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Doubtless there is much room for improvement in the deportment and
speech of our very efficient Municipal Police. Citizens have frequently
to apply to them for information, and it sometimes happens that the
answer is couched in language that may be Polish, so far as the querist
knows, though, in fact, there is no polish about it. It is more likely
to be COPTIC, as the policeman of the period likes to call himself a
"COP." If there is a street sensation in progress, and you ask a
contemplative policeman the cause of it, matters are not made perfectly
clear to you when he replies that it is "only a put-up job to screen a
fence" or words to that affect. If you ask him to explain things more
fully he will probably say, "Shoo! fly," or "you know how it is
yourself," or recommend you to "scratch gravel." Such expressions as
these are very embarrassing to strangers, and even to citizens whose
pathways have not led them through the brambly tracts of police
philology.
In view of these facts, the public have reason to be thankful to Justice
DOWLING for the reproof administered by him, a few days since, to a
policeman who made use of slang in addressing the bench. The reprehended
officer of the law spoke about a prisoner being "turned over," when he
should have said "discharged." This gave Mr. DOWLING occasion to pass
some severe remarks with regard to the use of slang terms generally, by
policemen, and to caution them against addressing persons in any such
jargon. The lesson was a timely one, and we hope that it may prove
effective, since we frequently hear perplexed inquirers complaining that
their education has been neglected so far as slang is concerned, and
lamenting that, when young, they had not devoted themselves rather to
the study of the Thieves' Dictionary than to that of the polite but
comparatively useless treatises on their native tongue.
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