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.