The Problems With Colorful Old Slang · 1:55pm Sep 14th, 2016
Faginism, like referring to loan sharks as "shylocks", is colorful, evocative, pungent, and anti-Semitic as all hell. (Check out Will Eisner's Fagin the Jew for a decent treatment of the history of Dickens' character.) But I honestly can not think of a modern slang equivalent to the concept - the idea of criminals recruiting guttersnipes to extend their petty criminal empires. If I'm to take The Wire as gospel -and I know no reason to doubt Simon's account of the phenomenon of "corner boys" - it's a practice which is alive and well in America today. Has the idea of the corruption of youth so faded in today's moral market that we no longer have a reputable term for the disreputable practice? In Dickens' day, the employment of children was legally unworthy of note, so common was it that children worked in shops, worked in factories, worked in coal mines. And yet the Victorian world descended upon the term "faginism" with relish to tut-tut about the employment of children in criminal enterprises. I suppose the outrage laid in the misappropriation of child labor towards illicit ends?
Seriously, the politically correct gangster can refer to shylocks as "loan sharks", what's the equivalent for roping children into apprenticeships in the organized criminal trades?
