MUG, a face, is derived by Mr Wedgwood from the Italian MOCCA, a mocking or apish mouth (Dictionary of English Etymology), but in English Gipsy we have not only mui, meaning the face, but the older forms from which the English word was probably taken, such as Mak’h (Paspati), and finally the Hindustani Mook and the Sanskrit Mukha, mouth or face (Shakespeare, Hind.  Dic., p. 745).  In all cases where a word is so “slangy” as mug, it seems more likely that it should have been derived from Rommany than from Italian, since it is only within a few years that any considerable number of the words of the latter language was imparted to the lower classes of London.

BAMBOOZLE, BITE, and SLANG are all declared by the author of the Slang Dictionary to be Gipsy, but, with the exception of the last word, I am unable to verify their Rommany origin.  Bambhorna does indeed mean in Hindustani (Brice), “to bite or to worry,” and bamboo-bakshish to deceive by paying with a whipping, while swang, as signifying mimicking, acting, disguise and sham, whether of words or deeds, very curiously conveys the spirit of the word slang.  As for bite I almost hesitate to suggest the possibility of a connection between it and Bidorna, to laugh at.  I offer not only these three suggested derivations, but also most of the others, with every reservation.  For many of these words, as for instance bite, etymologists have already suggested far more plausible and more probable derivations, and if I have found a place for Rommany “roots,” it is simply because what is the most plausible, and apparently the most probable, is not always the true origin.  But as I firmly believe that there is much more Gipsy in English, especially in English slang and cant, than the world is aware of, I think it advisable to suggest what I can, leaving to abler philologists the task of testing its value.

Writers on such subjects err, almost without an exception, in insisting on one accurately defined and singly derived source for every word, when perhaps three or four have combined to form it.  The habits of thought and methods of study followed by philologists render them especially open to this charge.  They wish to establish every form as symmetrical and mathematical, where nature has been freakish and bizarre.  Some years ago when I published certain poems in the broken English spoken by Germans, an American philologist, named Haldemann, demonstrated to his own satisfaction that the language which I had put into Hans Breitmann’s mouth was inaccurate, because I had not reduced it to an uniform dialect, making the same word the same in spelling and pronunciation on all occasions, when the most accurate observation had convinced me, as it must any one, that those who have only partially learned a language continually vary their methods of uttering its words.