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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 5874199" data-attributes="member: 14159">I'll admit I was never big into the idea of Thieves Cant in D&D.  The idea that every member of the Thief/Rogue class knew a secret language that let them have an illicit discussion in public while sounding like they were having a mundane conversation nobody else could pick up on just stretched belief for me.DM's usually depicted it as being like two thieves meeting, talking banalities about the weather for a couple of minutes, and they've made a detailed plan for a robbery in that time.  I couldn't wrap my mind around that.Then I saw this news article about Thieves Cant being revived in modern-day England: <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1191475/Convicts-use-ye-olde-slang-fool-guards.html" target="_blank">Convicts use ye olde slang to fool guards | Mail Online</a> . . .with new words added/created to reference modern-day concepts like Phone SIM cards or various drugs.  Prisoners spoke in apparently mundane speech talking about planning visits from the outside, but were scheduling drug shipments, using revived Elizabethan-era cant with some new words added for the modern age.  Prison guards were stunned.  I did some more checking, and while most of the traditional "Thieves Cant" I could find seemed esoteric and strange, I did find this glossary taken from late 18th and early 19th century sources:<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080624185330/http://php.iupui.edu/~asimmon/thief.html" target="_blank">Thieves Cant</a>More specifically, I noticed a number of words in Thieves Cant have the same (or very close) meaning in modern English that they had in the Cant, the words/phrases went mainstream.Hubbub = riotHush money =  bribeFlog = To whipHoodwink = to fool someoneJail bird = a prisonerLift = to steal"left in the lurch" = betrayed by ones companionsMade man = member of a thieves guildNab = To seizePig = Officer of the lawRot gut = cheap liquorShoplifter = thief who steals from shopsSlang = Thieves Cant (We use it for much more now, but it looks like this was an early form of what we now call slang)"I lifted some rotgut, then I had to pay hush money to a pig or he'd nab me and I would end up a jail bird for being a shoplifter" or "Nobody hoodwinks a made man." or "I was really left in the lurch after the hubbub, " are valid sentences in 18th century Thieves Cant. . .which also make complete sense as valid, but informal, expressions with the same or very close to the same meanings in modern 21st century English.(Amusingly, this glossary warns against letting "Children use it in their games" as "the material is of an adult nature" since vocabulary for prostitution is part of the cant, guess the author thought only little kids played D&D)</blockquote>

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