The student of slang is surprised that he is able to bring forward an honorable pedigree for many words so long since fallen from their high estate that they are now treated as upstarts when they dare to assert themselves. Words have their fates as well as men and books; and the ups and downs of a phrase are often almost as pathetic as those of a man. It has been said that the changes of fortune are so sudden here in these United States that it is only three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. The English language is not quite so fast as the American people, but in the English language it is only three centuries from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. What could seem more modern, more western even, than deck for pack of cards, and to lay out or to lay out cold for to knockdown? Yet these are both good old expressions, in decay no longer, but now insisting on their right to a renewed life. Deck is Elizabethan, and we find in Shakspere’s ‘King Henry VI.’ (part iii., act v., sc. i.) that
The king was slyly finger’d from the deck.
To lay out in its most modern sense is very early English.
Even more important than this third class of slang expressions is the fourth, containing the terms which are, so to speak, serving their apprenticeship, and as yet uncertain whether or not they will be admitted finally into the gild of good English. These terms are either useful or useless; they either satisfy a need or they do not; they therefore live or die according to the popular appreciation of their value. If they expire, they pass into the limbo of dead-and-gone slang, than which there is no blacker oblivion. If they survive it is because they have been received into the literary language, having appealed to the perceptions of some master of the art and craft of speech, under whose sponsorship they are admitted to full rights. Thus we see that slang is a training-school for new expressions, only the best scholars getting the diploma which confers longevity, the others going surely to their fate.
Sometimes these new expressions are words only, sometimes they are phrases. To go back on, for instance, and to give one’s self away are specimens of the phrase characteristic of this fourth and most interesting class of slang at its best. In its creation of phrases like these, slang is what idiom was before language stiffened into literature, and so killed its earlier habit of idiom-making. After literature has arrived, and after the schoolmaster is abroad, and after the printing-press has been set up in every hamlet, the idiom-making faculty of a language is atrophied by disuse. Slang is sometimes, and to a certain extent, a survival of this faculty, or at least a substitute for its exercise. In other words (and here I take the liberty of quoting from a private letter of one of the foremost authorities on the history of English, Professor Lounsbury), “slang is an effort on the part of the users of language to say something more vividly, strongly, concisely than the language as existing permits it to be said”; and he adds that slang is therefore “the source from which the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed.”
Being contrary to the recognized standards of speech, slang finds no mercy at the hands of those who think it their duty to uphold the strict letter of the law. Nothing amazes an investigator more, and nothing more amuses him, than to discover that thousands of words now secure in our speech were once denounced as interlopers. “There is death in the dictionary,” said Lowell, in his memorable linguistic essay prefixed to the second series of the ‘Biglow Papers’; “and where language is too strictly limited by convention, the ground for expression to grow in is limited also, and we get a potted literature—Chinese dwarfs instead of healthy trees.” And in the paper on Dryden he declared that “a language grows and is not made.” Pedants are ever building the language about with rules of iron in a vain effort to keep it from growing naturally and according to its needs.
It is true that cab and mob are clipped words, and there has always been a healthy dislike of any clipping of the verbal currency. But consols is firmly established. Two clipped words there are which have no friends—gents and pants. Dr. Holmes has put them in the pillory of a couplet:
The things named pants, in certain documents,
A word not made for gentlemen, but gents.
And recently a sign, suspended outside a big Broadway building, announced that there were “Hands wanted on pants,” the building being a clothing factory, and not, as one might suppose, a boys’ school.
The slang of a metropolis, be that where you will, in the United States or in Great Britain, in France or in Germany, is nearly always stupid. There is neither fancy nor fun in the Parisian’s Ohé Lambert or on dirait du veau, nor in the Londoner’s all serene or there you go with your eye out—catchwords which are humorous, if humorous they are, only by general consent and for some esoteric reason. It is to such stupid phrases of a fleeting popularity that Dr. Holmes refers, no doubt, when he declares that “the use of slang, or cheap generic terms, as a substitute for differentiated specific expressions is at once a sign and a cause of mental atrophy.” And this use of slang is far more frequent in cities, where people often talk without having anything to say, than in the country, where speech flows slowly.