That respectable words lose caste, becoming the yellow dogs and
very lepers of language, is a familiar fact hospitable to abundant
illustration. One of these words has just fallen from my pen; fifty
or a hundred years from now it will be impossible, probably, for
any writer having a decent regard to the value of words to use the
word “respectable” of anything truly meriting respect. For the past
half-century it has been taking on a new and opprobrious character.
Already the type of the “respectable” man, for example, is the
prosperous, wool-witted Philistine, who complacently interlocks his fat
fingers under the overhang of his stomach, and surveying the world from
the eminence of his own esteem, tries vainly to imagine what it would
be without him.
The word “respectable” is indubitably doomed: etymology can not save
it, any more than it could save the word “miscreant,” which means by
derivation, as at one time it meant actually, infidel, unbeliever.
In its present abasement we may hear a faint, far whisper of the old,
old days of religious intolerance. It stands in modern speech a verbal
monument to the _odium theologicum_ reposing beneath in the sure and
certain hope of a blessed resurrection.
A half-century ago the word “awful” was plumped into the mire of
slang, where it has weltered ever since, without actual immersion, but
apparently with no hope of extrication. The writer who would use it
to-day in a serious sense has need to be well assured of his hold upon
the reader’s mood. It may perchance whisk that person away from the
sublime to the ridiculous, with the neat-handed nimbleness of Satan
snatching a soul from the straight and narrow way, to send it spinning
aslant into the red-and-black billows of everlasting damnation!
There are transformations of a contrary sort—promotions and elevations
of words, as from slang to poetry. Between the extremes of speech which
are the extremes of thought, for speech is thought—between the upper
and the lower deep, the heaven and the earth, is a Jacob’s-ladder which
these winged messengers of mind ascend and descend.
Grave advocacy of slang is not lacking: Professor Manley, of Harvard,
is afield in defence of it. Some slang, he justly says, is “strong and
poetical.” It is “strong” because graphic and vivid, “poetical” because
metaphorical; for the life and soul of poetry is metaphor.
Professor Manley thinks that the story of the Prodigal Son could have
been better told this way:
The world gave him the marble heart, but his father extended the
glad hand.
Yes, if those phrases had then been first used professors of literature
might, as he suggests, be now expatiating on the beautiful simplicity
of the diction and bewailing the inferiority of modern speech. But that
is no defence of slang. It would not have been slang, any more than
avowed or manifest quotations from the Scriptures as we have them are
slang.
Professor Manley is especially charmed with the phrase “bats in his
belfry,” and would indubitably substitute it for “possessed of a
devil,” the Scriptural diagnosis of insanity. I don’t think the good
man meant to be irreverent, but I should not care for his Revised
Edition.
Somewhat more than a generation ago John Camden Hotten, of London, a
publisher of “rare and curious books,” put out a slang dictionary.
Its editor-in-chief was that accomplished scholar, George Augustus
Sala. It was afterward revised by Henry Sampson, famous later as an
authority in matters of sport, to whom I gave such assistance as my
little learning and no sportsmanship permitted. The volume was a thick
one, but contained little that in this country and period we know (and
suffer) as “slang.” Slang, as the word was then used, is defined in the
_Century Dictionary_ thus: “The cant words or jargon used by thieves,
peddlers, beggars, and the vagabond classes generally.”
To-day we mean by it something different and more offensive. It is
no longer the _argot_ of criminals and semi-criminals, “whom one
does not meet,” and whose distance—when they keep it—lends a certain
enchantment to the ear, but the intolerable diction of more or less
worthy persons who obey all laws but those of taste. In its present
generally accepted meaning the word is thus defined by the authority
already quoted: “Colloquial words and phrases which have originated
in the cant or rude speech of the vagabond or unlettered classes, or,
belonging in form to standard speech, have acquired or have had given
them restricted, capricious, or extravagantly metaphorical meanings,
and are regarded as vulgar or inelegant.”
It is not altogether comprehensible how a sane intelligence can
choose to utter itself in that kind of speech, yet speech of that
kind seems almost to be driving good English out of popular use.
Among large classes of our countrymen, it is held in so high esteem
that whole books of it are put upon the market with profit to author
and publisher. One of the most successful of these, reprinted from
many of our leading newspapers, is called, I think, _Fables in
Slang_—containing, by the way, nothing that resembles a fable. This
unspeakable stuff made its author rich, and naturally he “syndicated”
a second series of the same. Another was entitled _Love Sonnets of a
Hoodlum_, and contained not a line of clean English. And it is hardly
an exaggeration to say that in this country the writing of humorous and
satirical verse is a lost art; slang has taken the place of wit; the
jest that smacks not of the slum finds no prosperity in any ear.
Slang has as many hateful qualities as a dog bad habits, but its
essential vice is its hideous lack of originality; for until a word
or phrase is common property it is not slang. Wherein, then, is the
sense or humor of repeating it? The dullest dunce in the world may have
an alert and obedient memory for current locutions. For skill in the
use of slang no other mental equipment is required. However apt and
picturesque a particular expression may be, the wit of it is his only
who invented and first used it: in all others its use is forbidden
by the commandment “Thou shalt not steal.” A self-respecting writer
would no more parrot a felicitous saying of unknown origin and popular
currency than he would plagiarize a lively sentiment from Catullus or
an epigram from Pope.