The place of slang is in real life. There, an
occasional indulgence in it is an almost
necessary
concession to our gregarious humanity;
he who declines altogether to let his speech be
influenced by his neighbours' tricks,
and takes counsel only of pure reason, is
setting up for
more than man. Awfully nice is an
expression than which few could be sillier; but
to have
succeeded in going through life without
saying it a certain number of times is as bad
as to have
no redeeming vice. Further, the writer
who deals in conversation may sometimes find it
necessary, by way of characterizing his
speakers, to put slang in their mouths; if he
is wise he
will make the least possible use of this
resource; and to interlard the
non-conversational parts of
a book or article with slang, quotation
marks or no quotation marks, is as bad as
interlarding
with French. Foreign words and slang
are, as spurious ornaments, on the same level.
The
italics, but not the quotation marks, in
these examples are ours:
When the madness motif was being
treated on the stage, Shakespeare (as was the
custom of his theatre) treated it
'for all it was worth', careless of the
boundaries
between feigning and
reality.—Times.
But even this situation 'peters
out', the wife being sent away with her fate
undecided, and the husband,
represented as a 'forcible-feeble' person by
the
dramatist and as a feeble person,
tout court, by the actor....—Times.
M. Baron the younger is amusing as
the 'bounder' Olivier.—Times.
Asking ourselves this question
about Mr. Thurston's play, we find that it has
given
us a ha'porth of pleasure to an
intolerable deal of boredom. With its primary
postulate, 'steep' as it is, we
will not quarrel.—Times.
They will find no subtlety in it,
no literary art, no profundity of feeling; but
they will
assuredly find breadth, colour,
and strength. It is a play that hits you, as
the children
say, 'bang in the eye'.—Times.
They derive no advantage from
schemes of land settlement from which the man
who has broken the land in gets
'the boot', the voter gets the land, the
Government gets the vote, and the
London labour market gets the risk.—Times.
The effect of using quotation marks with
slang is merely to convert a mental into a
moral
weakness. When they are not used, we may
mercifully assume that the writer does not know
the
difference between slang and good
English, and sins in ignorance: when they are,
he is telling
us, I know it is naughty, but then it is
nice. Most of us would rather be taken for
knaves than for
fools; and so the quotation marks are
usually there.
With this advice—never to use slang
except in dialogue, and there as little as may
be—we might
leave the subject, except that the
suggestion we have made about the unconscious
use of slang
seems to require justifying. To justify
it, we must attempt some analysis, however
slight, of
different sorts of slang.
To the ordinary man, of average
intelligence and middle-class position, slang
comes from every
direction, from above, from below, and
from all sides, as well as from the centre.
What comes
from some directions he will know for
slang, what comes from others he may not. He
may be
expected to recognize words from below.
Some of these are shortenings, by the lower
classes,
of words whose full form conveys no
clear meaning, and is therefore useless, to
them. An
antiquated example is mob, for mobile
vulgus. That was once slang, and is now good
English.
A modern one is bike, which will very
likely be good English also in time. But though
its brevity
is a strong recommendation, and its
uncouthness probably no more than subjective
and
transitory, it is as yet slang. Such
words should not be used in print till they
have become so
familiar that there is not the slightest
temptation to dress them up in quotation marks.
Though they
are the most easily detected, they are
also the best slang; when the time comes, they
take their
place in the language as words that will
last, and not, like many of the more highly
descended
words, die away uselessly after a brief
popularity.
Another set of words that may be said to
come from below, since it owes its existence to
the
vast number of people who are incapable
of appreciating fine shades of meaning, is
exemplified
by nice, awful, blooming. Words of this
class fortunately never make their way, in
their slang
senses, into literature (except, of
course, dialogue). The abuse of nice has gone
on at any rate
for over a century; the curious reader
may find an interesting page upon it in the
fourteenth
chapter of Northanger Abbey (1803). But
even now we do not talk in books of a nice day,
only of a nice distinction. On the other
hand, the slang use makes us shy in different
degrees of
writing the words in their legitimate
sense: a nice distinction we write almost
without qualms;
an awful storm we think twice about; and
as to a blooming girl, we hardly venture it
nowadays. The most recent sufferer of
this sort is perhaps chronic. It has been
adopted by the
masses, as far apart at least as in
Yorkshire and in London, for a mere intensive,
in the sense of
remarkable. The next step is for it to
be taken up in parody by people who know
better; after
which it may be expected to succeed
awful.
So much for the slang from below; the
ordinary man can detect it. He is not so
infallible about
what comes to him from above. We are by
no means sure that we shall be correct in our
particular attribution of the half-dozen
words now to be mentioned; but it is safe to
say that they
are all at present enjoying some vogue
as slang, and that they all come from regions
that to
most of us are overhead. Phenomenal,
soon, we hope, to perish unregretted, is (at
least
indirectly, through the abuse of
phenomenon) from Metaphysics; immanence, a word
often
met in singular company, from
Comparative Theology; epochmaking perhaps from
the
Philosophic Historian; true inwardness
from Literary Criticism; cad (which is, it
appears,
Etonian for cadet) from the Upper
Classes; psychological moment from Science;
thrasonical
and cryptic from Academic Circles;
philistine from the region of culture. Among
these the one
that will be most generally allowed to
be slang—cad—is in fact the least so; it has by
this time,
like mob, passed its probation and taken
its place as an orthodox word, so that all who
do not
find adequate expression for their
feelings in the orthodox have turned away to
bounder and
other forms that still admit the
emphasis of quotation marks. As for the rest of
them, they are
being subjected to that use, at once
over-frequent and inaccurate, which produces
one kind of
slang. But the average man, seeing from
what exalted quarters they come, is dazzled
into
admiration and hardly knows them for
what they are.
By the slang that comes from different
sides or from the centre we mean especially the
many
words taken originally from particular
professions, pursuits, or games, but extended
beyond
them. Among these a man is naturally
less critical of what comes from his own daily
concerns,
that is, in his view, from the centre.
Frontispiece, for face, perhaps originated in
the desire of
prize-ring reporters to vary the words
in their descriptive flights. Negotiate (a
difficulty, &c.)
possibly comes from the hunting-field;
people whose conversation runs much upon a
limited
subject feel the need of new phrases for
the too familiar things. And both these words,
as well
as individual, which must be treated
more at length in the next section, are
illustrations of a
tendency that we have called
polysyllabic humour and discussed in the
Chapter Airs and
Graces. We now add a short list of slang
phrases or words that can most of them be
referred
with more or less of certainty to
particular occupations. Whether they are
recognized as slang
will certainly depend in part on whether
the occupation is familiar, though sometimes
the
familiarity will disguise, and sometimes
it will conceal the slanginess.
To hedge, the double event (turf);
frontal attack (war); play the game, stumped
(cricket); to
run—the show, &c.—(engine-driving);
knock out, take it lying down (prize ring);
log-rolling,
slating, birrelling (literature); to
tackle—a problem, &c.—(football); to take a
back seat
(coaching?); bedrock, to exploit, how it
pans out (mining); whole-hogging, world policy
(politics); floored (1. prize ring; 2.
school); the under dog (dog-fighting); up to
date
(advertising); record—time,
&c.—(athletics); euchred, going one better,
going Nap. (cards); to
corner—a thing—(commerce)—a
person—(ratting); chic (society journalism); on
your own,
of sorts, climb down, globetrotter, to
laze (perhaps not assignable).
Good and sufficient occasions will
arise—rarely—for using most of these phrases
and the rest
of the slang vocabulary. To those,
however, who desire that what they write may
endure it is
suggested that, as style is the great
antiseptic, so slang is the great corrupting
matter; it is
perishable itself, and infects what is
round it—the catchwords that delight one
generation stink in
the nostrils of the next; individual,
which almost made the fortune of many a
Victorian humorist,
is one of the modern editor's
shibboleths for detecting the unfit. And even
those who regard
only the present will do well to
remember that in literature as elsewhere there
are as many
conservatives as progressives, as many
who expect their writers to say things a little
better than
they could do themselves as who are
flattered by the proof that one man is no
better than
another.
'Skepsey did come back to London
with rather a damaged frontispiece', Victor
said.—Meredith.
Henson, however, once negotiated a
sprint down his wing, and put in a fine
dropping shot to Aubert, who
saved.—Guernsey Evening Press.
Passengers, the guild add, usually
arrive at the last moment before sailing, when
the master must concentrate his
mind upon negotiating a safe passage.—Times.
To deal with these extensive and
purely local breeding grounds in the manner
suggested by Major Ross would be a
very tall order.—Times.
In about twenty minutes he
returned, accompanied by a highly
intelligent-looking
individual, dressed in blue and
black, with a particularly white cravat, and
without a
hat on his head; this individual,
whom I should have mistaken for a gentleman but
for the intelligence depicted in
his face, he introduced to me as the master of
the
inn.—Borrow.
A Sèvres vase sold yesterday at
Christie's realized what is believed to be the
record price of 4,000
guineas.—Times.
You could not, if you had tried,
have made so perfect a place for two girls to
lounge in, to laze in, to read
silly novels in, or to go to sleep in on drowsy
afternoons.—Crockett.
Mr. Balfour's somewhat thrasonical
eulogies.—Spectator.
A quarrelsome, somewhat
thrasonical fighting man.—Spectator.
The true inwardness of this
statement is...—Times.
We do not know what inwardness
there may be in the order of his discourses,
though each of them has some
articulate link with that which
precedes.—Times.
Such a departure from etiquette at
the psychological moment shows tact and
discretion.—Times.
He asserts that about four years
ago there was quite an Argentine boom in New
Zealand.—Times.
No
treatment of slang, however short, should omit
the reminder that slang and idiom are hard to
distinguish, and yet, in literature,
slang is bad, and idiom good. We said that
slang was
perishable; the fact is that most of it
perishes; but some survives and is given the
idiomatic
franchise; 'when it doth prosper, none
dare call it' slang. The idiomatic writer
differs chiefly from
the slangy in using what was slang and
is now idiom; of what is still slang he chooses
only that
part which his insight assures him has
the sort of merit that will preserve it. In a
small part of their
vocabulary the idiomatic and the slangy
will coincide, and be therefore confused by the
undiscerning. The only advice that can
be given to novices uncertain of their own
discrimination
is to keep carefully off the debatable
ground. Full idiom and full slang are as far
apart as virtue
and vice; and yet
They oft so mix, the difference is
too nice
Where ends the virtue, or begins
the vice.
Any one who can confidently assign each
of the following phrases to its own territory
may feel
that he is not in much danger:
Outrun the constable, the man in
the street, kicking your heels, between two
stools,
cutting a loss, riding for a fall,
not seeing the wood for the trees, minding your
Ps
and Qs, crossing the ts, begging
the question, special pleading, a bone to pick,
half seas over, tooth and nail,
bluff, maffick, a tall order, it has come to
stay.
