Going to Read and Write:


Today’s slang has a really long history in various forms. Although this particular formation is from the early part of the 20th Century, I’ve also encountered variations and similar allusions from Shakespeare onward and it’s probably got roots even earlier.

Going/Gone to Read and Write: (v) going to/in jail.

When I used to do Renaissance fairs, my first “job” was with the thieves’ guild (no, we weren’t actual thieves, we posed as them, and did a lot of street theater about pickpockets, con men, and other nefarious types in Elizabethan England). Here I encountered the term “college” among the thieves cant we learned. If one of our troupe said they’d been “been to college” we were supposed to understand and play on the fact that they’d been in jail. We made a lot of college jokes since the majority of us were actual college students or had been at some time. So I figured out the 1920s/30s term “gone to read and write” to mean the same thing and, behold, after looking it up in several references it does!

Banksy painting on a brick wall of a prisoner escaping from above the wall down a "rope" of written pages to a hanging typewriter acting as a weight. With Creative Commons rights usage.