To one word, then, there are many meanings, according as it falls in the sentence, according as its successive ties and associations are broken or renewed.And here, seeing that the stupidest of all possible meanings is very commonly the slang meaning, it will be well to treat briefly of slang.For slang, in the looser acceptation of the term, is of two kinds, differing, and indeed diametrically opposite, in origin and worth.Sometimes it is the technical diction that has perforce been coined to name the operations, incidents, and habits of some way of life that society despises or deliberately elects to disregard.This sort of slang, which often invents names for what would otherwise go nameless, is vivid, accurate, and necessary, an addition of wealth to the world's dictionaries and of compass to the world's range of thought.Society, mistily conscious of the sympathy that lightens in any habitual name, seems to have become aware, by one of those wonderful processes of chary instinct which serve the great, vulnerable, timid organism in lieu of a brain, that to accept of the pickpocket his names for the mysteries of his trade is to accept also a new moral stand-point and outlook on the question of property.For this reason, and by no special masonic precautions of his own, the pickpocket is allowed to keep the admirable devices of his nomenclature for the familiar uses of himself and his mates, until a Villon arrives to prove that this language, too, was awaiting the advent of its bully and master.In the meantime, what directness and modest sufficiency of utterance distinguishes the dock compared with the fumbling prolixity of the old gentleman on the bench! It is the trite story, - romanticism forced to plead at the bar of classicism fallen into its dotage, Keats judged by BLACKWOOD, Wordsworth exciting the pained astonishment of Miss Anna Seward.Accuser and accused alike recognise that a question of diction is part of the issue between them; hence the picturesque confession of the culprit, made in proud humility, that he "clicked a red 'un" must needs be interpreted, to save the good faith of the court, into the vaguer and more general speech of the classic convention.Those who dislike to have their watches stolen find that the poorest language of common life will serve their simple turn, without the rich technical additions of a vocabulary that has grown around an art.They can abide no rendering of the fact that does not harp incessantly on the disapproval of watch-owners.They carry their point of morals at the cost of foregoing all glitter and finish in the matter of expression.
This sort of slang, therefore, technical in origin, the natural efflorescence of highly cultivated agilities of brain, and hand, and eye, is worthy of all commendation.But there is another kind that goes under the name of slang, the offspring rather of mental sloth, and current chiefly among those idle, jocular classes to whom all art is a bugbear and a puzzle.There is a public for every one; the pottle-headed lout who in a moment of exuberance strikes on a new sordid metaphor for any incident in the beaten round of drunkenness, lubricity, and debt, can set his fancy rolling through the music-halls, and thence into the street, secure of applause and a numerous sodden discipleship.Of the same lazy stamp, albeit more amiable in effect, are the thought-saying contrivances whereby one word is retained to do the work of many.
For the language of social intercourse ease is the first requisite;the average talker, who would be hard put to it if he were called on to describe or to define, must constantly be furnished with the materials of emphasis, wherewith to drive home his likes and dislikes.Why should he alienate himself from the sympathy of his fellows by affecting a singularity in the expression of his emotions? What he craves is not accuracy, but immediacy of expression, lest the tide of talk should flow past him, leaving him engaged in a belated analysis.Thus the word of the day is on all lips, and what was "vastly fine" last century is "awfully jolly"now; the meaning is the same, the expression equally inappropriate.
Oaths have their brief periods of ascendency, and philology can boast its fashion-plates.The tyrant Fashion, who wields for whip the fear of solitude, is shepherd to the flock of common talkers, as they run hither and thither pursuing, not self-expression, the prize of letters, but unanimity and self-obliteration, the marks of good breeding.Like those famous modern poets who are censured by the author of PARADISE LOST, the talkers of slang are "carried away by custom, to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have exprest them." The poverty of their vocabulary makes appeal to the brotherly sympathy of a partial and like-minded auditor, who can fill out their paltry conventional sketches from his own experience of the same events.
Within the limits of a single school, or workshop, or social circle, slang may serve; just as, between friends, silence may do the work of talk.There are few families, or groups of familiars, that have not some small coinage of this token-money, issued and accepted by affection, passing current only within those narrow and privileged boundaries.This wealth is of no avail to the travelling mind, save as a memorial of home, nor is its material such "as, buried once, men want dug up again." A few happy words and phrases, promoted, for some accidental fitness, to the wider world of letters, are all that reach posterity; the rest pass into oblivion with the other perishables of the age.
