Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Spondulicks (or spondulics or spondulix or...)

I'm making a list, checking it twice, and getting ready for a quick shopping spree. This spree requires that I crack open the piggybank and check the spondulicks within. Wait... does anyone even use piggybanks anymore? It's probably almost as ancient a concept as our Slang-o-rama word o' the week, spondulicks....

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According to Merriam-Webster, spondulicks is slang for money or funds. Go back far enough, and it was used to mean fractional currency. M-W claims the origin and etymology of the word is unknown. As you probably know, I never take "unknown" at face value, so away we go, delving into the shadowy corners of the internet and the depths of my reference books in search of the whens and wheres of spondulicks.

To my delight, World Wide Words has a lovely piece on the word, opening with:

Though originally a bit of mid-nineteenth-century American slang for money, this has travelled widely, being cast up on the shores of Britain and Australia among other places. It’s a member of a group of words created in a century-long fit of logographical exuberation which also gave us slumgullion, rambunctious, and absquatulate...

(Note to self: must find an occasion in which to use the phrase "logographical exuberation.")  World Wide Words does such a great job, that I'll quote their post some more:

...It would seem from the evidence that spondulicks (either so spelled or as spondulix) was originally American college slang. One of its earliest appearances was in a piece about college life in the New York magazine Vanity Fair in 1860: “My friend the Senior got out of spondulix, and borrowed [my watch] to spout for the purpose of bucking the Tiger” (to interpret, his friend had run out of money and pawned the watch to get some more cash in order to gamble on cards, probably faro).

This reference to the game of faro (aka bucking the tiger) has me thinking I'll have to find a way to weave spondulicks into a bit of dialogue in some future Silver Rush story. 

Plenty of spondulicks exchanged hands while bucking the tiger
The game of faro as depicted by John David Borthwick in California, 1851
http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/customs3.htm
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7876330

WWW notes that the word appears in the writings of O. Henry and Bret Harte, which is very nifty indeed, but what about its evolution? That's a story and a bit of a mystery in and of itself, according to the post. WWW lays it all out in such a delightful manner, I have to share the explanation with you:

Where does it come from? “A fanciful coinage”, the Oxford English Dictionary says. It has been described as a “perverted and elaborated” form of greenback (you may feel that to believe spondulicks could come from greenback requires a perverted imagination all its own). Eric Partridge suggests that it might derive from Greek spondulikos, from spondulos, a species of shell once used as money.

 However, Doug Wilson pointed out that that Greek stem is also the source of various English words beginning in spondylo– that refer to the spine or vertebrae. He suggested that a stack of coins may have been likened to the spine, with each coin a vertebra. He found a supporting reference in an 1867 book, A Manual of the Art of Prose Composition: for the Use of Colleges and Schools, by John Mitchell Bonnell. A list of provincialisms included: “Spondulics — coin piled for counting”.

 I found the word (spelled spondulics) on my bookshelf, in my three-volume Green's Dictionary of Slang (which you can also view online), with the earliest print appearance cited being in a 1856 parody of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha," titled "Plu-ri-bus-tah." The parody was written by Q. K. Philander Doesticks, the pseudonym for U.S. journalist/humorist Mortimer Thomson, who was apparently quite a character himself. (Thomson's Wikipedia entry says he was expelled from Michigan University for, perhaps "for "too much enterprise in securing subjects for the dissecting room.")

Well! I have wandered far afield here, but research is soooooo much fun! However, I must now tote up the spondulicks I have on hand and see what Santa can offer up this year...

Dori, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons