The words that are rolling off your tongue at this moment have a criminal record.
It’s not even a figurative expression. It’s literal. An extensive portion of the English language spoken in the United States today can be traced directly back to cheats, crooks, hustlers, and thieves in the eighteenth and nineteenth century individuals who needed a language that only they could understand. They created a secret language. But somehow, it became public.
Here’s the strange part: most of the phrases on this list don’t feel like slang at all anymore. They feel like plain English. That’s exactly what makes them fascinating.
The Con Man’s Contribution
Words have as much of a dark history as you do.
The very word “con” was handed down to us by the underworld. “Con” is simply an abbreviation for “confidence,” but it found its way into our language through one specific con game that was common in the nineteenth century. This involved first persuading your victim to have confidence in you before he tried to take advantage of him. The confidence man eventually became a “con man” or, more briefly, a “con.” You can apply the term to a con artist on the automobile lot or in politics.
“Sting” followed a similar path. Originally a term used within criminal circles to describe the moment a scheme paid off, the moment the mark handed over the money, it eventually slipped into broader use. Now it describes police operations, poker bluffs, and plot twists in heist films. The criminals coined it. Hollywood borrowed it. America kept it.
Card Tables and Crooked Dice
The origin of the phrases you used is as dark as the soul from which they came.
Gamblers and cheats used words to communicate among themselves without alerting either the house or the mark. The phrase “ace in the hole” originated in stud poker, where the hole card was the card placed face down in the deck. If that card turned out to be an ace, then the gambler possessed an invisible advantage over others. The phrase found its way out of the saloon and into the boardroom.
Your words are as dark in their history as your soul.
“Welshing,” which means to renege on an obligation, has an obscure and controversial origin, but most traces point to the gambling world, particularly the realm of horse racing and bookmaking. “Loaded dice,” meanwhile, refers to dice used by gamblers to rig the game, where “loaded” referred to their rigged nature. This term has been extended to include any kind of unfair advantage.
Pickpockets and Street Hustlers
“Sucker” is slang for someone who can be fooled. Suckers were people who could be duped; they took the bait. Suckers were a common term among carnies and shell game operators to refer to an easy mark. It has become such a common word that it is even used in children’s literature.
The words coming out of your mouth right now have a criminal background.
“Mark,” too, does not come out clean. “Mark” can be traced back to the person being swindled, possibly because the old swindlers had a special way of marking someone’s clothing or location, which their colleagues would know as their next mark. The term is casually applied in games such as baseball and in business, but few people give it a second thought.
The origin of “shakedown” can be traced back to extortion. It was known as a shakedown when extortionists forced someone to pay them for whatever reason. The process itself, which involved shaking them until money came loose, earned the name shakedown.
These words that flow out of your mouth right now have a criminal history of their own.
The Dictionary of Outlaws
“Fence,” in noun form referring to a dealer of stolen property, is an age-old criminal word. So complete was the transference of the word that it has come to be used in general parlance, such as “sitting on the fence,” with no knowledge of the fact that it originated in a context related to crime syndicates.
“Casing a joint,” referring to a preliminary reconnaissance of a place to be robbed, led to the verb form “to case,” which only denotes the action of making an examination of something. Detectives “case” places; tourists “case” places; realtors “case” places.
The origins of “throw someone under the bus” are even more unclear, but linguists have documented its evolution within the criminal and political subcultures of the twentieth century, where betrayal to the authorities for your own gain was a realistic method of survival long before it became business jargon.
How about “the whole nine yards”? It’s still being debated. It’s also still intriguing. Possible explanations include cartridges, fabric lengths, or building supplies, all of which share a link to underground economies. No one has pinned down a definitive origin yet, and that alone suggests that it wasn’t born out of mainstream history.
Why the Underworld Wins at Language
That’s why criminal lingo inevitably makes its way into regular English. The people who operate on the fringes of society have the closest connection with language. Each word is a weapon. Accuracy is crucial. Ambiguity is intentional; the value of language which says one thing to insiders and innocuous words to others cannot be overstated.
When such language gets through to us, it brings power with it. It’s vivid. It’s condensed. It does more per syllable than normal language ever manages. “Sting” works better than “elaborate fraud.” “Mark” beats out “intended victim.” “Con” is better than “confidence-based deception scheme.”
Criminals didn’t just break laws. They broke the language open and handed us better words for it.
The next time someone tells you to “play it straight,” know that the phrase implies the existence of playing it crooked, and the people who invented that framing weren’t exactly model citizens.
This article was created with AI assistance and reviewed by Charlotte Dayes, author at NewsDailys. The review included fact-checking, clarity edits, and sourcing of images.
