as at the beginning of a round”, or, “a series of blows delivered quickly, and at a short distance.”[199] In the same period, and in the same country, FIDDLER, was extended to refer to “a prize fighter,” specifically, “one who depends more upon activity than upon strength or ‘stay’.”[200] Possessing possibly a related sense are both FIDDLE-JIGGING, moving awkwardly,[201] and FIDDLE-FOOTED, restive.[202]

A different characteristic of the musician in action, now the bent arm holding the bow, genered both the expression LIKE A FIDDLER’S ELBOW, meaning crooked;[203] and the Yorkshire child’s game, MY FATHER’S FIDDLE, a regional variation on the universally nasty things that children do to each other.[204] Related are the military slang use of FIDDLER for bugler;[205] the use of FIDDLINE and FIDDLE-BACK wood in the bookbinding trade (the rapid action of sewing book leaves together with an overcast stitch; and the wood thus used in book-covers, respectively);[206] and the use of both FIDDLE and FIDDLESTICK in agriculture, a transfer based again on similarity of movement with the musician.[207]

On the resemblance both to the actions of the musician and the subsequent sound produced, FIDDLE was also transferred to the natural world as FIDDLE-WOOD, or FIDDLE-STICKS, a plant “so called because the stems are by children stripped of their leaves and scraped across each other fiddler-fashion, when they produce a squeaking sound.”[208] In fact, the shift of meaning for the verb FIDDLE to mean ‘to scrape’ can be dated much earlier at 1672,[209] a meaning subsequently informing a highly technical use of FIDDLING in the malfunction of micrometers in the late nineteenth century,[210] and contributing to the final crucial extension of the words’ use in Stage III.

A much earlier transfer to the natural world occurred as early as 1714, but was on the basis of a resemblance with the actions of a musician rather than with the sound produced from playing. The FIDDLER is a crab with one small claw, and “one claw much enlarged, and often holds it in a position suggesting that in which a musician holds a fiddle”, according to 1941: WEBSTER.[211] Somewhat later, in 1842, the Common Sandpiper was also called a FIDDLER, again because of a physical resemblance, this time between its stance and that of the violinist.[212]

But perhaps the most extensive transferred use of members of the FIDDLE word-family was ot objects which resembled the musical instrument in some or other way. Some resembled the bow. FIDDLESTICK, in its use for broadsword, a use dating from at least 1595,[213] is a possible candidate in this category; althouhg it may (as a classic phallic symbol) alternatively have been indirectly transferred from the sexual crucial extension which is the model for name shifts in this stage of the development of the word’s meaning.

Three other shifts most obviously reflect a direct transfer from the violinist’s bow. the FIDDLE-DRILL, one turned, according to 1900: WRIGHT, “with bow and string”;[214] the Victorian wood industry’s FIDDLE, which, claims 1889: WHITNEY, “consists of a piece of emery-covered cloth stretched between two end-pieces of wood connected by a curved handle”;[215] and the nautical slang used of FIDDLED STICK for flag staff.[216] Finally, there once existed the expression FIDDLE-FLANKED which 1901: O.E.D. defines as “having hollow flanks like a fiddle”. Presumably, this has matured into the more modern phrase ‘bow legged.’[217]

Many more shifts were to senses reminiscent of the musical instrument rather than of the bow. Several objects from the naturaly world are in this category. FIDDLE-SHAPED is a standard botanical term for any leaf with a panduriform, or figure-of-eight profile;[218] and FIDDLE-LIPPED is also used for any similarly shaped lip.[219] FIDDLE-DOCK is a specific plant with panduriform leaves;[220] and the angel-fish or monk fish is called the FIDDLE-FISH for the same reason.[221]

The FIDDLE-BEETLE (Damaster blaptiodes) and the quite different FIDDLER-BEETLE (Eupoecila australasiae) both have panduriform outlines, with the latter having, in addition, green longitudinal stripes which further resemble the strings of the violin.[222] Bridging the natural and social world was, of course, FIDDLEBACK wood: the ideal type of wood for violin construction.[223] Several other uses of words from the FIDDLE word-family to name flora and fauna are traceable, although it is not clear in these remaining cases what point of co-similarity provides the fulcrum for the transfer.

Two different types of fly have been called FIDDLERS, one dating from 1750,[224] the other from 1890.[225] One duck has been called a FIDDLER,[226] as has one fish,[227] although a different one from the FIDDLER-FISH described above and from the king-crab, which is also called a FIDDLE-FISH.[228] Several plants have also been given the name, most probably because of panduriform shape. The wild carrot,[229] the marsh marigold,[230] and murrain grass[231] have all been called FIDDLE; one particular type of grass is called FIDDLE-GRASS,[232] the yellow rattle is termed FIDDLE-CASE,[233] and the leaves of the young cinnamon fern are called FIDDLE-HEADS.[234]

Also on the model of the musical instrument, by 1785 those who were “long-faced, solemn, melancholy looking” might be called FIDDLE-FACED;[235] those with a “long narrow chin” might be referred to as FIDDLE-CHIN;[236] and those with “long scraggy posteriors” could be termed FIDDLE-DOUP.[237] During the nineteenth century, the noun form was shifted to social artefacts possessing the pandurate shape with increasing frequency. In 1832, a FIDDLE was a watchman’s rattle;[238] by 1836, a use for an instrument of tortue was recorded;[239] by 1865, a FIDDLE was a contrivance on board a passenger ship used to prevent cutlery and food sliding off the dining table in bad weather;[240] by 1874, it was an eleven foot long wooden bar dragged along behind a horse to pick up loose straw or hay.[241]

By the end of the century, FIDDLE was also the term for a cleat;[242] a jam puff;[243] somewhat later, for a grand piano (amongst American furniture removal men),[244] and even for a chinaware rack.[245] Similarly shaped to the violin was the FIDDLE-BLOCK;[246] those chairs which had a FIDDLE-BACK;[247] the ecclestiastical garment called a FIDDLEBACK CHASUBLE;[248] small ancient marble shaped but undetailed statuettes called FIDDLE IDOLS;[249] and a rather fashionable American shoe with an instep coloured differently to the rest of the sole, and termed a FIDDLE-WAIST.[250] One wholly inexplicable transfer was of the word FIDDLE to mean ‘A writ to arrest’.[251]

Some transfers were merely on the basis of resemblance to any part of the musical instrument. Some ships have an ornament at their prow which, to quote 1883: SMITH, is “one finished by a scroll turning aft, in contradistinction to a scroll-head, which turns forward.” Because of this “bending in like the head of a violin” (1859: WORCESTER), this was termed a FIDDLE-HEAD.[252] Since this was somewhat plainer than an ornamental figure-head, FIDDLE-HEAD was subsequently re-transferred to mean, of people, plain or ugly.[253]

It was also generalised from ships to other social artefacts which had one end shaped like the head or scroll of the musical instrument.[254] This perhaps an apposite moment to mention a long-standing nautical preference for the word FIDDLE, which was, as 1921: WEEKLEY puts it, “a favourite word with mariners”. FIDDLER’S GREEN was a mythical paradise to which all old sailors were eventually posted. It was a place where, to quote 1894: BREWER, “there is perpetual mirth, a fiddle that never ceases to untiring dancers, plenty of grog, and unlimited tobacco.”

It also provided, as 1897: BARRERE and LEYLAND are more careful to point out, “those amenities for which Wapping, Castle Rag, and the back of Portsmouth Point were once noted.”[255] More practically, and on board ship, the FIDDLEY (sometimes the FIDDLER) was an area surrounding the stoke-hole (sometimes the capstan house) where sailors were allowed to smoke and play music.[256] Somewhat later, again in a nautical context, but actually from an entirely different root, the word FIDDLE came to be used for the instrument used by convicts to pick oakum.[257]

Another part of the musical instrument which generated a shift in the use of the name was the configuration of the strings against the frets, producing FIDDLE-PATTERN - a sort of “cross-pattern” used to decorate various artefacts;[258] and subsequently FIDDLE-FACE, of humans, implying criss-crossed with lines, or “wizened”.[259] The strings independantly produced one nomination in the natural world, where FIDDLESTRINGS referred to “the ribs of the plantain leaf when pulled out”.[260] Then the inevitably voluminous and pandurate instrument case produced FIDDLER-POUCHED (of pockets);[261] FIDDLE-CASE BOOTS;[262] and, of smock type frocks, FIDDLE-BAGS.[263]

So far all these uses in Stage II are adequated transfers to objects and activities well within the referential range newly established by the crucial extension to sex which closed Stage I. So far in this stage, I have merely indexed the gradual shifts of the name (post-as it were-coitally) to other panduriform uses. But there were several attempts to move outside this circumscribed referential range. Some were phrases fashioned in an attempt to generalise from the noise of the musical instrument, as in the DEVIL RIDES ON A FIDDLESTICK;[264] or from the absence of any sound at all, as in HANG UP THE FIDDLE;[265] or in HANG UP ONE’S FIDDLE WHEN ONE GETS HOME;[266] or the regionally based, HANG UP ONE’S FIDDLE ON THE DOOR SNECK.[267]

In either case, this was extended to the player; either positively, as in to have one’s FACE MADE OF A FIDDLE;[268] or negatively, as in to have a FACE LIKE THE FAR END OF A [FRENCH] FIDDLE;[269] or, to have a FACE AS LONG AS A FIDDLE.[270] Alternatively, but now aping the frenetic action of the musician and simultaneously exploiting two probably etymological distinct meanings of the word ‘fret’, one could, if worried, FRET ONESELF TO A FIDDLESTRING;[271] or, if wearied, one could be WORN TO A FIDDLESTRING.[272] Perhaps because it was a difficult instrument to play (or construct), one could bungle the execution of a task, or MAKE A FINE FIDDLE of it.[273]

Yet, well-tuned, it could be transferred to non-musical persons, who could be as FINE AS A [FARTHING] FIDDLE as early as 1603;[274] or slightly later, as FIT AS A FIDDLE,[275] if they were in good form. Under any circumstances, those in charge of any undertaking could PLAY FIRST FIDDLE from 1778;[276] subordinates might PLAY SECOND FIDDLE from 1809;[277] and any third party might PLAY THIRD FIDDLE after 1866.[278] Yet, while some of these expressions have survived (and many have not), none became secondarily extended in the sense that the word FIDDLE alone could call the whole expression to mind.

Yet one did. And it, almost be mistake, fostered the “crucial extension” in sense from this to the next Stage in FIDDLE’s development. The curious expressed TO FIND A FIDDLE, which originally “applied to the finding of a child dropped by gypsies”;[279] became later generalised and universalised as “to come upon something very amusing.”[280] In turn, this change (the apparently paradoxical movement from ‘abandoned child’ to ‘something amusing’, or mildly diverting) was facilitated by the fortuitous intercession of the extraordinary homonym, “bosh”.

To trim another etymological story, “bosh” had for long meant, in particularised and specialised gypsy cant, a violin or FIDDLE;[281] yet it also did duty in a very generalised sense as a universal colloquialism meaning ‘nonsense’.[282] It was with this transfer as a base, that the name FIDDLE was subsequently and gradually shifted to a wide range of forms and expressions all implying, in some or other way, ‘nonsense’.

Stage III: From Nonsense to Theft

The earliest transferred formulations had an identical interjectional quality to the “bosh” intermediary. A use in this sense (ie as ‘nonsense’) can be traced as early as 1600 for FIDDLESTICK;[283] a century later for FIDDLESTICKS;[284] and sometime later, in 1796, for FIDDLESTICKS END.[285] Derived from this is the subsequently datable expression, NOT TO CARE A FIDDLESTICK, meaning not to care at all.[286] The expressive symbolism available in the word FIDDLE may well have assisted this sense extension. Indeed, as Marchand comments:

“..... Initial /F/, /P/, less so /B/, often express, scorn, contempt, disapproval, disgust; pish, pooh, ph, fie, foh, faugh (cf. the exclamation fiddlesticks, I don’t care a fig, contemptous words such as fiddle-faddle, fingle-fangle, Gp, pah, puh, F fi, L fu). Only certain sounds lend themselves to being used as emotionally expressive symbols....”[287]

Thus the reduplication, FIDDLE-FADDLE,[288] an “argumentative or emphatic repetition,”[289] with no previous history or other meaning, had emerged in the sense of “meer silly stuff, or nonsense; idle, vain discourse” as early as in 1690: B.E.; and the slightly later contraction to FID-FAD was used identically.[290] FIDDLE-FADDLE was a founder member of a large and phonetically similar family of common reduplications, which possessed the same semantic threat of nonsensical, foolish triviality.[291] In turn, and again with the same syntactical function as an interjection, FIDDLE! took on this meaning at least by 1695;[292] as did the echo repetitions FIDDLEDEDEE;[293] and the less common FIDDLEDEE![294]

The reduplication shifted, by adequation, through FIDDLECOME,[295] from emphasis on the interjectional form and function of the word, to attention instead to the product of the activity thus described, to FIDDLE-COME-FADDLE, which meant ‘a trifle’.[296] So, FIDDLE-FADDLE, as an adjective, meant ‘trifling’;[297] and as a verb, slightly later, to ‘to trifle’.[298] Somewhat earlier, whole persons could be called FIDDLE-FADDLES,[299] or later FIDDLE-FADDLERS,[300] or some regional variant.[301]

This sense of ‘trifle’ (nonsense) for FIDDLE - one produced through the crucial extension provided by the bridge, “bosh”; elided with an earlier iconic transfer based upon a resemblance between the movement of the hands in violin playing, to similar hand movements elsewhere, producing for FIDDLE the other sense of ‘trifle’ (to toy with). Indeed, this is one of the earliest transferred senses for FIDDLE, recorded first in 1735: JOHNSON, but traced in this sense to at leat 1530.[302] Thus, and similarly, but now exploiting the polysemy in the noun ‘fool’, FIDDLER became ‘a jester’;[303] and ‘a trifler’.[304] FIDDLING[305] rapidly, and later FIDDLE,[306] took on the meaning of (with persons) ‘acting triflingly’, and later, of the state of being ‘busy about trifles’,[307] before being applied to the objects of such attention themselves.[308]

This idea of nonsensical triviality was thence extended to various expressions, some of which had been used differently before. By 1762, a foolish person might be described as having a HEAD AS EMPTY AS A FIDDLE-CASE;[309] with FIDDLE-HEADED,[310] FIDDLE-HEAD,[311] and even later FIDDLE-BRAINED,[312] gaining currency as apt description of empty-headed people, who possessed an over-convern with idle, trivial pursuits.

This rapid and extensive adequation generated inevitable semantic rivalry with the word TRIFLE itself, with FIDDLE gradually assuming responsibility for some of the semantic range originally reserved for TRIFLE. Early examples are FIDDLE, ‘to play upon’ (in the sense of trifling with another’s affections or patience),[313] and ‘to fritter away’ (passing time in a trifling manner).[314]

Now whilst synonyms may harmoniously and fruitfully coexist without necessary redundancy, elision between words possessing multiple meanings inevitably generates individual ambiguity exascerbated by conjoint undeterminancy.[315] This “overload”, (Ullmann’s term),[316] produces obsolescence which is usually, and in this case, resolved as “the popular use gradually constricts the more learned”, and “old senses are imperiled by the new.”[317]

Assisting the partial abridgement of the semantic range of TRIFLE, and the complementary sense extension of FIDDLE, was the phonetic-expressive pull of what might be termed the “-IDDLE” group.[318] Marchand comments:

“The initial symbols sometimes overlap as do other morphemes. This is especially so when the final symbol is particularly strong. For the concept ‘trifle’ we have fiddle, twiddle, piddle (with their variants peddle and paddle), and quiddle, all recorded in the 16th century. The basis may be fiddle which attracted the otherwise unexplainable variants. It will be noted, anyhow, that the final symbols, as containing the vowel, are the real ‘roots’ while the initial symbols have the modifying character which prefixes have with radicals.... -IDDLE: is found in several words denoting ‘trifle’ of which the basis may be FIDDLE which in this particular sense development is first recorded 1530. Other words coined after it are piddle 1545, tiddle 1560, twiddle 1540, quiddle 1567, diddle ‘sing without distinct utterance of words’ 1706, diddle (away) ‘trifle (away), waste’ 1826.”[319]

Much of the semantic range of FIDDLE and TRIFLE may be conveyed by the use of either word, particularly the cluster of senses inferring nonsensical, frivolous, idle, time-wasting.[320] But during critical semantic hostilities - which took place during the latter part of the seventeenth century - TRIFLE “lost”, and FIDDLE “won” the critical meaning which crucially extended the word FIDDLE to complete this stage of its development.

For TRIFLE, allegedly derived from the It. Truffa, ‘a cozening, cheating, conicatching’, at one time referred specifically to, amongst other things, “a false or idle tale told to deceive, cheat or befool”, or, as a verb, “to cheat, delude, befool.”[321] What is most significant is that this sense attributed to TRIFLE both predates any similar sense attribution for FIDDLE by (at least four, and in my opinion) five centuries, and is considered by 1901: O.E.D. to be an obsolete sense for TRIFLE after the middle of the seventeenth century - marginally before it becomes a datable new sense for FIDDLE.

The arena for this sense-exchange was the London Stock Exchange, and the earliest surviving use of the word FIDDLE in this newly transferred sense is in a bitter tract criticising “stock-jobbers” written by Daniel Defoe in the early years of the eighteenth century. In it, he said:

“But these people can run Men silently, undermine and impoverish by a sort of impeneterable Artifice, like Poison that works at Distance, can wheedle Men to ruin themselves, and Fiddle them out of their Money, by the strange unheard of Engines of Interests, Discounts, Transfers, Tallies, Debentures, Shares, Projects, and the Devil and all of Figures and hard Names.”[322]

In the late seventeenth century, a stock-jobber was a middle-man, working on his own account, living through, “the buying of goods or stock from one person and selling to another in order to profit.”[323] “Jobbing”, more generally, then referred to various forms of securing private gain through corruptness;[324] with the application to the stock-market being a pejorative particularised specialisation, specifically denoting the practice of making a fast profit by buying cheap and speedily selling high; together with, as 1901: O.E.D. adds, “often with unfavourable implication of rash or dishonest speculation; esp. with reference to the abuses of the early 18th century, which led to condemnation by Act of Parliament.”[325]

Somewhat later, from this verb use of FIDDLE to mean ‘buy cheap, sell dear’, emerged a noun use of FIDDLE to mean, according to 1891: FARMER and HENLEY, “one sixteenth part of a pound”, a use again restricted to the London Stock Exchange.[326] This rather curious amount of 1s 3d (yet not quite so arcane when it is remembered that pounds sterling were then commonly divided into “crowns” worth 5s., and “half-crowns”, worth 2s 6d) may have recalled the much older FIDDLER’S MONEY (“small change, small silver coins”),[327] now applied to the profits from crafty speculation rather than to the earnings from providing a night’s music.[328]

This final particularised and specialised path-breaking “crucial extension” was relatively rapidly universalised to the stage at which, by 1850, the new (yet still specialised sense) had currency on London’s street markets as well as on its stockmarket. 1891: FARMER and HENLEY, for example, quote this meaning for FIDDLING (and note the new demoted use of ‘trifle’):

“1850. Lloyd’s Weekly, 3 Feb. ‘low lodging houses of London.’ I live on 2s a week from thieving, because I understand FIDDLING - that means, buying a thing for a mere trifle, and selling it for double, or for more, if you’re not taken in yourself.”[329]

But this cultural universalisation was speedily accompanied by a semantic specialisation. One use recorded by Henry Mayhew was contained in a description given him by an informant of a racket in which the “leading mob” were “gypsies”. An early form of crystal ball was a “small glass globe filled full of water”. Armed with one, “the way the globe man does is to go among the old women and fiddle (humbug) them”, chiefly, it would appear, by pretending to see recipient-designed tall dark strangers in the watery depths.[330]

But this, too, is a specialised use (albeit another one), although it is apparently universal. The first proper basis for eventual generalised and universalised use is found in Volume III of London Labour and the London Poor, and is taken from another informants’ description of the hopefully equal sharing by the owner’s wife of the takings from the audience to a day’s street entertainment provided by a small troupe of clowns:

“‘The scene of sharing at the drum-head is usually this, - while the last performance is going on the missus counts up the money; and she is supposed to bring in all the money she has taken, but that we don’t know, and we are generally fiddled most tremendous.’”[331]

Note here how the use of the word has moved from covering specific speculations to general commercial peculations.[332] In reaching this last major milestone in the word’s life - FIDDLE, ‘to cheat, within some other legitimate activity’[333] - the path there may well have been smoothed by possible connections with previous crucial extensions of the word’s sense.[334] Yet more important is the use of the word FIDDLE, rather than any other new or existing word to refer to these activities, was the unique stability which flowed from the combination of its idiosyncratic semantic trajectory (in particular, the heavy connotations with ‘triviality’; and the connections with the original sense of ‘trifle’) and the uniquely novel activities it was co-opted to refer to.

Minor embezzlement a “novel activity”? In a very special, yet unusually wholly neglected sense, that is precisely what embezzlement became during the latter part of the eighteenth, and first half of the nineteenth century. This is an unconventional view. More commonly, it is asserted that FIDDLING (in this sense) has a much longer history that I would allow, one stretching back almost, as a “custom from time immemorial”.[335] Indeed, evidence apparently in support of this is mustered ably by Henry:

“the hidden economy is not new. Its history can be traced back to the thirteenth century, when it appears to have been much the same as it is today. According to Jerome Hall, fiddles of ‘office’ are probably the oldest crimes in history.”[336]

Yet while Henry extends the adequate list provided by Hall, he neglects to include the sentence with which Hall concluded his own little potted history, and which I find most crucial. It was:

“But while the idea of embezzlement is ancient, and instances of its incidence continuous in the Criminal Law, legal control of the type of criminal behaviour which has become a commonplace in modern times - the violation of private financial trust - dates definitely from the eighteenth century.”[337]

In essence, Hall’s point was (and he makes it himself) that while “violation of public trust is probably one of the oldest notions in history”, it was the “false report rather than conversion” which was “the gist of the crime”.[338] Thus, the element of the action of embezzlement which was punishable was that of perjury, and not that of theft. This represents a crucial criminological distinction: that between an act, which may be seen as “a succession of biophysical events”; and an action, which is “an act considered in the perspective in which it has meaning for the actor.”[339]

Whilst an act, such as one of embezzlement, may apparently be identified adequately by the recognition of the presence of observable characteristics, this is in itself (and criminologically) utterly meaningless. So, allow another distinction. this time between act meaning - “the meaning of the act to the actor”, and action meaning - “its meaning to us as scientists, taking the action as subject matter.”[340] Kaplan, who makes the distinction, then continues:

“a particular act may have a variety of act meanings, and so constitute correspondingly different actions... On the other hand, a variety of acts may have the same meaning and so constitute the same action.”

To employ this, it is only necessary to recognise here that the act of embezzlement may well have had a consistent and long behavioural history, but that this itself does not permit observers to give instances, isolated by centuries of societal upheaval and separated by cultures chasms apart, a similar name. Yet this occurs. As Kaplan put it:

“it is often tacitly assumed that as soon as we understand the act, we have thereby arrived at an understanding of the action.”[341]

And this is precisely the achilles’ heel of the “custom from time immemorial” view of FIDDLING. The alternative, and the one espoused here, is that the action meaning of embezzlement (whatever its act meaning) changed dramatically and rapidly during the period latterly under review, 1703-1861. From possessing the action meaning of perjury, as it had for some time; it took on instead, and would possess thereafter, the action meaning of theft. In the interim, as Hall puts it:

“For, during this period, as we have seen, except for the emerging rule regarding theft by a servant (based upon his having mere custody), the common law recognised no criminality in a person who came legally into possession of property and later converted it. Apparently, it was thought that the owner should have protected himself by selecting a trustworthy person. Since, presumably, this could readily be done, the owner must have been negligent if he delivered his property to a person who absconded with it... In the absence of any other even remotely relevant sanction in the criminal law, the only choice was - guilty of larceny or not guilty of any offense.”[342]

“The only choice” supplied by the law had been adequate until novel property control problems began to present themselves during the enormous burgeoning of commerce which accompanied the demise of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. In particular, Hall singles out the demand for new law which came with, “the familiar concomitants of business enterprise - the use of large amounts of capital and of credit facilities, the appearance of numerous middlemen, a division of labour, the employment of hundreds of persons by single firms, and the growth of industrial urban areas which penetrated into the rural districts.” Hall then concludes, “the need for regulation and for raising the standards of honesty resulted from the increasing necessity of the merchants to rely upon professional carriers rather than upon their own servants.”[343]

The metaphoric growth of commerce to the point where middlemen became a vital link in the chain of profit, and the literal expansion of commerce on the highways, produced two sorts of problems. Attacks on middlemen and “attacks” by middlemen (on the merchandise). The extraordinary success of a succession of ever-more draconian vagrancy statutes introduced particularly between 1530 and 1571 yet remaining in force until 1743, is well documented elsewhere,[344] and testifies to an adequate solution to the first problem. The second problem was not as easily dealt with.

Admittedly, the law supplied some relief here in the judgement which concluded the ancient Carrier’s Case of 1473, (before which someone in legal possession of goods - as a servant might be - could not be guilty of theft even if the goods were converted), and which founded the critical distinction between custody and possession;[345] a ruling slightly extended, albeit with exceptions, in an Act of 1529.[346] Yet, overall, the supply of law was increasingly inadequate; and even when its invocation might be appropriate, it was inevitably accompanied either by punishments of bloody and counter-productive severity (such as death), or by automatic defeat through the invocation of Benefit of Clergy which was, by 1706, widely extended.[347]

It was thus a combination of the ineffectiveness and inappropriateness of existing law, which drove the control of embezzlement from the public to the private sphere.[348] Granted, the law eventually returned to this problem of control: but it is fair to conclude that control was never fully returned (by employers) to the law. Indeed, the law turned its attention to this increasingly recognised problem initially with three piecemeal, minor and special embezzlement statutes in 1742, 1751 and 1765; which were restricted in scope to the control of Bank of England employees, South Sea Company employees and Post Office employees, respectively.[349]

It was not until 1799 that a general embezzlement statute was passed, but even that only applied to servants and clerks.[350] In fact, after 1812 when a stockbroker, acting as an agent converted a large sum,[351] it took several additional statutes to extend adequately the scope of embezzlement.[352] And complementing this increased effectiveness of the law were several successful attempts to mitigate the awesome severity of the customary punishments of death, or, at best, transportation. Hall summarises, “by 1860 over one hundred and ninety capital penalties had been eliminated,” and, at last, the law returned to synchrony with the demands of business.[353]

So, the period which witnessed the cultural spread of FIDDLING from Defoe’s stockmarket of 1703 to Mayhew’s streetmarket of 1861, and which egged on the semantic extension from one specialised type of cheating to other, more generalised forms, was also the period in which a third formal “choice” presented itself. Now lying between “guilty of larceny or not guilty of any offense” were a clutch of fresh statutes, and an almost infinite variety of highly flexible and relatively trivial imprisonment options which could discipline wayward employees without despatching them; discourage others rather than drive them from the labour market; and ultimately (and suarely in Capital’s best interests) patrol trade’s boundaries without impeding its progress. Thus, between outright serious theft, and outright trivial innocence, grew the curious, paradoxical category of trivial theft. This is were fiddling comes from.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Epilogue

Others tell a different tale. From alternative accounts, one may choose either a much earlier development of the sense “to cheat” for FIDDLE, or a much later borrowing from America. Neither stands up very well to extended scrutiny, yet the first is rather more difficult to despatch than the second.

Indeed, supporting the idea that FIDDLE developed the key sense nearly a century earlier than I would allow (by at least 1604 rather than 1703) is its use in Thomas Dekker’s play, The Honest Whore:

“Duke. Did any hand work in this theft but yours?

Mat. O, yes, my Lord, yes: - the Hangman has neuer one Soone at a birth, his Children alwaies come by couples: Tho I cannot giue the old dog, my Father, a bone to gnaw, the daughter shall bee sure of a Choke-peare. -- Yes, my Lord, there was one more than fiddled my fine Pedlars, and that was my wife.”[354]

This would appear to use FIDDLE for theft, and indeed that is 1901: O.E.D.’s opinion. Yet without going too deeply into this play, it should be acknowledged that whilst a robbery is being discussed, the speaker, Matheo, was also accusing his wife, Bellafront, of being Hippolito’s mistress. Since the latter is the key theme of the play, it is equally likely that the word is being used as an oblique sexual referent, and thus in a sense well established for the period.

Offering indirect support for this interpretation is the fact the prolific Dekker does not use the word FIDDLE for theft in any other of his works (although he uses the word);[355] and when he discusses theft, in three extracts devoted to a detailed account of urban and rural villainy in the Elizabethan period,[356] even by “Jinglers”, or horsedealers who artfully repaint tastelessly coloured horses for resale and, in dealing with whom, the buyer must take care that “he be not cozened with an overprice for a bad pennyworth,”[357] nowhere does he use the word FIDDLE in this sense.

In this reluctance, Dekker joined the other serious pamphleteers of his time. Walker, in a mid-sixteenth century discussion of gambling, refers to the fact that “sleight and crafty deceit was practised in play”,[358] but does not refer to it as FIDDLING. Greene, in a series of pamphlets,[359] similarly shies from the word. Even when discussing coal-dealers, notorious for defrauding their customers,[360] to the extent that “they got an intolerable gains by their false measure,”[361] the word FIDDLE never appears. And neither does it in Rid, Fennor (who recalls “a trick to worm me out of my money”), Harman or Awdeley.[362]

This resistance to the word also extended into the most notable tracts of the eighteenth century, where it is not to be found either.[363] In addition it is plausible to suggest that the modern claims assenting that sixteenth century minstrels FIDDLED their audiences in a criminal as well as a musical way are merely erroneous.[364] Yet the strongest argument against an earlier development of the sense, “to cheat”, is that such a meaning appears in no dictionary until 1860.

Unfortunately, and now turning to the second alternative account, even that entry is suspect, as is its ultimate source. For it appears in 1860: HOTTEN, yet not in 1859: HOTTEN. The “it” is the entry, “FIDDLER, a sharper, cheat”.[365] This was not particularly contentious. It was the addition, in 1925 [HOTTEN] of the words, “a sharper, ‘a street mugger’. In America, a swindle or an imposture”, that creates difficulties. The use of the word “mugger” provides its own problems,[366] but I am only concerned with the idea that FIDDLE in this sense is a loan-word from America.

And such a passage is most unlikely as USUK borrowings are rare before 1870,[367] a time at which FIDDLE was already established in Britain in the cricial sense that interests me. Additionally, it should be recognised that HOTTEN is not considered to be an accurate compilation, with Aydelottle, for one, claiming that it is “full of mistakes”.[368] Perhaps the most likely explanation is that Hotten confused one of the small-con games (in which a cheap and nasty violin plays a cheap and nasty role), wherein a FIDDLE is a musical instrument and not a deception;[369] and thus, the claim that we inhereit FIDDLE in this sense from one of the colonies should be treated with great suspicion.

Implications: A General Approach?

“we cannot begin to decide the past meanings until we develop some of the skills of the ethnographer as well as the historian, and combine these in a coherent method.”[370]

History and Criminology have always flirted with each other. More recently, each has begun again to snuffle excitedly around the other’s qualifications. Whilst the eternal hope is for “some painless form of symbiosis”,[371] the endless reality more closely resembles hurtful and mutually barbaric penetration, and an ultimately “unhealthy relationship”.[372] Perhaps this is because, in the attempts to put something together, the least attractive elements of each have been on show. The shotgun marriage has ignored the phenomenal essence of criminology, and allowed the disreputable end of history (its “criminological” deductions) to be elevated to nauseous pre-eminence.[373]

The careful merger proposed here attempts to select the best rather than the worst features of each to guarantee the survival of the unity. A new form, if you like, of “natural” selection, taking criminology’s induced meanings and history’s documentary precision. The ultimate validity of the attempt I leave for others to judge. It may help, however, if I briefly and finally point to some features of the procedure which hint at a utility wider than the parochial and personal use of it made here.

Firstly, modern etymology is at least a record. If only of the results and timing of historical and societal change, rather than of the forces responsible. Indeed, modern etymological uniquely provides this record, in the sense that it represents, as Malkiel has claimed:

“a scrupulously calculated, elastic approach, an effort cautiously to fill a gap in our information starting from facts solidly established, to reconstruct the blurred part of an uninterrupted line by examing with utmost care the segments preserved. The etymologist tentatively projects into the remote past the antecedants of an accessible record of the observable behaviour of a word throughout a historical.... stretch of time.... no amount of inferences can quite replace the steady record of a word, within the same speech community, over a period of several centuries.”[374]

Secondly, etymology-based criminology provides a check. A check on the sometimes apparently boundless analytic enthusiasm to ignore (as Strang said of language) the, “variation and change observable at the present time as being evidence of the ceaselessly, oceanically, heaving, swelling, flowing, ungraspable mass that historians corset into manageable chunks onto which quasi-scientific labels can be stuck.”[375] Natural criminology, in this sense, checks the use of concepts to understand the actions of those living in periods which preceeded the origin of the concept. For example, the use of “class” before the late eighteenth century,[376] or of “labour aristocracy” before the middle of the nineteenth.[377]

Gross errors such as this, referred to as “the semantic trap of presuming a constant reality because of a constant word” by Sidney Pollard,[378] may easily be avoided if a dictionary is present. Additionally, whilst the check natural criminology provies is in some senses a negative one[379] - it tells us when not why; and that whilst a sense (or a word) has currency after a dateable point not whether or not it had an unnoticed one earlier than that - it may well add what Williams refers to as an “extra edge of consciousness”. Here are his words in full:

“the variations and confusions of meaning are not just faults in a system, or errors of feedback, or deficiencies of education. They are in many cases, in my terms, historical and contemporary substance. Indeed, they have often, as variations, to be insisted upon, just because they embody different experiences and readings of experience, and this will continue to be true, in active relationships and conflicts, over and above the clarifying exercises of scholars or committees. What can really be contributed is not resolution but perhaps, at times, just that extra edge of consciousness.”[380]

Thirdly, finally, and most importantly, natural criminology offers a model capable of satisfying the “need for a sense of history” which has been called for.[381] Careful inductive plotting of the trajectories of key words,[382] paying particular attention to the perjorative or ameliorative profiles they represent over the shoulder of the present,[383] can reveal the actual, rather than merely supposed, linkage between class and crime. Why, for example, is crime a criminological perogative of the working class. At one level, the answer lies in:

“the word villain, or villein. This term, as everybody knows, had in the middle ages, a connotation as strictly defined as a word could, being the proper legal designation for those persons who were the subjects of the less onerous forms of feudal bondage. The scorn of the semibarbarous military aristocracy for these their abject dependents, rendered the act of likening any person to this class of men a mark of the greatest contumely: the same scorn led them to ascribe to the same people of all manner of hateful qualities, which doubtless also, in the degrading situation in which they were held, were often not unjustly imputed to them. These circumstances, combined to attach to the term villain, ideas of crime and guilt, in so forcible a manner, that the application of the epithet even to those whom it legally belonged became an affront was intended. From that time guilt was part of the connotation; and soon became the whole of it, since mankind were not prompted by any urgent motive to continue making a distinction in their language between bad men of servile station and bad men of any othe rank in life.”[384]

Other semantic members of the working class family have suffered a similar self-validating fate. A clown was once an honourable rural man; a blackguard once a kitchen servant with special responsibility for keeping the hearth spotlessly black; a knave, merely a youth; a scavenger, an inspector, a cadger, a dairy products transporter; a cheater, a legal clerk; a brigand, a foot soldier, and so on.[385]

Our history is locked up right here. In the words we use now. It is in this way that natural criminology holds the key to unlock those meanings life had in the past. The data for an acceptable history lies in the language we use today. Yet natural language cannot lie to the extent that the collections of highly selectively preserved and possibly fraudulently produced conventional “records” do. Rather than wring arbitrary theoretical constructions from the latter - as do historians of every shade - better to rely upon the more limited inductive knowledge hanging from those little planted histories potted in words.

Natural criminology may not produce an analysis which is most persuasive or effective, or which is either aesthetically or pedagogically most convenient or satisfactory. But it is an accurate, if limited one. Its denial of dogmatism consequently restores what Rock calls the “soverignty of the phenomenal world” to the past.[386] By giving the data active and full, rather than passive and partial status, it allows the world a determining role in its own analysis, rather than merely an exemplary one in the seemingly endless reduplication and republication of a tired, deductive, self-professed “marxist” position. It is in this way that the etymologist is the desk-bound partner of the stree-wise ethnographer. Malkiel has thus described the etymologist.:

“though sophisticated in his approach to language, he should, ideally, preserve a high degree of naivete in his vision of the outside world which, like a versatile actor, he must view alternately with the eyes of hunters, fishermen, tillers, herdsmen, soldiers, waiters, vendors, and other humble professions.”[387]

Both are natural criminologists. Both pursue common meanings. Both are open to their creative analytic potential. Neither must go native: both must remain naive. Thus the worlds of the past and the present open themselves to the analyses of those prepared to view each, and constantly, as strange.

A ChronologicalL of Dictionaries

1604: CAWDREY A Table Alphabetical of Hard Usual English Words, J. Cawdrey; London; E. Weaver; 1604.

1616: BULLOKAR An English Expositor, J. Bullokar; London; J. Legatt; 1616.

1623: COCKERAM The English Dictionary: Or, an Interpreter of Hard English Words, [12th Edn.; 1658] H. Cockeram; London; A.M.; 1623.

1656: BLOUT Glossographia, T. Blout; London; T. Newcomb; 1656.

1658: PHILLIPS The New World of English Words, E. Phillips; London; N. Brooke; 1658

1659: SOMNER Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, W. Somner; London; D. White; 1659.

1676: COLES An English Dictionary, E. Coles; London; S. Crouch; 1676.

1689: Anon. Gazophylacium Anglicanum: Containing the Derivation of English Words, Proper and Common, Anon.; London; E.H. and W.H.; 1689.

1690: B.E. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, B.E. (Gent); London; W. Hawes; 1690.

1704: COCKER Cocker’s English Dictionary, E. Cocker; London; J. Hawkins; 1704.

1707: Anon. Glossographia Anglicana Nova: Or a Dictionary Interpreting Such Hard Words of Whatever Language as are at present Used in the English Tongue, Anon.; London; D. Brown; 1707.

1708: KERSEY Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, J. Kersey; London; J. Wile; 1708.

1721: BAILEY A Universal Etymological English Dictionary, N. Bailey; London; J. Darby; 1721.

1730: BAILEY Dictionarium Britannicum: Or a more Compleat Universal Etymological English Dictionary, N. Bailey et al; London; T. Cox; 1730.

1735: DYCHE & PARDON A New General English Dictionary, T. Dyche and W. Pardon; London; R. Wave; 1735.

1753: Anon. A Pocket Dictionary; or, Complete English Expositor, Anon; London; T. Carman and F. Newberry; 1735.

1755: JOHNSON A Dictionary of the English Language, S. Johnson; London; Strachan; 1755.

1783: LEMON English Etymology; Or, a Derivative Dictionary of the English Language, G.W. Lemon; London; G. Robinson, 1783.

1785: GROSE A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, F. Grose; London; S. Hooper; 1785.

1797: SHERIDAN Dictionary of the English Language, T. Sheridan; London; C. Dilly; 1797.

1801: MASON A Supplement to Johnson’s English Dictionary, G. Mason; London; C. Roworth; 1801.

1802: WALKER A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language, [1791: 1st Edn.] J. Walker; London; Wilson and Co.; 1802.

1819: WALKER A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, J. Walker; London; A. Wilson; 1819.

1820: JODRELL Philology on the English Language, R.P. Jodrell; London; Cox and Baylis; 1820.

1822: NARES A Glossary; or, Collection of Words, Phrases, Names, and Allusions to Customs, Proverbs, etc. which have been thought to require illustration in the works of English Authors, Particularly Shakespeare, and his Contemporaries, R. Nares; London; R. Triphook; 1822.

1822: OFFER A Dictionary of the English Language, G. Offer and J. Offer et al.; London; Samuel Johnson; 1822.

1826: THOMPSON Etymons of English Words, J. Thompson; Edinburgh; Oliver and Boyd; 1826.

1828: JOHNSON & WALKER Dictionary of the English Language, S. Johnson and J. Walker; London; W. Pickering; 1828.

1832: TOONE A Glossary and Etymological Dictionary of Obsolete and Uncommon Words, W. Toone; London; W. Pickering; 1832.

1835: KNOWLES A Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language, J. Knowles; London; de Porquet and Cooper; 1835.

1836: RICHARDSON A New Dictionary of the English Language, C. Richardson; London; W. Pickering; 1836.

1836: SMART A New Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language, B.H. Smart; London; T. Cadell; 1836.

1844: OGILVIE The Comprehensive English Dictionary: Explanatory, Pronouncing and Etymological, J. Ogilvie; London; Blackie and Son; 1844.

1847: CRAIG A New Universal Etymological and Pronouncing Dictionary, of the English Language, J. Craig; London; J. Gilbert, 1847.

1848: HALLIWELL A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, J.C. Halliwell; London; J. Russell Smith; 1848.

1857: WRIGHT Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English, T. Wright; London; H.G. Bolin; 1857.

1859: BARTLETT Dictionary of Americanisms, J.R. Bartlett; Boston; Little, Brown; 1859.

1859: WORCESTER A Dictionary of the English Language, J.E. Worcester; London; Sampson Low; 1852.

1859: HOTTEN A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words, J.C. Hotten; London; Hotten; 1859.

1860: HOTTEN A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulger Words, [2nd Edn.; Revised with 2,000 Additional words] J.C. Hotten; London; Hotten; 1860.

1862: WEDGEWOOD A Dictionary of English Etymology, H. Wedgewood; London; Trubner and Co; 1862.

1866: LATHAM A Dictionary of the English Language, R.G. Latham; London; Longmans Green; 1866.

1866: WHEATLEY A Dictionary of Reduplicated Words in the English Language, H.B. Wheatley; London; Asher & Co.; 1866.

1867: DONALD Chamber’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, J. Donald; London; W. & R. Chambers; 1867.

1873: FERGUSON The Dialect of Cumberland, R. Ferguson; London; Williams and Norgate; 1873.

1874: HALLIWELL A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, [Vol.I] J.O. Halliwell; London; J. Russell Smith; 1874.

1877: MACKAY The Gaelic Etymology of the English Language, C. Mackay; London; N. Trubner and Co.; 1877.

1882: ANNANDALE The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language, C. Annandale; London; Blackie & Son; 1882.

1882: SKEAT An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Walter W. Skeat; Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1882.

1882: SMYTHE PALMER Folk Etymology: A Dictionary, A. Smythe Palmer; London; G. Bell & Sons; 1882.

1883: SMITH Glossary of Terms and Phrases, H.P. Smith; London; Kegan, Paul, Trench & Co.; 1883.

1885: LONGMUIR Jamieson’s Dictionary of the Scottish Language, J. Longmuir; London; W.P. Nimmo; 1885.

1889: CASSELL The Encyclopaedic Dictionary, _______; London; Cassell & Co.; 1889.

1889: FARMER Americanisms Old and New, J.S. Farmer; London; T. Poulter; 1889.

1889: WHITNEY The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, W.O. Whitney; London; T. Fisher Unwin; 1889.

1891: FARMER & HENLEY Slang and its Analogues: Past and Present, J.S. Farmer and W.E. Henley; ___; [Privately Published]; 1891.

1894: BREWER The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer; London; Cassel, Petter and Galpin; 1894.

1897: BARRÉRE & LEYLAND A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant, A. Barrére and C.G. Leyland; London; Bell; 1897.

1899: FUNK A Standard Dictionary of the English Language, I.K. Funk; London; Funk and Wagnalls; 1899.

1900: WRIGHT The English Dialect Dictionary, [Vol. II]; J. Wright; London; H. Frowde; 1900.

1901: O.E.D. Oxford English Dictionary, ___; Oxford; Clarendon Press; 1933. [Vol. IV, published 1901; Section ‘F’ prepared, 1895].

1910: SKEAT An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, [4th Edn.]; W.W. Skeat; Oxford; Clarendon Press; 1910.

1912: KIRKPATRICK Handbook of Idiomatic English: As Now Written and Spoken, Containing Idioms, Phrases and Locutions, J. Kirkpatrick; Paris; Boyvean and Chevillet; 1912.

1912: THORNTON An American Glossary, R.H. Thornton; London; Francis & Co.; 1912.

1914: SKEAT AND MAYHEW A Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Words, W.W. Skeat and A.L. Mayhew; Oxford; Clarendon; 1914.

1921: WEEKLEY An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, E. Weekley; London; J. Murray; 1921.

1925: HARGRAVE Origins and Meanings of Popular Phrases and Names, [Revised Edn.] B. Hargrave; London; T.W. Laurie; 1925.

1925: [HOTTEN] The Slang Dictionary: Etymological, Historical and Anecdotal, [J.C. Hotten] London; Chatto and Windus; 1925.

1930: MENCKEN The American Language, [3rd Edn.] H.L. Mencken; New York; A. Knopf; 1930.

1931: IRWIN American Tramp and Underworld Slang, G. Irwin; London; Scholartis Press; 1931.

1934: WESEEN A Dictionary of American Slang, M.H. Weseen; London; G.G. Harrap & Co; 1934.

1937: PARTRIDGE A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, E. Partridge; London; Routledge; 1937.

1941: WEBSTER Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, N. Webster; London; G. Bell and Sons; 1941.

1942: BERRY & VAN DEN BARK The American Thesaurus of Slang, L.V. Berry and M. Van Den Bark; London; Constable; 1942.

1944: WENTWORTH American Dialect Dictionary, H. Wentworth; New York; T. Crowell; 1944.

1945: RADFORD Crowther's Encyclopedia of Phrases and Origins, E. Radford; London; J. Crowther; 1945.

1946: SMITH & O’LOUGHLIN Odhams Dictionary of the English Language, A.H. Smith and J.L.N. O’Loughlin; London; Odhams; 1946.

1948: MENCKEN The American Language, [Supplement II] H.L. Mencken; London; R.K.P.; 1948.

1948: PARTRIDGE A Dictionary of Forces’ Slang, 1939-1945, E. Partridge et al.; London; Secker and Warburg; 1948.

1949: PARTRIDGE A Dictionary of the Underworld, E. Partridge; London; Routledge; 1949.

1950: SCOTT Swan’s Anglo-American Dictionary, G.R. Scott; London; G.G. Swan; 1950.

1952: KURATH & KUHN Middle English Dictionary, H. Kurath and S.M. Kuhn; Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press; 1952.

1956: GRANT & MURISON The Scottish National Dictionary [Vol. IV] W. Grant and D.D. Murison; Edinburgh; Scottish National Dictionary Association; 1956.

1957: ZANDVOORT Wartime English: Materials for a Linguistic History of World War II, R.W. Zandroovt; J.B. Wolters; Groningen; 1957.

1958: PARTRIDGE Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, E. Partridge; London; R.K.P.; 1958.

1965: FOWLER A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, H.W. Fowler; Oxford; Clarendon Press; 1965.

1966: KLEIN A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, E. Klein; Amsterdam, Elsevier; 1966.

1966: ONIONS The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, C.T. Onions; Oxford, Clarendon; 1966.

1970: FINKENSTAEDT, et.al. A Chronological English Dictionary, T. Finkenstaedt, E. Leisi, and D. Wolff; Heidelberg; Carl Winter; 1970.

1970: FRANKLYN A Dictionary of Rhyming Slang, J. Franklyn; London; R.K.P.; 1970.

1972: O.E.D. Oxford English Dictionary, [Supplement] [Vol. I] ___; Oxford, Clarendon Press; 1972.

1972: PARTRIDGE The Penguin Dictionary of Historical Slang, E. Partridge; Hammondsworth; Penguin; 1972.

1972: ZVIADADZE A Dictionary of Modern American and British English, G. Zviadedze; Georgia (USSR); Tbilisi State University Press; 1972.

1978: WEBSTER Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language [ 2nd Edn.] N. Webster; U.S.A.; Collins World; 1978.

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