[DIALETTI] - Dizionarietto dell’argot - 1900

The upper-class people like to resort to slang, and those who can be reproached for a certain thing flaunt their ease in talking about it." (Marcel Proust, 'La part de Guermantes') Originally, with the term argot one indicated the speech of the criminal underworld or of the military. Later, argot also developed in other social groups and in every neighborhood, so every environment has its own argot. In practice it is a linguistic register proper to a social group, whose purpose is to exclude outsiders from communication, encoding the messages exchanged. The concept appeared in France in the XIII century, under the name jargon (i.e., jargon). One of the early appearances of argot within a literary text dates to the XV century, thanks to François Villon and his ballads inserted in the Coquillards, which narrated rascals and their slang understandable only thanks to the description of the procedural acts suffered by the criminals. French literature of the following centuries spread mainly the Parisian argot, through the works of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola and many others. The Paris argot remained very lively in the capital until the fifties; the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline used it for his texts until 1961, the year of his death.

United, in homage: two issues of the satirical magazine "Il Male", Year III no. 25 (30/6/1980) and Year III no. 27 (14/7/1980).

Printed manuscript, in-8° (215×160 mm). 95 pages (complete). Clear handwriting on squared paper. Bound in red morocco, belonging to the writer Paolo Valera (Como, 1850 – Milan, 1926).

End of the 19th century – beginning of the 20th century.