The unfortunate remark of Mr. Lang was due to his happening not to recall the fact that exit had become, first, an English noun, and, second, an English verb. When once it was Anglicized, it had all the rights of a native; it was a citizen of no mean country. The principle which it is well to keep in mind in any consideration of the position in English of terms once foreign is that no word can serve two masters. The English language is ever ravenous and voracious; its appetite is insatiable. It is forever taking over words from strange tongues, dead and alive. These words are but borrowed at first, and must needs conform to all the grammatical peculiarities of their native speech. But some of them are sooner or later firmly incorporated into English; and thereafter they must cease to obey any laws but those of the language into which they have been adopted. Either a word is English or it is not; and a decision on this point is rarely difficult.
(1895-1900)
VIII
THE FUNCTION OF SLANG
It is characteristic of the interest which science is now taking in things formerly deemed unworthy of consideration that philologists no longer speak of slang in contemptuous terms. Perhaps, indeed, it was not the scholar, but the amateur philologist, the mere literary man, who affected to despise slang. To the trained investigator into the mutations of language and into the transformations of the vocabulary, no word is too humble for respectful consideration; and it is from the lowly, often, that the most valuable lessons are learned. But until recently few men of letters ever mentioned slang except in disparagement and with a wish for its prompt extirpation. Even professed students of speech, like Trench and Alford (now sadly shorn of their former authority), are abundant in declarations of abhorrent hostility. De Quincey, priding himself on his independence and on his iconoclasm, was almost alone in saying a good word for slang.
There is this excuse for the earlier author who treated slang with contumely, that the differentiation of slang from cant was not complete in his day. Cant is the dialect of a class, often used correctly enough, as far as grammar is concerned, but often also unintelligible to those who do not belong to the class or who are not acquainted with its usages. Slang was at first the cant of thieves, and this seems to have been its only meaning until well into the present century. In ‘Redgauntlet,’ for example, published in 1824, Scott speaks of the “thieves’ Latin called slang.” Sometime during the middle of the century slang seems to have lost this narrow limitation, and to have come to signify a word or a phrase used with a meaning not recognized in polite letters, either because it had just been invented, or because it had passed out of memory. While cant, therefore, was a language within a language, so to speak, and not to be understanded of the people, slang was a collection of colloquialisms gathered from all sources, and all bearing alike the bend sinister of illegitimacy.
Certain of its words were unquestionably of very vulgar origin, being survivals of the “thieves’ Latin” Scott wrote about. Among these are pal and cove, words not yet admitted to the best society. Others were merely arbitrary misapplications of words of good repute, such as the employment of awfully and jolly as synonyms for very—as intensives, in short. Yet others were violent metaphors, like in the soup, kicking the bucket, holding up (a stage-coach). Others, again, were the temporary phrases which spring up, one scarcely knows how, and flourish unaccountably for a few months, and then disappear forever, leaving no sign; such as shoo-fly in America and all serene in England.
An analysis of modern slang reveals the fact that it is possible to divide the words and phrases of which it is composed into four broad classes, of quite different origin and of very varying value. Toward two of these classes it may be allowable to feel the contempt so often expressed for slang as a whole. Toward the other two classes such a feeling is wholly unjustifiable, for they are performing an inestimable service to the language.
Of the two unworthy classes, the first is that which includes the survivals of the “thieves’ Latin,” the vulgar terms used by vulgar men to describe vulgar things. This is the slang which the police-court reporter knows and is fond of using profusely. This is the slang which Dickens introduced to literature. This class of slang it is which is mainly responsible for the ill repute of the word. Much of the dislike for slang felt by people of delicate taste is, however, due to the second class, which includes the ephemeral phrases fortuitously popular for a season, and then finally forgotten once for all. These mere catchwords of the moment are rarely foul, as the words and phrases of the first class often are, but they are unfailingly foolish. There you go with your eye out, which was accepted as a humorous remark in London, and Where did you get that hat? which had a like fleeting vogue in New York, are phrases as inoffensive as they are flat. These temporary terms come and go, and are forgotten swiftly. Probably most readers of Forcythe Wilson’s ‘Old Sergeant’ need now to have it explained to them that during the war a grape-vine meant a lying rumor.
It must be said, however, that even in the terms of the first class there is a striving upward, a tendency to disinfect themselves, as any reader of Grose’s ‘Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue’ must needs remark when he discovers that phrases used now with perfect freedom had a secret significance in the last century. There are also innuendos not a few in certain of Shakspere’s best-known plays which fortunately escape the notice of all but the special student of the Elizabethan vocabulary.
The other two classes of slang stand on a different footing. Altho they suffer from the stigma attached to all slang by the two classes already characterized, they serve a purpose. Indeed, their utility is indisputable, and it was never greater than it is to-day. One of these classes consists of old and forgotten phrases or words, which, having long lain dormant, are now struggling again to the surface. The other consists of new words and phrases, often vigorous and expressive, but not yet set down in the literary lexicon, and still on probation. In these two classes we find a justification for the existence of slang—for it is the function of slang to be a feeder of the vocabulary. Words get threadbare and dried up; they come to be like evaporated fruit, juiceless and tasteless. Now it is the duty of slang to provide substitutes for the good words and true which are worn out by hard service. And many of the recruits slang has enlisted are worthy of enrolment among the regulars. When a blinded conservative is called a mossback, who is so dull as not to perceive the poetry of the word? When an actor tells us how the traveling company in which he was engaged got stranded, who does not recognize the force and the felicity of the expression? And when we hear a man declare that he would to-day be rich if only his foresight had been equal to his hindsight, who is not aware of the value of the phrase? No wonder is it that the verbal artist hankers after such words which renew the lexicon of youth! No wonder is it that the writer who wishes to present his thought freshly seeks these words with the bloom yet on them, and neglects the elder words desiccated as tho for preservation in a herbarium!