Questions at Issue in Our English Speech

by Edwin W. Bowen

Viewed in this light, slang assumes a different aspect, and it becomes evident that it performs a certain necessary function in the development of language. It is no longer proper, therefore, to refer to slang with supreme contempt and to condemn it offhand as an unmitigated evil which ought to be forthwith extirpated from the language. For, as an eminent authority has observed, slang is the recruiting ground of language and is, in reality, idiom in the making. It has been pointed out how some of the slang expressions of the eighteenth century which fell under the censure of Swift and Beattie are now found upon the pages of our best authors and are heard upon the lips of our most polished and elegant speakers. Since this is true, no verbal critic can at the present time affirm of a polite slang expression now in vogue that it is destined never to work its way up into good usage, or of a foreign locution that it will never be domiciled in our speech. Nor can he determine, in the case of a new coinage which is a candidate for adoption into the literary language, just when it is taken over from that doubtful borderland between slang and standard usage.

Seeing, then, that slang really has a function to perform in the growth of speech and, therefore, that it is worthy of serious consideration, let us examine some of our modern English slang and study for a short while its origin and history.

Professor Brander Matthews, in an admirable paper on the subject, divides slang into four classes, and we can hardly do better than to follow his general classification. The first class embraces those vulgar cant expressions which are the survivals of thieves’ Latin or St. Giles’ Greek, and those uncouth, inelegant terms which constitute the vernacular of the lower orders of society. This is the kind of slang heard in the police courts, the kind the newspaper reporter too frequently resorts to, in order to give spice to his account. It has been introduced into literature by some of our recent novelists, notably Dickens. The second class of slang is not quite so coarse, and includes those ephemeral phrases and catchwords which have a fleeting popularity and which, because they meet no real need, are soon forgotten utterly. They live but a day and pass away, leaving behind no trace of their existence. Of this class are campaign slogans and such inane expressions as where did you get that hat? chestnut, rot, I should smile and many others equally stupid. It is these two classes of slang that have brought the term into disrepute and merited contempt. For this sort of slang is very offensive to delicate ears and justly deserves the speedy oblivion which overtakes it.

The other two classes of slang, on the contrary, are of a finer type and have a reason for their being, something to commend them to popular favor. It may well be that from this type new idioms and phrases are recruited into our literary language. However, a certain stigma attaches to this better variety of slang, also, in the judgment of many, simply because it is slang. Yet it is heard on the lips of educated and cultured speakers, much to the disgust of those who are fastidious as to the propriety of usage. When it is employed in the written speech, the more careful writers brand it with inverted commas, the barbarian earmarks which attest its social inferiority. Occasionally a bold writer like Mr. Howells breaks down these barriers which convention has set up and gives a polite slang expression the stamp of his approval and authority. In this way these social outcasts, the pariahs of our literary speech, are now and then elevated to the dignity and rank of good society, and finally establish themselves in standard English.

Of these two classes of slang serving some useful end as feeders to the vocabulary and idiom of our language by which its wasting energy is to be repaired, the first embraces those archaic phrases and terms which are revived after long disuse and again brought into service. Restored after several generations of neglect, they now appear to be entirely new coinages and are only received as other probationers. The second class is composed of absolutely new words and expressions, frequently the product of a happy invention and, generally, racy and forceful. As instances of the first class may be mentioned to fire, in the sense to expel forcibly or dismiss, bloody in the sense of very, deck in the sense pack of cards and similar historic Elizabethan revivals. Such locutions have a good literary pedigree, now and then boasting the authority of Shakespearean usage. But this is not always apparent and such long-obsolete phrases are, therefore, accounted mere parvenus. For example, in King Henry VI. we read:

Whiles he thought to steal the single ten,
The king was slily fingered from the deck.—3 Pr.,v.1.

and again in Shakespeare’s 144th sonnet:

Till my good angel fire my bad one out.

The vulgar bloody, more common in England than in America, is an inheritance from the classic age of Dryden, who even uses the coarse phrase “bloody drunk” in his Prologue to “Southerne’s Disappointment.” Swift furnishes a slight variation from this in “bloody sick,” occurring in his “Poisoning of Curll.” The more fruitful province of polite slang is the second class, which is made up of the clever productions of the present age. It is from the best of these coinages, above all, that the worn-out energies of our vocabulary and idiom are repaired. These raw recruits of slang are severely disciplined and tested by hard preliminary service. If in this test an individual slang expression proves useful and is seen to fill an actual need, it is admitted eventually into the fellowship of standard English. But if, on the other hand, its utility is not established, it is relegated to the limbo of useless inventions where oblivion soon engulfs it.

Let us now review a few specimens of the best type of our modern slang. But perhaps it is safer simply to mention the alleged slang and not undertake to decide which of these expressions are slang and which standard English. For it is no easy matter to trace the line of cleavage between the legitimate technicality of a given craft or profession and polite slang. For instance, are corner, bull, bear and slump, so familiar in financial parlance, mere technical phraseology or slang? How is one to classify such political terms as mugwump, buncombe, gerrymander, scalawag, henchman, log-rolling, pulling the wires, machine, slate and to take the stump? If these are mere technical terms, surely boycott, cab, humbug, boom and blizzard have passed beyond the narrow bounds of technicality and are verging on that dubious borderland between slang and standard English. Furthermore, are swell, fad, crank, spook and stogy to be considered slang or good English? Each of these terms is supported by the authority of some of our best writers. Swell, to cite only one example, is bolstered up by the authority of Thackeray, who in his “Adventures of Philip” writes: “They narrate to him the advent and departure of the lady in the swell carriage, the mother of the young swell with the flower in his buttonhole.” Again, how is one to regard fake, splurge, sand, swagger, blooming (idiot), to go it blind, to catch on, and that vast host of similar racy and vivid phrases which, if slang, still do duty for classic English in common parlance?