Perhaps the more highly civilized a population is, the more it has parted with the power of pictorial phrase-making. It may be that a certain lawlessness of life is the cause of a lawlessness of language. Of all metropolitan slang that of the outlaws is most vigorous. It was after Vidocq had introduced thieves’ slang into polite society that Balzac, always a keen observer and always alert to pick up unworn words, ventured to say, perhaps to the astonishment of many, that “there is no speech more energetic, more colored, than that of these people.” Balzac was not academic in his vocabulary, and he owed not a little of the sharpness of his descriptions to his hatred of the cut-and-dried phrases of his fellow-novelists. He would willingly have agreed with Montaigne when the essayist declared that the language he liked, written or spoken, was “a succulent and nervous speech, short and compact, not so much delicated and combed out as vehement and brusk, rather arbitrary than monotonous, ... not pedantic, but soldierly rather, as Suetonius called Cæsar’s.” And this brings us exactly to Mr. Bret Harte’s
Phrases such as camps may teach,
Saber-cuts of Saxon speech,
There is a more soldierly frankness, a greater freedom, less restraint, less respect for law and order, in the west than in the east; and this may be a reason why American slang is superior to British and to French. The catchwords of New York may be as inept and as cheap as the catchwords of London and of Paris, but New York is not as important to the United States as London is to Great Britain and as Paris is to France; it is not as dominating, not as absorbing. So it is that in America the feebler catchwords of the city give way before the virile phrases of the west. There is little to choose between the how’s your poor feet? of London and the well, I should smile of New York, for neither phrase had any excuse for existence, and neither had any hope of survival. The city phrase is often doubtful in meaning and obscure in origin. In London, for example, the four-wheel cab is called a growler. Why? In New York a can brought in filled with beer at a bar-room is called a growler, and the act of sending this can from the private house to the public house and back is called working the growler. Why?
But when we find a western writer describing the effects of tanglefoot whisky, the adjective explains itself, and is justified at once. And we discover immediately the daringly condensed metaphor in the sign, “Don’t monkey with the buzz-saw”; the picturesqueness of the word buzz-saw and its fitness for service are visible at a glance. So we understand the phrase readily and appreciate its force when we read the story of ‘Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral,’ and are told that “he never went back on his mother,” or when we hear the defender of ‘Banty Tim’ declare that
“Ef one of you teches the boy
He’ll wrestle his hash to-night in hell,
Or my name’s not Tilman Joy.”
To wrestle one’s hash is not an elegant expression, one must admit, and it is not likely to be adopted into the literary language; but it is forcible at least, and not stupid. To go back on, however, bids fair to take its place in our speech as a phrase at once useful and vigorous.
From the wide and wind-swept plains of the west came blizzard, and altho it has been suggested that the word is a survival from some local British dialect, the west still deserves the credit of having rescued it from desuetude. From the logging-camps of the northwest came boom, an old word again, but with a new meaning which the language promptly accepted. From still farther west came the use of sand to indicate staying power, backbone—what New England knows as grit and old England as pluck (a far less expressive word). From the southwest came cinch, from the tightening of the girths of the pack-mules, and so by extension indicating a grasp of anything so firm that it cannot get away.
Just why a dead cinch should be the securest of any, I confess I do not know. Dead is here used as an intensive; and the study of intensives is as yet in its infancy. In all parts of Great Britain and the United States we find certain words wrenched from their true meaning and most arbitrarily employed to heighten the value of other words. Thus we have a dead cinch, or a dead sure thing, a dead shot, a dead level—and for these last two terms we can discover perhaps a reason. Lowell noted in New England a use of tormented as a euphemism for damned, as “not a tormented cent.” Every American traveler in England must have remarked with surprise the British use of the Saxon synonym of sanguinary as an intensive, the chief British rivals of bloody in this respect being blooming and blasted. All three are held to be shocking to polite ears, and it was with bated breath that the editor of a London newspaper wrote about the prospects of “a b——y war”; while, as another London editor declared recently, it is now impossible for a cockney to read with proper sympathy Jeffrey’s appeal to Carlyle, after a visit to Craigenputtock, to bring his “blooming Eve out of her blasted paradise.” Of the other slang synonyms for very—jolly, “he was jolly ill,” is British; awfully was British first, and is now American also; and daisy is American. But any discussion of intensives is a digression here, and I return as soon as may be to the main road.
To freeze to anything or any person is a down-east phrase, so Lowell records, but it has a far-western strength; and so has to get solid with, as when the advice is given that “if a man is courting a girl it is best to get solid with her father.” What is this phrase, however, but the French solidarité, which we have recently taken over into English to indicate a communion of interests and responsibilities? The likeness of French terms to American is no new thing; Lowell told us that Horace Mann, in one of his public addresses, commented at some length on the beauty and moral significance of the French phrase s’orienter, and called upon his young friends to practise it, altho “there was not a Yankee in his audience whose problem had not always been to find out what was about east, and to shape his course accordingly.” A few years ago, in turning over ‘Karikari,’ a volume of M. Ludovic Halévy’s clever and charming sketches of Parisian character, I met with a delightful young lady who had pas pour deux liards de coquetterie; and I wondered whether M. Halévy, if he were an American, and one of the forty of an American Academy, would venture the assertion that his heroine was not coquettish for a cent.
Closely akin to to freeze to and to be solid with is jumped on. When severe reproof is administered the culprit is said to be jumped on; and if the reproof shall be unduly severe, the sufferer is said then to be jumped on with both feet. All three of these phrases belong to a class from which the literary language has enlisted many worthy recruits in the past, and it would not surprise me to see them answer to their names whenever a new dictionary calls the roll of English words. Will they find themselves shoulder to shoulder with spook, a word of Dutch origin, now volunteering for English service both in New York and in South Africa? And by that time will slump have been admitted to the ranks, and fad, and crank, in the secondary meaning of a man of somewhat unsettled mind? Slump is an Americanism, crank is an Americanism of remote British descent, and fad is a Briticism; this last is perhaps the most needed word of the three, and from it we get a name for the faddist, the bore who rides his hobby hard and without regard to the hounds.