![]() ![]() He once moved in the world as a gentleman. Bullbean is a man well known to the police as a card-sharper. George Hotspur met two men, named Walker and Bullbean, in the lodgings of the former at about nine in the evening, and remained there during the greater part of the night playing cards. It's from a serial notel by Anthony Trollope, "Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite" (Chapter XXII), Lippincott's Magazine of Literature, Science and Education, Dec. ![]() The next hit from APS, for card-sharper, involves a well-known author, and picks up on the class consciousness implicit in the 1858 quote from Ballou's. ![]() Mountebanks with monkeys, and dancers on stilts Punch-and-Judy men, with panpipes complete card-sharps, Ethiopian serenaders, troubadours, dark gipsey fortune-tellers grooms, porters, postillions, cab-drivers, stable-boys, racing-touts, beggars, costermongers, newspaper reporters, policement and pickpockets, are all mixed up with the lords and the ladies, the guardsmen and the dandies, the great betting men, and the young ladies with long ringlets and, as accessories to the motley tableau, we have a heterogeneous salmagundi of lobster-salad, champagne, pale ale, betting-books, race-cards, opera glasses, cold lamb, crinoline, pigeon-pies, smelling-bottles, whistles, penny-trumpets, jacks-in-the-box, white kid gloves, white top-coats, brown stout and beer. Mark the scence on the "hill." All Bohemia seems to have emptied its floating population upon this portion of Epsom Downs. The Derby Day may even be compared to the saturnalia of ancient Rome for at Epsom, for one day in the year at least, the rich and the poor, the nobs and the snobs, the patricians and the plebians, are on an equality. The large engraving which occupies the whole of the last page, will serve to give the American public some idea of the motley crowd assembled on the Epsom race-course on the Derby Day. "Epsom Course, Derby Day, England", in Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, Boston, Oct. Searching the ProQuest American Periodicals Series allows us to back card sharp up to 1858. card-sharping in a railway carriage.ġ884 HARTE On Frontier 273 To make a card sharp out of him.Īnd the OED doesn't give card shark at all. The OED's first two citations relevant to card sharp are:ġ870 Daily News 20 Apr., Two men.were charged with. (Let's pass over in silence the mistaken use of the term "back formation" here - whatever card shark is, it's not "a neologism by reinterpreting an earlier word as a derivation and removing apparent affixes".) Card sharp certainly seems to be about a half a century older than card shark. In actuality, the reverse is probably true: card sharp is the original term, and card shark is a back formation. Another theory, which is likely fake etymology, is that card sharp is a degenerate form of card shark, which itself is an analogy to the term pool shark. A popular theory is that it comes from the German word Scharper, which in one sense means swindler. The etymology of the term "card sharp" is debated. The Wikipedia entry for card sharp says that: And there are some interesting bits of linguistic and literary flotsam along the way to figuring this out. So maybe card shark isn't an eggcorn after all, or at least maybe it sort of isn't one completely. And the success of card shark is understandable: " shark" has developed a general slang sense "A person unusually skilled in a particular activity" and the relevant sense of sharp, perhaps the same one involved in "sharp practice", is rare if not obsolete. For one thing, this eggcorn (if it is one) is winning: according to Google, card shark (with 318,000 hits) has outpaced card sharp (with 167,000) by almost two to one. A couple of days ago, during the recent Language Log eggcorn fest that was sparked by Mark Peters' article in the Chronicle, Alan Hogue wrote in with a suggestion that hasn't made it into the eggcorn database yet: card shark for card sharp. ![]()
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