lobbygow

A lobbygow, in the argot of early twentieth-century American cities, was an errand runner, specifically one who fetched things for the patrons of gambling houses and opium dens, or who carried messages between criminal enterprises and their clients. The word surfaces in New York and San Francisco newspapers from around 1900, always in the context of Chinatown and its shadow economy. H.L. Mencken catalogued it in The American Language as one of the Chinese-American coinages that had drifted into general underworld slang.

The etymology traces to Cantonese, formed in the pidgin English environment of San Francisco's Chinatown during the 1880s and 1890s. The most plausible reconstruction derives it from Cantonese 老 (lou), a prefix meaning elder or senior man, combined with elements that suggested a runner or go-between in pidgin usage. In the Chinatown streets where Chinese workers, Anglo employers, and criminal middlemen occupied the same blocks, words formed in the gap between two languages and carried meanings neither could express alone.

By 1905 the word had acquired a secondary meaning: a dupe or easy mark, someone who could be sent on pointless errands or manipulated by sharper operators. This semantic drift is predictable. The person who runs errands for others is already positioned low in a hierarchy. In the card rooms and fan-tan parlors of Mott Street and Sacramento Street, a lobbygow was both useful and expendable, and the word kept both meanings simultaneously for decades.

American newspapers of the 1900s and 1910s used lobbygow in crime reporting alongside yen-shee, hip sing, and other Cantonese-origin terms that had entered the journalistic vocabulary for covering Chinatown. After the federal ban on opium dens and the gradual assimilation of Chinese-American communities, the word faded from active use. By the 1940s it was appearing in glossaries of obsolete slang. It remains now a small fossil record of the linguistic contact zone that was Gilded Age Chinatown.