The Argot of the Three-Shell Game

Abstract

THERE ARE two distinct phases of argot indigenous to American circuses. The one, used by performers and employees, is really a sort of occupational jargon and has been frequently sampled by students of language. The other, comprising elements of several obscure criminal argots, is almost exclusively the property of the circus-grifters who keep themselves aloof from the other personnel, share their take with the management, and constitute a small, closely-knit social unit within most circuses. These men are specialists in many rackets, each of which has some individual argot of its own. Formerly, these grifters were standard equipment with all road shows; today some of the more progressive circuses have dispensed with the grift as being poor business policy. This study gives a sampling of the technical' argot of the three-shell man, which in turn is only a minor aspect of the large body of the argot of the circus-grifter now under observation by the writer. Everyone has seen the simple-looking little shell-game played at fairs, on circus lots, or on the backstretch at a big racetrack. In recent years, some magicians have studied it as a basis for parlor entertainment. It looks harmless enough-and usually is, except in the hands of specialized grifters, where it can take as much as several thousand dollars a day from a gullible public. It has in it many of the elements of the deadly big-con, and, so far as the psychological factors are concerned, is the great-grand-daddy of modern big-time confidence games. This relationship is borne out by the fact that a whole generation of first-rate big-con men, some of them unsurpassed, got their start on the circus grift and particularly on the three-shell game. Historically this game is very old. We got it from England, where it appears in the i8th century as thimble-rig, played with three thimbles weighted in the top with solder. Some old-timers in this country still refer to three-shell operators as thimble-riggers. However, it was in the United States, during the late g1th and early 2oth centuries that the game was fully developed as an adjunct to the very lucrative circus grift. Recently it