Professor Manley thinks that the story of the Prodigal Son could have been better told this way:
The world gave him the marble heart, but his father extended the glad hand.
Yes, if those phrases had then been first used professors of literature might, as he suggests, be now expatiating on the beautiful simplicity of the diction and bewailing the inferiority of modern speech. But that is no defence of slang. It would not have been slang, any more than avowed or manifest quotations from the Scriptures as we have them are slang.
Professor Manley is especially charmed with the phrase “bats in his belfry,” and would indubitably substitute it for “possessed of a devil,” the Scriptural diagnosis of insanity. I don’t think the good man meant to be irreverent, but I should not care for his Revised Edition.
Somewhat more than a generation ago John Camden Hotten, of London, a publisher of “rare and curious books,” put out a slang dictionary. Its editor-in-chief was that accomplished scholar, George Augustus Sala. It was afterward revised by Henry Sampson, famous later as an authority in matters of sport, to whom I gave such assistance as my little learning and no sportsmanship permitted. The volume was a thick one, but contained little that in this country and period we know (and suffer) as “slang.” Slang, as the word was then used, is defined in the Century Dictionary thus: “The cant words or jargon used by thieves, peddlers, beggars, and the vagabond classes generally.”
To-day we mean by it something different and more offensive. It is no longer the argot of criminals and semi-criminals, “whom one does not meet,” and whose distance—when they keep it—lends a certain enchantment to the ear, but the intolerable diction of more or less worthy persons who obey all laws but those of taste. In its present generally accepted meaning the word is thus defined by the authority already quoted: “Colloquial words and phrases which have originated in the cant or rude speech of the vagabond or unlettered classes, or, belonging in form to standard speech, have acquired or have had given them restricted, capricious, or extravagantly metaphorical meanings, and are regarded as vulgar or inelegant.”
It is not altogether comprehensible how a sane intelligence can choose to utter itself in that kind of speech, yet speech of that kind seems almost to be driving good English out of popular use. Among large classes of our countrymen, it is held in so high esteem that whole books of it are put upon the market with profit to author and publisher. One of the most successful of these, reprinted from many of our leading newspapers, is called, I think, Fables in Slang—containing, by the way, nothing that resembles a fable. This unspeakable stuff made its author rich, and naturally he “syndicated” a second series of the same. Another was entitled Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum, and contained not a line of clean English. And it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in this country the writing of humorous and satirical verse is a lost art; slang has taken the place of wit; the jest that smacks not of the slum finds no prosperity in any ear.
Slang has as many hateful qualities as a dog bad habits, but its essential vice is its hideous lack of originality; for until a word or phrase is common property it is not slang. Wherein, then, is the sense or humor of repeating it? The dullest dunce in the world may have an alert and obedient memory for current locutions. For skill in the use of slang no other mental equipment is required. However apt and picturesque a particular expression may be, the wit of it is his only who invented and first used it: in all others its use is forbidden by the commandment “Thou shalt not steal.” A self-respecting writer would no more parrot a felicitous saying of unknown origin and popular currency than he would plagiarize a lively sentiment from Catullus or an epigram from Pope.