Re-encountering the lexicon of delinquency in the first dictionary of Mexicanisms

Abstract

Feliz Ramos i Duarte’s Diccionario de mejicanismos (1895) is a well-known work but still little explored by linguistic historiography. In a previous paper (Buzek and Gazdíková 2017) we studied the argot voices with the l.c. mark ‘prison language’, but our subsequent publications on Mexican slang in the 19th century (Buzek 2018 and Buzek 2019a) have induced us to go back to the source and look for other argot voices, already unaccompanied by that specific mark. We will be interested in their lexicographic treatment, other possible marks they may carry and, above all, in examples and quotations. To identify the argot terms, we will pay attention to the origin of the quotations, as well as to all kinds of information that other dictionaries or vocabularies of Mexican Spanish of that time can provide (Fernández Gordillo 2010a) and that could complete Ramos i Duarte’s data. The history of the Argotic lexicon and its sources in Mexican Spanish have been very little attended to until today, and with this work we want to help fill this knowledge gap.