Please wait while my tweets load 
Slangs Of New York: 19th Century Vocab Worth Bringing Back: Gothamist
Lots of words and phrases in the book still have the same meaning—a “crib” was a person’s home then too, the police have always been “pigs”—but there are quite a few whose meanings have slightly shifted as well: To “break a leg” then wasn’t something you said to an actor about to go on stage—it was what you called seducing a girl (which is why, we guess, mothers of children born out of wedlock were called “ankle” and “broken leg”). And while to “croak” still meant to die, newspapers at the time were also called “croakers.”
Another example: Thanks to Mario Puzo most of us think of a “Godfather” as the head of a mob, or the “mobility” in 1859 talk, but back then they were something entirely different. Godfathers were “jurymen; so called because they name the degrees of crime as to grand or petit larceny, etc., etc.”
Read the list at Gothamist.
