So, “lui c’est juste Ken” (he is just Ken) sounds exactly like “lui sait juste ken” (he just knows fucking).

“Ken” is a slang / argot word, and specifically verlan, a type of back slang.

Back slang is a type of cant where words are pronounced backwards. In English, a back slang of street sellers (costermongers) emerged in early Victorian London, so they could talk among themselves behind the customers’ / constables’ back. Possibly prisoners also used it (or something similar) to talk behind the wardens’ back. The words are pronounced backwards phonetically, more or less. So “boy” becomes yob, “pot of beer” becomes top o’ reeb, “no good” becomes on doog. But it’s not always straight forward, rules are always hazy in cant, so for example “police” becomes esclop. Cool the namesclop = look at the policeman.

The French equivalent is verlan. Its origins are hazy, elements of it appear from the Middle Ages, the criminal underworld probably used it (in some regions, at least) in the 19th century, it shows up in literature in the 20th, later the youths of the banlieues picked it up, rap and hip hop ran with it, and by now it’s pretty much mainstream, if informal.

Verlan reverses the syllables, transposing the last syllable to the start of the word. So “métro” become tromé, “bizzare” become zarbi, and “mec” becomes keum (with signle-syllable words it can go backwards phonetically). Sometimes it further truncates them, so zarbi becomes zarb. And “niquer” (“to fuck”, an argot word in the first place) becomes first keni, and from there ken.

[Speaking of niquer: during one of the many rebellions of the Parisian banlieues, a local tv station had sent a crew all the way to Paris to cover the riots, and the reporter found herself in front of a wall with large graffiti that said “SARKOZY NIQUE TA MÈRE”, and awkwardly said to the camera “and here we see a phrase that means, uh, ‘down with Sarkozy'”.]

Another famous back slang is Argentinian Lunfardo, which also reverses the syllables, so tango becomes gotán. (Hence, the Gotán Project.) Lunfardo was supposedly the slang of the criminal underworld and Italian immigrants in Buenos Aires, circa late 19th-early 20th century. It features in songs and in literature (see Borges’s “Streetcorner man”), though I should note its seedy origins are disputed. Roberto Arlt, an Argentinian author who didn’t just write about the underworld, he was of the underworld, commented that he doesn’t use Lunfardo in his writings because he doesn’t know it, he’d never heard it in real life in the shady dens he frequented. So it may have been a literary invention to some degree.

Other back slangs which reverse syllables are Xhosa Ilwimi, used mostly by teenagers, Japanese tougo, Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian šatrovački, used originally by criminals and later by youths in general, and Greek podana, which means exactly the same as the French verlan, it’s the word “backwards” (anapoda / l’envers) backwards, and is a somewhat dated criminal / subculture slang (mostly stoner-related tbh), only minimally taken up by hip hop.

Rule of thumb: hip hop is now the ultimate indicator of cant/slang. If a slang word or type of slang doesn’t take off there, it’s dead. If it’s widely used there, it’ll become mainstream informal in no time. (I believe the AAVE->tumblr speech pipeline is a subset of that, though that’s probably a bit more complicated.) And there’s a sweet spot in between where it’s alive but still marginal.

[originally posted on tumblr]