On the history of Russian argotism “chuvikha”

Abstract

The study addresses the problem of incompleteness of data on the origin of Russian slang expression chuvikha ‘woman, girl’. It has long been associated with thieves’ cant, in which, according to A. P. Barannikov, the lexeme was gypsyism. Then the gypsy etymology began to be rejected. The purpose of the study is to fill in the gaps in the history of the word chuvikha using the methods of corpus and lexicographic analysis on the material of the Russian National Corpus, the collection of digitized books google.books, the diary service Prozhito.org, dictionaries of secret languages, slang dictionaries, etc. The following conclusions are made. Chuvikha, chuvak and a number of other slang expressions moved into the jargon of so-called stylyags (youth, passionate about Western culture) no later than the early 1950s from the jargon of restaurant musicians, so-called labukhs. Thus, the source of the argotisms of the stylyags was the slang of musicians, not thieves. Further, jargons of restaurant musicians of the 20th century are related with the secret language of orchestral musicians of the 19th century, having common roots with the slang expressions of labukhs, are given in the book. They are also related with other secret languages of the 19th century. The words chuvikha and chuvak are possibly related to the lexem chovy ‘good’, which was used in the secret languages of the 19th century (with a variant of the root chuv-) and in the aforementioned musical jargon of the 1920s as a substantive — the nomination of a person.