The American Language
and Arkansas. At once it struck the popular fancy and was soon heard
on all sides. All the usual derivatives appeared, /to steam-roller/,
/steam-rollered/, and so on. Since then, curiously enough, the term
has gradually forced its way back from slang to good usage, and even
gone over to England. In the early days of the Great War it actually
appeared in the most solemn English reviews, and once or twice, I
believe, in state papers.
Much of the discussion of slang by popular etymologists is devoted to
proofs that this or that locution is not really slang at all--that it
is to be found in Shakespeare, in Milton, or in the Revised Version.
These scientists, of course, overlook the plain fact that slang, like
the folk-song, is not the creation of people in the mass, but of
definite individuals, and that its character /as/ slang depends
entirely upon its adoption by the ignorant, who use its novelties too
assiduously and with too little imagination, and so debase them to the
estate of worn-out coins, smooth and valueless. It is this error,
often shared by philologists of sounder information, that lies under
the doctrine that the plays of Shakespeare are full of slang, and that
the Bard showed but a feeble taste in language. Nothing could be more
absurd. The business of writing English, in his day, was unharassed by
the proscriptions of purists, and so the vocabulary could be enriched
more facilely than today, but though Shakespeare and his
fellow-dramatists quickly adopted such neologisms as /to bustle/, /to
huddle/, /bump/, /hubbub/ and /pat/, it goes without saying that they
exercised a sound discretion and that the slang of the Bankside was
full of words and phrases which they were never tempted to use. In our
own day the same discrimination is exercised by all writers of sound
taste. On the one hand they disregard the senseless prohibitions of
school-masters, and on the other hand they draw the line with more or
less watchfulness, according as they are of conservative or liberal
habit. I [Pg308] find /the best of the bunch/ and /joke-smith/ in
Saintsbury;[10] one could scarcely imagine either in Walter Pater. But
by the same token one could not imagine /chicken/ (for young
girl),[11] /aber nit/, /to come across/ or /to camouflage/ in
Saintsbury.
What slang actually consists of doesn't depend, in truth, upon
intrinsic qualities, but upon the surrounding circumstances. It is the
user that determines the matter, and particularly the user's habitual
way of thinking. If he chooses words carefully, with a full
understanding of their meaning and savor, then no word that he uses
seriously will belong to slang, but if his speech is made up chiefly
of terms poll-parroted, and he has no sense of their shades and
limitations, then slang will bulk largely in his vocabulary. In its
origin it is nearly always respectable; it is devised not by the
stupid populace, but by individuals of wit and ingenuity; as Whitney
says, it is a product of an "exuberance of mental activity, and the
natural delight of language-making." But when its inventions happen to
strike the popular fancy and are adopted by the mob, they are soon
worn thread-bare and so lose all piquancy and significance, and, in
Whitney's words, become "incapable of expressing anything that is
real."[12] This is the history of such slang phrases, often
interrogative, as "How'd you like to be the ice-man?" "How's your poor
feet?" "Merci pour la langouste," "Have a heart," "This is the life,"
"Where did you get that hat?" "Would you for fifty cents?" "Let her
go, Gallegher," "Shoo-fly, don't bother me," "Don't wake him up" and
"Let George do it." The last well exhibits the process. It originated
in France, as "Laissez faire à Georges," during the fifteenth century,
and at the start had satirical reference to the multiform activities
of Cardinal Georges d'Amboise, prime minister to Louis XII.[13] It
later [Pg309] became common slang, was translated into English, had a
revival during the early days of David Lloyd-George's meteoric career,
was adopted into American without any comprehension of either its
first or its latest significance, and enjoyed the brief popularity of
a year.
Krapp attempts to distinguish between slang and sound idiom by setting
up the doctrine that the former is "more expressive than the situation
demands." "It is," he says, "a kind of hyperesthesia in the use of
language. /To laugh in your sleeve/ is idiom because it arises out of
a natural situation; it is a metaphor derived from the picture of one
raising his sleeve to his face to hide a smile, a metaphor which arose
naturally enough in early periods when sleeves were long and flowing;
but /to talk through your hat/ is slang, not only because it is new,
but also because it is a grotesque exaggeration of the truth."[14] The
theory, unluckily, is combated by many plain facts. /To hand it to
him/, /to get away with it/ and even /to hand him a lemon/ are
certainly not metaphors that transcend the practicable and probable,
and yet all are undoubtedly slang. On the other hand, there is
palpable exaggeration in such phrases as "he is not worth the powder
it would take to kill him," in such adjectives as /break-bone/
(fever), and in such compounds as /fire-eater/, and yet it would be
absurd to dismiss them as slang. Between /block-head/ and /bone-head/
there is little to choose, but the former is sound English, whereas
the latter is American slang. So with many familiar similes, /e. g./,
/like greased lightning/, /as scarce as hen's teeth/; they are
grotesque hyperboles, but surely not slang.
The true distinction between slang and more seemly idiom, in so far as
any distinction exists at all, is that indicated by Whitney. Slang
originates in an effort, always by ingenious individuals, to make the
language more vivid and expressive. When in the form of single words
it may appear as new metaphors, [Pg310] /e. g./, /bird/ and /peach/;
as back formations, /e. g./, /beaut/ and /flu/; as composition-forms,
/e. g./, /whatdyecallem/; as picturesque compounds, /e. g./,
/booze-foundry/; as onomatopes, /e. g./, /biff/ and /zowie/; or in any
other of the shapes that new terms take. If, by the chances that
condition language-making, it acquires a special and limited meaning,
not served by any existing locution, it enters into sound idiom and is
presently wholly legitimatized; if, on the contrary, it is adopted by
the populace as a counter-word and employed with such banal
imitativeness that it soon loses any definite significance whatever,
then it remains slang and is avoided by the finical. An example of the
former process is afforded by /Tommy-rot/. It first appeared as
English school-boy slang, but its obvious utility soon brought it into
good usage. In one of Jerome K. Jerome's books, "Paul Kelver," there
is the following dialogue:
"The wonderful songs that nobody ever sings, the wonderful pictures
that nobody ever paints, and all the rest of it. It's /Tommy-rot/!"
"I wish you wouldn't use slang."
"Well, you know what I mean. What is the proper word? Give it to me."
"I suppose you mean /cant/."
"No, I don't. /Cant/ is something that you don't believe in yourself.
It's /Tommy-rot/; there isn't any other word."
Nor was there any other word for /hubbub/ and to /dwindle/ in
Shakespeare's time; he adopted and dignified them because they met
genuine needs. Nor was there any other satisfactory word for /graft/
when it came in, nor for /rowdy/, nor for /boom/, nor for /joy-ride/,
nor for /omnibus-bill/, nor for /slacker/, nor for /trust-buster/.
Such words often retain a humorous quality; they are used satirically
and hence appear but seldom in wholly serious discourse. But they have
standing in the language nevertheless, and only a prig would hesitate
to use them as Saintsbury used /the best of the bunch/ and
/joke-smith/.
On the other hand, many an apt and ingenious neologism, by falling too
quickly into the gaping maw of the proletariat, is spoiled forthwith.
Once it becomes, in Oliver Wendell Holmes' phrase, "a cheap generic
term, a substitute for differentiated [Pg311] specific expressions,"
it quickly acquires such flatness that the fastidious flee it as a
plague. One recalls many capital verb-phrases, thus ruined by
unintelligent appreciation, /e. g./, /to hand him a lemon/, /to freeze
on to/, /to have the goods/, /to fall for it/, and /to get by/. One
recalls, too, some excellent substantives, /e. g./, /dope/ and /dub/,
and compounds, /e. g./, /come-on/ and /easy-mark/, and verbs, /e. g./,
/to vamp/. These are all quite as sound in structure as the great
majority of our most familiar words, but their adoption by the
ignorant and their endless use and misuse in all sorts of situations
have left them tattered and obnoxious, and they will probably go the
way, as Matthews says, of all the other "temporary phrases which
spring up, one scarcely knows how, and flourish unaccountably for a
few months, and then disappear forever, leaving no sign." Matthews is
wrong in two particulars here. They do not arise by any mysterious
parthenogenesis, but come from sources which, in many cases, may be
determined. And they last, alas, a good deal more than a month.
/Shoo-fly/ afflicted the American people for at least two years, and
"I /don't/ think" and /aber nit/ quite as long. Even "good-/night/"
lasted a whole year.
A very large part of our current slang is propagated by the
newspapers, and much of it is invented by newspaper writers. One needs
but turn to the slang of baseball to find numerous examples. Such
phrases as /to clout the sphere/, /the initial sack/, /to slam the
pill/ and /the dexter meadow/ are obviously not of bleachers
manufacture. There is not enough imagination in that depressing army
to devise such things; more often than not, there is not even enough
intelligence to comprehend them. The true place of their origin is the
perch of the newspaper reporters, whose competence and compensation is
largely estimated, at least on papers of wide circulation, by their
capacity for inventing novelties. The supply is so large that
connoisseurship has grown up; an extra-fecund slang-maker on the press
has his following. During the summer of 1913 the /Chicago
Record-Herald/, somewhat alarmed by the extravagant fancy of its
baseball reporters, asked its readers if they would prefer a return to
plain English. Such of them as were literate enough [Pg312] to send
in their votes were almost unanimously against a change. As one of
them said, "one is nearer the park when Schulte /slams the pill/ than
when he merely /hits the ball/." In all other fields the newspapers
originate and propagate slang, particularly in politics. Most of our
political slang-terms since the Civil War, from /pork-barrel/ to
/steam-roller/, have been their inventions. The English newspapers,
with the exception of a few anomalies such as the /Pink-Un/, lean in
the other direction; their fault is not slanginess, but an otiose
ponderosity--in Dean Alford's words, "the insisting on calling common
things by uncommon names; changing our ordinary short Saxon nouns and
verbs for long words derived from the Latin."[15] The American
newspapers, years ago, passed through such a stage of bombast, but
since the invention of yellow journalism by the elder James Gordon
Bennett--that is, the invention of journalism for the frankly ignorant
and vulgar--they have gone to the other extreme. Edmund Clarence
Stedman noted the change soon after the Civil War. "The whole
country," he wrote to Bayard Taylor in 1873, "owing to the contagion
of our newspaper 'exchange' system, is flooded, deluged, swamped
beneath a muddy tide of slang."[16] A thousand alarmed watchmen have
sought to stay it since, but in vain. The great majority of our