Chapter VIII: The Function of Slang

It is characteristic of the interest which science is now taking in things formerly deemed unworthy of consideration that philologists no longer speak of slang in contemptuous terms. Perhaps, indeed, it was not the scholar, but the amateur philologist, the mere literary man, who affected to despise slang. To the trained investigator into the mutations of language and into the transformations of the vocabulary, no word is too humble for respectful consideration; and it is from the lowly, often, that the most valuable lessons are learned. But until recently few men of letters ever mentioned slang except in disparagement and with a wish for its prompt extirpation. Even professed students of speech, like Trench and Alford (now sadly shorn of their former authority), are abundant in declarations of abhorrent hostility. De Quincey, priding himself on his independence and on his iconoclasm, was almost alone in saying a good word for slang.

There is this excuse for the earlier author who treated slang with contumely, that the differentiation of _slang_ from _cant_ was not complete in his day. _Cant_ is the dialect of a class, often used correctly enough, as far as grammar is concerned, but often also unintelligible to those who do not belong to the class or who are not acquainted with its usages. _Slang_ was at first the _cant_ of thieves, and this seems to have been its only meaning until well into the present century. In ‘Redgauntlet,’ for example, published in 1824, Scott speaks of the “thieves’ Latin called _slang_.” Sometime during the middle of the century _slang_ seems to have lost this narrow limitation, and to have come to signify a word or a phrase used with a meaning not recognized in polite letters, either because it had just been invented, or because it had passed out of memory. While _cant_, therefore, was a language within a language, so to speak, and not to be understanded of the people, _slang_ was a collection of colloquialisms gathered from all sources, and all bearing alike the bend sinister of illegitimacy.

Certain of its words were unquestionably of very vulgar origin, being survivals of the “thieves’ Latin” Scott wrote about. Among these are _pal_ and _cove_, words not yet admitted to the best society. Others were merely arbitrary misapplications of words of good repute, such as the employment of _awfully_ and _jolly_ as synonyms for _very_--as intensives, in short. Yet others were violent metaphors, like _in the soup_, _kicking the bucket_, _holding up_ (a stage-coach). Others, again, were the temporary phrases which spring up, one scarcely knows how, and flourish unaccountably for a few months, and then disappear forever, leaving no sign; such as _shoo-fly_ in America and _all serene_ in England.

An analysis of modern slang reveals the fact that it is possible to divide the words and phrases of which it is composed into four broad classes, of quite different origin and of very varying value. Toward two of these classes it may be allowable to feel the contempt so often expressed for slang as a whole. Toward the other two classes such a feeling is wholly unjustifiable, for they are performing an inestimable service to the language.

Of the two unworthy classes, the first is that which includes the survivals of the “thieves’ Latin,” the vulgar terms used by vulgar men to describe vulgar things. This is the slang which the police-court reporter knows and is fond of using profusely. This is the slang which Dickens introduced to literature. This class of slang it is which is mainly responsible for the ill repute of the word. Much of the dislike for slang felt by people of delicate taste is, however, due to the second class, which includes the ephemeral phrases fortuitously popular for a season, and then finally forgotten once for all. These mere catchwords of the moment are rarely foul, as the words and phrases of the first class often are, but they are unfailingly foolish. _There you go with your eye out_, which was accepted as a humorous remark in London, and _Where did you get that hat?_ which had a like fleeting vogue in New York, are phrases as inoffensive as they are flat. These temporary terms come and go, and are forgotten swiftly. Probably most readers of Forcythe Wilson’s ‘Old Sergeant’ need now to have it explained to them that during the war a _grape-vine_ meant a lying rumor.

It must be said, however, that even in the terms of the first class there is a striving upward, a tendency to disinfect themselves, as any reader of Grose’s ‘Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue’ must needs remark when he discovers that phrases used now with perfect freedom had a secret significance in the last century. There are also innuendos not a few in certain of Shakspere’s best-known plays which fortunately escape the notice of all but the special student of the Elizabethan vocabulary.

The other two classes of slang stand on a different footing. Altho they suffer from the stigma attached to all slang by the two classes already characterized, they serve a purpose. Indeed, their utility is indisputable, and it was never greater than it is to-day. One of these classes consists of old and forgotten phrases or words, which, having long lain dormant, are now struggling again to the surface. The other consists of new words and phrases, often vigorous and expressive, but not yet set down in the literary lexicon, and still on probation. In these two classes we find a justification for the existence of slang--for it is the function of slang to be a feeder of the vocabulary. Words get threadbare and dried up; they come to be like evaporated fruit, juiceless and tasteless. Now it is the duty of slang to provide substitutes for the good words and true which are worn out by hard service. And many of the recruits slang has enlisted are worthy of enrolment among the regulars. When a blinded conservative is called a _mossback_, who is so dull as not to perceive the poetry of the word? When an actor tells us how the traveling company in which he was engaged got _stranded_, who does not recognize the force and the felicity of the expression? And when we hear a man declare that he would to-day be rich if only his foresight had been equal to his _hindsight_, who is not aware of the value of the phrase? No wonder is it that the verbal artist hankers after such words which renew the lexicon of youth! No wonder is it that the writer who wishes to present his thought freshly seeks these words with the bloom yet on them, and neglects the elder words desiccated as tho for preservation in a herbarium!

The student of slang is surprised that he is able to bring forward an honorable pedigree for many words so long since fallen from their high estate that they are now treated as upstarts when they dare to assert themselves. Words have their fates as well as men and books; and the ups and downs of a phrase are often almost as pathetic as those of a man. It has been said that the changes of fortune are so sudden here in these United States that it is only three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. The English language is not quite so fast as the American people, but in the English language it is only three centuries from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. What could seem more modern, more western even, than _deck_ for _pack_ of cards, and _to lay out_ or to _lay out cold_ for _to knockdown_? Yet these are both good old expressions, in decay no longer, but now insisting on their right to a renewed life. _Deck_ is Elizabethan, and we find in Shakspere’s ‘King Henry VI.’ (part iii., act v., sc. i.) that

The king was slyly finger’d from the deck.

_To lay out_ in its most modern sense is very early English.

Even more important than this third class of slang expressions is the fourth, containing the terms which are, so to speak, serving their apprenticeship, and as yet uncertain whether or not they will be admitted finally into the gild of good English. These terms are either useful or useless; they either satisfy a need or they do not; they therefore live or die according to the popular appreciation of their value. If they expire, they pass into the limbo of dead-and-gone slang, than which there is no blacker oblivion. If they survive it is because they have been received into the literary language, having appealed to the perceptions of some master of the art and craft of speech, under whose sponsorship they are admitted to full rights. Thus we see that slang is a training-school for new expressions, only the best scholars getting the diploma which confers longevity, the others going surely to their fate.

Sometimes these new expressions are words only, sometimes they are phrases. _To go back on_, for instance, and _to give one’s self away_ are specimens of the phrase characteristic of this fourth and most interesting class of slang at its best. In its creation of phrases like these, slang is what idiom was before language stiffened into literature, and so killed its earlier habit of idiom-making. After literature has arrived, and after the schoolmaster is abroad, and after the printing-press has been set up in every hamlet, the idiom-making faculty of a language is atrophied by disuse. Slang is sometimes, and to a certain extent, a survival of this faculty, or at least a substitute for its exercise. In other words (and here I take the liberty of quoting from a private letter of one of the foremost authorities on the history of English, Professor Lounsbury), “slang is an effort on the part of the users of language to say something more vividly, strongly, concisely than the language as existing permits it to be said”; and he adds that slang is therefore “the source from which the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed.”

Being contrary to the recognized standards of speech, slang finds no mercy at the hands of those who think it their duty to uphold the strict letter of the law. Nothing amazes an investigator more, and nothing more amuses him, than to discover that thousands of words now secure in our speech were once denounced as interlopers. “There is death in the dictionary,” said Lowell, in his memorable linguistic essay prefixed to the second series of the ‘Biglow Papers’; “and where language is too strictly limited by convention, the ground for expression to grow in is limited also, and we get a _potted_ literature--Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy trees.” And in the paper on Dryden he declared that “a language grows and is not made.” Pedants are ever building the language about with rules of iron in a vain effort to keep it from growing naturally and according to its needs.

It is true that _cab_ and _mob_ are clipped words, and there has always been a healthy dislike of any clipping of the verbal currency. But _consols_ is firmly established. Two clipped words there are which have no friends--_gents_ and _pants_. Dr. Holmes has put them in the pillory of a couplet:

The things named _pants_, in certain documents,
A word not made for gentlemen, but _gents_.

And recently a sign, suspended outside a big Broadway building, announced that there were “Hands wanted on pants,” the building being a clothing factory, and not, as one might suppose, a boys’ school.

The slang of a metropolis, be that where you will, in the United States or in Great Britain, in France or in Germany, is nearly always stupid. There is neither fancy nor fun in the Parisian’s _Ohé Lambert_ or _on dirait du veau_, nor in the Londoner’s _all serene_ or _there you go with your eye out_--catchwords which are humorous, if humorous they are, only by general consent and for some esoteric reason. It is to such stupid phrases of a fleeting popularity that Dr. Holmes refers, no doubt, when he declares that “the use of slang, or cheap generic terms, as a substitute for differentiated specific expressions is at once a sign and a cause of mental atrophy.” And this use of slang is far more frequent in cities, where people often talk without having anything to say, than in the country, where speech flows slowly.

Perhaps the more highly civilized a population is, the more it has parted with the power of pictorial phrase-making. It may be that a certain lawlessness of life is the cause of a lawlessness of language. Of all metropolitan slang that of the outlaws is most vigorous. It was after Vidocq had introduced thieves’ slang into polite society that Balzac, always a keen observer and always alert to pick up unworn words, ventured to say, perhaps to the astonishment of many, that “there is no speech more energetic, more colored, than that of these people.” Balzac was not academic in his vocabulary, and he owed not a little of the sharpness of his descriptions to his hatred of the cut-and-dried phrases of his fellow-novelists. He would willingly have agreed with Montaigne when the essayist declared that the language he liked, written or spoken, was “a succulent and nervous speech, short and compact, not so much delicated and combed out as vehement and brusk, rather arbitrary than monotonous, ... not pedantic, but soldierly rather, as Suetonius called Cæsar’s.” And this brings us exactly to Mr. Bret Harte’s

Phrases such as camps may teach,
Saber-cuts of Saxon speech,

There is a more soldierly frankness, a greater freedom, less restraint, less respect for law and order, in the west than in the east; and this may be a reason why American slang is superior to British and to French. The catchwords of New York may be as inept and as cheap as the catchwords of London and of Paris, but New York is not as important to the United States as London is to Great Britain and as Paris is to France; it is not as dominating, not as absorbing. So it is that in America the feebler catchwords of the city give way before the virile phrases of the west. There is little to choose between the _how’s your poor feet?_ of London and the _well, I should smile_ of New York, for neither phrase had any excuse for existence, and neither had any hope of survival. The city phrase is often doubtful in meaning and obscure in origin. In London, for example, the four-wheel cab is called a _growler_. Why? In New York a can brought in filled with beer at a bar-room is called a _growler_, and the act of sending this can from the private house to the public house and back is called _working the growler_. Why?

But when we find a western writer describing the effects of _tanglefoot_ whisky, the adjective explains itself, and is justified at once. And we discover immediately the daringly condensed metaphor in the sign, “Don’t _monkey_ with the _buzz-saw_”; the picturesqueness of the word _buzz-saw_ and its fitness for service are visible at a glance. So we understand the phrase readily and appreciate its force when we read the story of ‘Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral,’ and are told that “he never _went back on_ his mother,” or when we hear the defender of ‘Banty Tim’ declare that

“Ef one of you teches the boy
He’ll _wrestle his hash_ to-night in hell,
Or my name’s not Tilman Joy.”

_To wrestle one’s hash_ is not an elegant expression, one must admit, and it is not likely to be adopted into the literary language; but it is forcible at least, and not stupid. _To go back on_, however, bids fair to take its place in our speech as a phrase at once useful and vigorous.

From the wide and wind-swept plains of the west came _blizzard_, and altho it has been suggested that the word is a survival from some local British dialect, the west still deserves the credit of having rescued it from desuetude. From the logging-camps of the northwest came _boom_, an old word again, but with a new meaning which the language promptly accepted. From still farther west came the use of _sand_ to indicate staying power, backbone--what New England knows as _grit_ and old England as _pluck_ (a far less expressive word). From the southwest came _cinch_, from the tightening of the girths of the pack-mules, and so by extension indicating a grasp of anything so firm that it cannot get away.

Just why a _dead cinch_ should be the securest of any, I confess I do not know. _Dead_ is here used as an intensive; and the study of intensives is as yet in its infancy. In all parts of Great Britain and the United States we find certain words wrenched from their true meaning and most arbitrarily employed to heighten the value of other words. Thus we have a _dead cinch_, or a _dead sure thing_, a _dead shot_, a _dead level_--and for these last two terms we can discover perhaps a reason. Lowell noted in New England a use of _tormented_ as a euphemism for _damned_, as “not a _tormented_ cent.” Every American traveler in England must have remarked with surprise the British use of the Saxon synonym of _sanguinary_ as an intensive, the chief British rivals of _bloody_ in this respect being _blooming_ and _blasted_. All three are held to be shocking to polite ears, and it was with bated breath that the editor of a London newspaper wrote about the prospects of “a b----y war”; while, as another London editor declared recently, it is now impossible for a cockney to read with proper sympathy Jeffrey’s appeal to Carlyle, after a visit to Craigenputtock, to bring his “blooming Eve out of her blasted paradise.” Of the other slang synonyms for _very_--_jolly_, “he was _jolly_ ill,” is British; _awfully_ was British first, and is now American also; and _daisy_ is American. But any discussion of intensives is a digression here, and I return as soon as may be to the main road.

_To freeze to_ anything or any person is a down-east phrase, so Lowell records, but it has a far-western strength; and so has _to get solid with_, as when the advice is given that “if a man is courting a girl it is best _to get solid with_ her father.” What is this phrase, however, but the French _solidarité_, which we have recently taken over into English to indicate a communion of interests and responsibilities? The likeness of French terms to American is no new thing; Lowell told us that Horace Mann, in one of his public addresses, commented at some length on the beauty and moral significance of the French phrase _s’orienter_, and called upon his young friends to practise it, altho “there was not a Yankee in his audience whose problem had not always been to find out what was _about east_, and to shape his course accordingly.” A few years ago, in turning over ‘Karikari,’ a volume of M. Ludovic Halévy’s clever and charming sketches of Parisian character, I met with a delightful young lady who had _pas pour deux liards de coquetterie_; and I wondered whether M. Halévy, if he were an American, and one of the forty of an American Academy, would venture the assertion that his heroine was _not coquettish for a cent_.

Closely akin to _to freeze to_ and _to be solid with_ is _jumped on_. When severe reproof is administered the culprit is said to be _jumped on_; and if the reproof shall be unduly severe, the sufferer is said then to be _jumped on with both feet_. All three of these phrases belong to a class from which the literary language has enlisted many worthy recruits in the past, and it would not surprise me to see them answer to their names whenever a new dictionary calls the roll of English words. Will they find themselves shoulder to shoulder with _spook_, a word of Dutch origin, now volunteering for English service both in New York and in South Africa? And by that time will _slump_ have been admitted to the ranks, and _fad_, and _crank_, in the secondary meaning of a man of somewhat unsettled mind? _Slump_ is an Americanism, _crank_ is an Americanism of remote British descent, and _fad_ is a Briticism; this last is perhaps the most needed word of the three, and from it we get a name for the _faddist_, the bore who rides his hobby hard and without regard to the hounds.

Just as in New York the “Upper Ten Thousand” of N. P. Willis have shrunk to the “Four Hundred” of Mr. Ward McAllister, so in London the _swells_ soon became the _smart_ set, and after a while developed into _swagger_ people, as they became more and more exclusive and felt the need of new terms to express their new quality. But in no department of speech is the consumption of words more rapid than in that describing the degrees of intoxication; and the list of slang synonyms for the drunkard, and for his condition, and for the act which brings it about, is as long as Leporello’s. Among these, _to get loaded_ and _to carry a load_ are expressions obvious enough; and when we recall that _jag_ is a provincialism meaning a light load, we see easily that the man who _has a jag on_ is in the earlier stages of intoxication. This use of the word is, I think, wholly American, and it has not crossed the Atlantic as yet, or else a British writer could never have blundered into a definition of _jag_ as an umbrella, quoting in illustration a paragraph from a St. Louis paper which said that “Mr. Brown was seen on the street last Sunday in the rain carrying a large fine jag.” One may wonder what this British writer would have made out of the remark of the Chicago humorist, that a certain man was not always drunk, even if he did jump “from jag to jag like an alcoholic chamois.”

Here, of course, we are fairly within the boundaries of slang--of the slang which is temporary only, and which withers away swiftly. But is _swell_ slang now, and _fad_, and _crank_? Is _boom_ slang, and is _blizzard_? And if it is difficult to draw any line of division between mere slang on the one side, and idiomatic words and phrases on the other, it is doubly difficult to draw this line between mere slang and the legitimate technicalities of a calling or a craft. Is it slang to say of a picture that the chief figure in it is _out of drawing_, or that the painter has got his _values_ wrong? And how could any historian explain the ins and outs of New York politics who could not state frankly that the _machine_ made a _slate_, and that the _mugwumps_ broke it. Such a historian must needs master the meaning of _laying pipe_ for a nomination, or _pulling wires_ to secure it, of _taking the stump_ before election, and of _log-rolling_ after it; he must apprehend the exact relation of the _boss_ to his _henchmen_ and his _heelers_; and he must understand who the _half-breeds_ were, and the _stalwarts_, and how the _swallowtails_ were different from the _short-hairs_.

To call one man a _boss_ and another a _henchman_ may have been slang once, but the words are lawful now, because they are necessary. It is only by these words that the exact relation of a certain kind of political leader to a certain kind of political follower can be expressed succinctly. There are, of course, not a few political phrases still under the ban because they are needless. Some of these may some day come to convey an exact shade of meaning not expressed by any other word, and when this shall happen, they will take their places in the legitimate vocabulary. I doubt whether this good fortune will ever befall a use of _influence_, now not uncommon in Washington. The statesman at whose suggestion and request an office-holder has received his appointment is known as that office-holder’s _influence_. Thus a poor widow, suddenly turned out of a post she had held for years, because it was wanted by the henchman of some boss whose good will a senator or a department chief wished to retain, explained to a friend that her dismissal was due to the fact that her _influence_ had died during the summer. The inevitable extension of the merit system in the civil service of our country will probably prevent the permanent acceptance of this new meaning.

The political is only one of a vast number of technical vocabularies, all of which are proffering their words for popular consumption. Every art and every science, every trade and every calling, every sect and every sport, has its own special lexicon, the most of the words in which must always remain outside of the general speech of the whole people. They are reserves, to be drawn upon to fill up the regular army in time of need. Legitimate enough when confined to their proper use, those technicalities become slang when employed out of season, and when applied out of the special department of human endeavor in which they have been evolved. Of course, if the public interest in this department is increased for any reason, more and more words from that technical vocabulary are adopted into the wider dictionary of popular speech; and thus the general language is still enriching itself by the taking over of words and phrases from the terminology devised by experts for their own use. Not without interest would it be if we could ascertain exactly how much of the special vocabulary of the mere man of letters is now understandable by the plain people. It is one of the characters in ‘Middlemarch’ who maintains that “correct English” is only “the slang of prigs who write history and essays, and the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.”

Of recent years many of the locutions of the Stock Exchange have won their way into general knowledge; and there are few of us who do not know what _bears_ and _bulls_ are, what a _corner_ is, and what is a _margin_. The practical application of scientific knowledge makes the public at large familiar with many principles hitherto the exclusive possession of the experts, and the public at large gets to use freely to-day technicalities which even the learned of yesterday would not have understood. _Current_, for example, and _insulation_, made familiar by the startlingly rapid extension of electrical possibilities in the last few years, have been so fully assimilated that they are now used independently and without avowed reference to their original electrical meanings.

The prevalence of a sport or of a game brings into general use the terms of that special amusement. The Elizabethan dramatists, for example, use _vy_ and _revy_ and the other technicalities of the game of primero as freely as our western humorists use _going it blind_ and _calling_ and the other technicalities of the game of poker, which has been evolved out of primero in the course of the centuries. Some of the technicalities of euchre also, and of whist, have passed into every-day speech; and so have many of the terms of baseball and of football, of racing and of trotting, of rowing and of yachting. These made their way into the vocabulary of the average man one by one, as the seasons went around and as the sports followed one another in popularity. So during the civil war many military phrases were frequent in the mouths of the people; and some of these established themselves firmly in the vocabulary.

“In language, as in life,” so Professor Dowden tells us, “there is, so to speak, an aristocracy and a commonalty: words with a heritage of dignity, words which have been ennobled, and a rabble of words which are excluded from positions of honor and trust.” Some writers and speakers there are with so delicate a sense of refinement that they are at ease only with the ennobled words, with the words that came over with the conquerer, with the lords, spiritual and temporal, of the vocabulary. Others there are, parvenus themselves, and so tainted with snobbery that they are happy only in the society of their betters; and these express the utmost contempt for the mass of the vulgar. Yet again others there are who have Lincoln’s liking for the plain words of the plain people--the democrats of the dictionary, homely, simple, direct. These last are tolerant of the words, once of high estate, which have lost their rank and are fallen upon evil days, preferring them over the other words, plebeian once, but having pushed their fortunes energetically in successive generations, until now there are none more highly placed.

Perhaps the aristocratic figure of speech is a little misleading, because in the English language, as in France after the Revolution, we find _la carrière ouverte aux talents_, and every word has a fair chance to attain the highest dignity in the gift of the dictionary. No doubt family connections are still potent, and it is much easier for some words to rise in life than it is for others. Most people would hold that war and law and medicine made a more honorable pedigree for a technical term than the stage, for example, or than some sport.

And yet the stage has its own enormous vocabulary, used with the utmost scientific precision. The theater is a hotbed of temporary slang, often as lawless, as vigorous, and as picturesque as the phrases of the west; but it has also a terminology of its own, containing some hundreds of words, used always with absolute exactness. A _mascot_, meaning one who brings good luck, and a _hoodoo_, meaning one who brings ill fortune, are terms invented in the theater, it is true; and many another odd word can be credited to the same source. But every one behind the scenes knows also what _sky-borders_ are, and _bunch-lights_, and _vampire-traps_, and _raking-pieces_--technical terms all of them, and all used with rigorous exactitude. Like the technicalities of any other profession, those of the stage are often very puzzling to the uninitiated, and a greenhorn could hardly even make a guess at the meaning of terms which every visitor to a green-room might use at any moment. What layman could explain the office of a _cut-drop_, the utility of a _carpenter’s scene_, or the precise privileges of a _bill-board ticket_?

There is one word which the larger vocabulary of the public has lately taken from the smaller vocabulary of the playhouse, and which some strolling player of the past apparently borrowed from some other vagabond familiar with thieves’ slang. This word is _fake_. It has always conveyed the suggestion of an intent to deceive. “Are you going to get up new scenery for the new play?” might be asked; and the answer would be, “No; we shall _fake_ it,” meaning thereby that old scenery would be retouched and readjusted so as to have the appearance of new. From the stage the word passed to the newspapers, and a _fake_ is a story invented, not founded on fact, “made out of whole cloth,” as the stump-speakers say. Mr. Howells, always bold in using new words, accepts _fake_ as good enough for him, and prints it in the ‘Quality of Mercy’ without the stigma of italics or quotation-marks; just as in the same story he has adopted the colloquial _electrics_ for _electric lights_--i.e., “He turned off the electrics.”

And hereafter the rest of us may use either _fake_ or _electrics_ with a clear conscience, either hiding ourselves behind Mr. Howells, who can always give a good account of himself when attacked, or else coming out into the open and asserting our own right to adopt either word because it is useful. “Is it called for? Is it accordant with the analysis of the language? Is it offered or backed by good authority? These are the considerations by which general consent is won or repelled,” so Professor Whitney tells us, “and general consent decides every case without appeal.” It happens that Don Quixote preceded Professor Whitney in this exposition of the law, for when he was instructing Sancho Panza, then about to be appointed governor of an island, he used a Latinized form of a certain word which had become vulgar, explaining that “if some do not understand these terms it matters little, for custom will bring them into use in the course of time so that they will be readily understood. That is the way a language is enriched; custom and the public are all-powerful there.” Sometimes the needful word which is thought to be too common for use is Latinized, as Don Quixote preferred, but more often it is ennobled without change, being simply lifted out from among its former low companions.

One of the hardest lessons for the amateurs in linguistics to learn--and most of them never attain to this wisdom--is that affectations are fleeting, that vulgarisms die of their own weakness, and that corruptions do little harm to the language. And the reason is not far to seek: either the apparent affectation, the alleged vulgarism, the so-called corruption, is accidental and useless, in which case its vogue will be brief and it will sink swiftly into oblivion; or else it represents a need and fills a want, in which case, no matter how careless it may be or how inaccurately formed, it will hold its own firmly, and there is really nothing more to be said about it. In other words, slang and all other variations from the high standard of the literary language are either temporary or permanent. If they are temporary only, the damage they can do is inconsiderable. If they are permanent, their survival is due solely to the fact that they were convenient or necessary. When a word or a phrase has come to stay (as _reliable_ has, apparently), it is idle to denounce a decision rendered by the court of last resort. The most that we can do with advantage is to refrain from using the word ourselves, if we so prefer.

It is possible to go further, even, and to turn the tables on those who see in slang an ever-growing evil. Not only is there little danger to the language to be feared from those alleged corruptions, and from these doubtful locutions of evanescent popularity, but real harm is done by the purists themselves, who do not understand every modification of our language, and who seek to check the development of idiom and to limit the liberty which enables our speech freely to provide for its own needs as these are revealed by time. It is these half-educated censors, prompt to protest against whatever is novel to them, and swift to set up the standard of a narrow personal experience, who try to curb the development of a language. It cannot be declared too often and too emphatically how fortunate it is that the care of our language and the control of its development is not in the hands even of the most competent scholars. In language, as in politics, the people at large are in the long run better judges of their own needs than any specialist can be. As Professor Whitney says, “the language would soon be shorn of no small part of its strength if placed exclusively in the hands of any individual or of any class.” In the hands of no class would it be enfeebled sooner than if it were given to the guardianship of the pedants and the pedagogs.

A sloven in speech is as offensive as a sloven in manners or in dress; and neatness of phrase is as pleasant to the ear as neatness of attire to the eye. A man should choose his words at least as carefully as he chooses his clothes; a hint of the dandy even is unobjectionable, if it is but a hint. But when a man gives his whole mind to his dress, it is generally because he has but little mind to give; and so when a man spends his force wholly in rejecting words and phrases, it is generally because he lacks ideas to express with the words and phrases of which he does approve. In most cases a man can say best what he has to say without lapsing into slang; but then a slangy expression which actually tells us something is better than the immaculate sentence empty of everything but the consciousness of its own propriety.

(1893)