Transparency may be a goal within global governance, but some nations clearly pick and choose. Or indeed those involving dark diplomacy. These private lexicons are of course light years away from the languages of closed priesthoods such as spies, Freemasons, or the Magic Circle. When a paramedic blues a patient into hospital with GCS 3 and possible ETOH (a ranking on the Glasgow Coma Scale thanks to potential alcohol poisoning), or a cyclist soothes an “endo” (a head-first plunge over the handlebars) with some vitamin I (ibuprofen), they are each dipping into a standard protocol that is swift, succinct, and pragmatic. Any group united by a profession, passion, or family will have their own tribal language. Often of course, the coded lingo is our own, only we fail to realise it’s private at all, in the same way as we always see ourselves as the only ones without an accent. It became less secret thanks to the BBC radio show Round the Horne, featuring the characters Julian and Sandy: “Oh hello Mr Horne, how bona to vada your dolly eek!” (“nice to see your pretty face”). One of these was Polari, a language whose roots included Italian, Romany, and rhyming slang and which offered its speakers both public camouflage and a collective, unifying identifier. Since the 16th century, LGBTQ+ communities have created their own linguistic registers. Some linguistic codes, for all their colour, are more necessary, particularly within marginalised communities who rely on them as markers of identity and community. Appropriately, for butchers, “pig-Latin” was the insider’s code: a complicated business involving words spelled backwards as well as extra syllables tagged on – thus “yennom” was “money”, “fil-heath” a thief, and a “hel-bat” a table. In his 1859 Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words, the lexicographer John Camden Hotten wrote that “the new dead-meat market” was “strongest in the way of pure… back slang”. Nor was it the only covert language of London’s East End. Language has always served the conspirator – a word whose very beginnings lie in the “breathing together”, Latin conspirare, of individuals as they huddle in secrecy. Photo-ops of the two leaders feasting on crab dumplings and shrub sorbet were followed by the enthusiastic pressing of hands and verbal assurances of “unconditional support” – the standard formula that (barely) disguises a multitude of potential sins.Īny mutual machinations behind the scenes were of course entirely hidden from the public ears. If the hugger-muggery we’ve witnessed this week between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un is anything to go by, state-sponsored skulduggery is still very much the name of the game.ĭespite Western efforts to derail the summit by exposing news of it in advance, the talks between Russia and North Korea were clearly successful. A master of negotiation as well as the dark art of propaganda, he was second only to the king in his control of a nation. “Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of state.” The French statesman Cardinal Richelieu, a powerhouse of 17th-century France, knew what it took to achieve dominance. It’s tempting to revive a long-lost word for the Putin-Kim co-operation: ‘uniminacious’, ‘jointly menacing’ (Photo: STR/KCNA/AFP via Getty)
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