Once upon a time, at a performance of William Congreve’s Restoration play “The Way of the World,” I was enjoying all the various speech patterns that Congreve has aptly matched with his characters when a word jumped at me from the year 1700—and made me pause.
“Lingo.”
“Lingo?” I thought. “Did Sir Wilfull say lingo?”
Indeed, he did. In Act 3 scene 16, Sir Wilfull says, “But I have thoughts to tarry a small matter in town, to learn somewhat of your lingo first.”
And later, in Act 4 scene 4, he says, “Well, well, I shall understand your lingo one of these days, cousin; in the meanwhile I must answer in plain English.”
The Oxford English Dictionary records that the first written use of lingo was only forty years before Congreve’s play, in the New Haven Col. Rec. (“To which the plaintiff answered that he was not acquainted with Dutch lingo.”)
Lingo derives from Latin lingua, tongue.
It is interesting that lingo remains colloquial still today, after hundreds of years in the language.
I suspect that the foreign sounding ending “o” gives it an unexpected, and therefore humorous, kick, keeping it out of the formal lexicon of standard words.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.