  Feb 26, 2008  The Cant of Thieves  I happened to read A. C.
Baantjer's DeKok and the Geese of Death recently. Baantjer is a
famous Dutch writer of crime fiction, and his police inspector
DeKok is as erudite a man as Sherlock Holmes, with knowledge of
far more recondite things than the great detective. This book is
rather weak, though. It's fairly obvious early on what the plot
is, and the rather literal translation from the Dutch makes for
a slightly jarring read.  But one interesting thing I came
across is Bargoens, the Dutch argot of sundry low-life,
criminals and tramps. In the translation of Baantjer's book, it
was rendered into a sort of pidgin Italian-English, a sort of
Cockney-mixed-with-Brooklyn (at least, that is what it looked
like in English). Bargoens, itself, though, has a long and
immodest history. It was fairly widespread till about the 1980s
(the book is from 1983), but fewer and fewer people spoke or
understood it even then. For instance, Baantjer makes the case
that DeKok understood it wel