Parts of Speech: Essays on English

by Brander Matthews

Just as in New York the “Upper Ten Thousand” of N. P. Willis have shrunk to the “Four Hundred” of Mr. Ward McAllister, so in London the swells soon became the smart set, and after a while developed into swagger people, as they became more and more exclusive and felt the need of new terms to express their new quality. But in no department of speech is the consumption of words more rapid than in that describing the degrees of intoxication; and the list of slang synonyms for the drunkard, and for his condition, and for the act which brings it about, is as long as Leporello’s. Among these, to get loaded and to carry a load are expressions obvious enough; and when we recall that jag is a provincialism meaning a light load, we see easily that the man who has a jag on is in the earlier stages of intoxication. This use of the word is, I think, wholly American, and it has not crossed the Atlantic as yet, or else a British writer could never have blundered into a definition of jag as an umbrella, quoting in illustration a paragraph from a St. Louis paper which said that “Mr. Brown was seen on the street last Sunday in the rain carrying a large fine jag.” One may wonder what this British writer would have made out of the remark of the Chicago humorist, that a certain man was not always drunk, even if he did jump “from jag to jag like an alcoholic chamois.”

Here, of course, we are fairly within the boundaries of slang—of the slang which is temporary only, and which withers away swiftly. But is swell slang now, and fad, and crank? Is boom slang, and is blizzard? And if it is difficult to draw any line of division between mere slang on the one side, and idiomatic words and phrases on the other, it is doubly difficult to draw this line between mere slang and the legitimate technicalities of a calling or a craft. Is it slang to say of a picture that the chief figure in it is out of drawing, or that the painter has got his values wrong? And how could any historian explain the ins and outs of New York politics who could not state frankly that the machine made a slate, and that the mugwumps broke it. Such a historian must needs master the meaning of laying pipe for a nomination, or pulling wires to secure it, of taking the stump before election, and of log-rolling after it; he must apprehend the exact relation of the boss to his henchmen and his heelers; and he must understand who the half-breeds were, and the stalwarts, and how the swallowtails were different from the short-hairs.

To call one man a boss and another a henchman may have been slang once, but the words are lawful now, because they are necessary. It is only by these words that the exact relation of a certain kind of political leader to a certain kind of political follower can be expressed succinctly. There are, of course, not a few political phrases still under the ban because they are needless. Some of these may some day come to convey an exact shade of meaning not expressed by any other word, and when this shall happen, they will take their places in the legitimate vocabulary. I doubt whether this good fortune will ever befall a use of influence, now not uncommon in Washington. The statesman at whose suggestion and request an office-holder has received his appointment is known as that office-holder’s influence. Thus a poor widow, suddenly turned out of a post she had held for years, because it was wanted by the henchman of some boss whose good will a senator or a department chief wished to retain, explained to a friend that her dismissal was due to the fact that her influence had died during the summer. The inevitable extension of the merit system in the civil service of our country will probably prevent the permanent acceptance of this new meaning.

The political is only one of a vast number of technical vocabularies, all of which are proffering their words for popular consumption. Every art and every science, every trade and every calling, every sect and every sport, has its own special lexicon, the most of the words in which must always remain outside of the general speech of the whole people. They are reserves, to be drawn upon to fill up the regular army in time of need. Legitimate enough when confined to their proper use, those technicalities become slang when employed out of season, and when applied out of the special department of human endeavor in which they have been evolved. Of course, if the public interest in this department is increased for any reason, more and more words from that technical vocabulary are adopted into the wider dictionary of popular speech; and thus the general language is still enriching itself by the taking over of words and phrases from the terminology devised by experts for their own use. Not without interest would it be if we could ascertain exactly how much of the special vocabulary of the mere man of letters is now understandable by the plain people. It is one of the characters in ‘Middlemarch’ who maintains that “correct English” is only “the slang of prigs who write history and essays, and the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.”

Of recent years many of the locutions of the Stock Exchange have won their way into general knowledge; and there are few of us who do not know what bears and bulls are, what a corner is, and what is a margin. The practical application of scientific knowledge makes the public at large familiar with many principles hitherto the exclusive possession of the experts, and the public at large gets to use freely to-day technicalities which even the learned of yesterday would not have understood. Current, for example, and insulation, made familiar by the startlingly rapid extension of electrical possibilities in the last few years, have been so fully assimilated that they are now used independently and without avowed reference to their original electrical meanings.

The prevalence of a sport or of a game brings into general use the terms of that special amusement. The Elizabethan dramatists, for example, use vy and revy and the other technicalities of the game of primero as freely as our western humorists use going it blind and calling and the other technicalities of the game of poker, which has been evolved out of primero in the course of the centuries. Some of the technicalities of euchre also, and of whist, have passed into every-day speech; and so have many of the terms of baseball and of football, of racing and of trotting, of rowing and of yachting. These made their way into the vocabulary of the average man one by one, as the seasons went around and as the sports followed one another in popularity. So during the civil war many military phrases were frequent in the mouths of the people; and some of these established themselves firmly in the vocabulary.

“In language, as in life,” so Professor Dowden tells us, “there is, so to speak, an aristocracy and a commonalty: words with a heritage of dignity, words which have been ennobled, and a rabble of words which are excluded from positions of honor and trust.” Some writers and speakers there are with so delicate a sense of refinement that they are at ease only with the ennobled words, with the words that came over with the conquerer, with the lords, spiritual and temporal, of the vocabulary. Others there are, parvenus themselves, and so tainted with snobbery that they are happy only in the society of their betters; and these express the utmost contempt for the mass of the vulgar. Yet again others there are who have Lincoln’s liking for the plain words of the plain people—the democrats of the dictionary, homely, simple, direct. These last are tolerant of the words, once of high estate, which have lost their rank and are fallen upon evil days, preferring them over the other words, plebeian once, but having pushed their fortunes energetically in successive generations, until now there are none more highly placed.

Perhaps the aristocratic figure of speech is a little misleading, because in the English language, as in France after the Revolution, we find la carrière ouverte aux talents, and every word has a fair chance to attain the highest dignity in the gift of the dictionary. No doubt family connections are still potent, and it is much easier for some words to rise in life than it is for others. Most people would hold that war and law and medicine made a more honorable pedigree for a technical term than the stage, for example, or than some sport.

And yet the stage has its own enormous vocabulary, used with the utmost scientific precision. The theater is a hotbed of temporary slang, often as lawless, as vigorous, and as picturesque as the phrases of the west; but it has also a terminology of its own, containing some hundreds of words, used always with absolute exactness. A mascot, meaning one who brings good luck, and a hoodoo, meaning one who brings ill fortune, are terms invented in the theater, it is true; and many another odd word can be credited to the same source. But every one behind the scenes knows also what sky-borders are, and bunch-lights, and vampire-traps, and raking-pieces—technical terms all of them, and all used with rigorous exactitude. Like the technicalities of any other profession, those of the stage are often very puzzling to the uninitiated, and a greenhorn could hardly even make a guess at the meaning of terms which every visitor to a green-room might use at any moment. What layman could explain the office of a cut-drop, the utility of a carpenter’s scene, or the precise privileges of a bill-board ticket?

There is one word which the larger vocabulary of the public has lately taken from the smaller vocabulary of the playhouse, and which some strolling player of the past apparently borrowed from some other vagabond familiar with thieves’ slang. This word is fake. It has always conveyed the suggestion of an intent to deceive. “Are you going to get up new scenery for the new play?” might be asked; and the answer would be, “No; we shall fake it,” meaning thereby that old scenery would be retouched and readjusted so as to have the appearance of new. From the stage the word passed to the newspapers, and a fake is a story invented, not founded on fact, “made out of whole cloth,” as the stump-speakers say. Mr. Howells, always bold in using new words, accepts fake as good enough for him, and prints it in the ‘Quality of Mercy’ without the stigma of italics or quotation-marks; just as in the same story he has adopted the colloquial electrics for electric lights—i.e., “He turned off the electrics.”