Word of the Day:

“[Lenny] Bruce, born Leonard Alfred Schneider on Long Island, quit school at 16 and got his start telling jokes at a Brooklyn nightclub for $12 a week. … He developed his act in ... jazz joints around Southern California in the mid-1950s. He riffed in a Beatnik argot, and his act took on the flavor of improvisational jazz.” — Christopher Goffard, The Los Angeles Times, 16 Aug. 2026

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English borrowed argot from French in the early 1800s, although the language already had several words basically covering its meaning. Jargon, the Anglo-French ancestor of which meant “twittering of birds,” had been used for specialized (and often obscure or pretentious) vocabulary since the 1600s. There was also lingo, from the Latin word lingua, meaning “language”; that term had been in use for more than a century. English novelist and lawyer Henry Fielding used it of “court gibberish”—what we tend to call legalese. And speaking of legalese, the suffix -ese is a newer means of indicating specialized argot. One of its very first applications at the turn of the 20th century was for “American ‘golfese.’”