It can believed that if some testimonies are taken into account exclusively, namely: an anonymous article published in La Prensa in June 1878, apparently by a police officer; two articles in La Nación signed by Benigno Baldomero Lugones, a writing clerk of the Police Department, in March and April 1879; the book Los hombres de presa(Men of prey), that the criminal investigator Luis María Drago made public in 1888 and, finally, El idioma del delito(The language of crime) of Antonio Dellepiane, edited in 1894.

Both the anonymous journalist of La Prensa, and Lugones, that was a police-officer, and Drago and Dellepiane, that were criminal investigators, had heard this terms –which they started to call lunfardo- from thieves and convicts. Because of that the thought that it was a particular jargon that belonged to “the guild”. And many were those that started to believe, with them, that lunfardo was nothing more nothing less that the language used in prison. For years it was supported that lunfardo was a delinquent technical dialect. Two other policemen, Jose S. Álvarez(Fray Mocho) in Memorias de un vigilante(Memoirs of a watchman) in 1897 and Luis Villamayor in El lenguaje del bajo fondo(The language of the underworld) in 1915, kept on sustaining that lunfardo was a delinquent technical dialect.

Consequently, some specialists have believed or, even worst, keep on believing today in the cryptic nature of this linguistic variety. Contradicting this, Mario Teruggi, author of Panorama del lunfardo, has written in a very enlightening way about the alleged secret character of these terms:

 

The famous secret character of lunfardo(or any other slang) does not stand the slightest analysis, as many serious investigators have proven. A brief reflection suffices to understand that if delinquents had a secret language, only known to them, when using it among strangers or potential victims, they would be in evidence, that is their language would have the opposite function to the one desired, which was to mislead. Any individual that would communicate with terms partly incomprehensible would do no other thing than to call attention on him and would make his intentions suspicious.

Oscar Conde. 

 

Note: This is the second part of an article that we have divided into three parts. You can read the second part here