Prisoner's Dictionary. Twists, Slugs and Roscoes A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang. Compiled by William Denton <wtd@pobox.com>. Copyright © 1993-2009. Please send me corrections, additions, suggestions and comments. Edition 3.9.4. Version 4.0 is planned. This glossary is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If you’ve ever read a hardboiled detective story, you may have come across a sentence like, “I jammed the roscoe in his button and said, ‘Close your yap, bo, or I squirt metal.’” Something like this isn’t too hard to decipher. “The flim-flammer jumped in the flivver and faded.” You may need to translate this into normal English just to be able to follow the plot.
Or maybe you want to seem tougher. This is the language spoken by Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Mike Hammer and the Continental Op. Now, with the help of this glossary, you too can speak it like a native! Alderman: A man’s pot bellyAmeche: TelephoneAnkle: (n) Woman(v) To walk. Shipman Inquiry (the) - a Doctor who murdered close to 300 peopl.