Argot  

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  1. A secret language or conventional slang peculiar to thieves, tramps, and vagabonds.
  2. The specialized informal vocabulary and terminology used between people with special skill in a field, such as between doctors, mathematicians or hackers; a jargon.
    The conversation was in the argot of the trade, full of acronyms and abbreviations that made no sense to the uninitiate.

Argot (French and Spanish for "slang") is primarily slang used by various groups, including but not limited to thieves and other criminals, to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations.

Victor Hugo was one of the first to research argot extensively [1]. He describes it in his novel, Les Misérables, as the language of the dark; at one point, he says, "What is argot; properly speaking? Argot is the language of misery."

Bruce Sterling defines argot as "the deliberately hermetic language of a small knowledge clique... a super-specialized geek cult language that has no traction in the real world." For example: "He philosophized and recited baseball statistics in a Brooklyn argot that was fast-fading."

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See also





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Argot" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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