antelope
– a hog (ironic: “a hog’s ugliness and clumsiness are contrasted with an antelope’s beauty and grace”).
antelope lay
– hog stealing.
Image by johnmuk via Flickr
Sources
Barnes, Daniel R. “An Early American Collection of Rogue’s Cant.” The Journal of American Folklore 79, no. 314 (Oct.-Dec., 1966), 600-607.
Partridge, Eric. A Dictionary of the Underworld. New York: [...]
Sometime around midnight on June 10, 1664, Arthur Nottool, a tailor by trade and a servant living in Abington Cliffs, broke into the house of John Hunt of Eltonhead Manor in Calvert County, Maryland. Poking around in the dark, Nottool spotted an open trunk and removed a shirt from it. He also spied a gun, [...]
A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States by Stephen Mihm (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 457 pp.
Counterfeiting was widespread during the early history of the United States. Some estimates from the time claimed that between ten and fifty percent of the circulating currency was counterfeit. Such high [...]
