Adjectivism, adverbism, and nounism, or marked disposition to multiply one or more of the above classes of words, and in the above order, also occur near the early teens. Adjectives are often used as adverbial prefixes to other adjectives, and here favorite words are marked. Nearly half of Conradi's reports show it, but the list of words so used is small.
[Illustration: Graph showing Slang, Reading Craze, and Precision by
Age.]
Miss Williams presents on interesting curve of slang confessed as being both attractive and used by 226 out of 251. From this it appears that early adolescence is the curve of greatest pleasure in its use, fourteen being the culminating year. There is very little until eleven, when the curve for girls rises very rapidly, to fall nearly us rapidly from fifteen to seventeen. Ninety-three out of 104 who used it did so despite criticism.
Conradi, who collected and prints a long list of current slang words and phrases, found that of 295 young boys and girls not one failed to confess their use, and eighty-five per cent of all gave the age at which they thought it most common. On this basis he constructs the above curve, comparing with this the curve of a craze for reading and for precision in speech.
The reasons given are, in order of frequency, that slang was more emphatic, more exact, more concise, convenient, sounded pretty, relieved formality, was natural, manly, appropriate, etc. Only a very few thought it was vulgar, limited the vocabulary, led to or was a substitute for swearing, destroyed exactness, etc. This writer attempts a provisional classification of slang expressions under the suggestive heads of rebukes to pride, boasting and loquacity, hypocrisy, quaint and emphatic negatives, exaggerations, exclamations, mild oaths, attending to one's own business and not meddling or interfering, names for money, absurdity, neurotic effects of surprise or shock, honesty and lying, getting confused, fine appearance and dress, words for intoxication which Partridge has collected,[10]for anger collated by Chamberlain,[11] crudeness or innocent naïveté, love and sentimentality, etc. Slang is also rich in describing conflicts of all kinds, praising courage, censuring inquisitiveness, and as a school of moral discipline, but he finds, however, a very large number unclassified; and while he maintains throughout a distinction between that used by boys and by girls, sex differences are not very marked. The great majority of terms are mentioned but once, and a few under nearly all of the above heads have great numerical precedence. A somewhat striking fact is the manifold variations of a pet typical form. Twenty-three shock expletives, e.g., are, "Wouldn't that —— you?" the blank being filled by jar, choke, cook, rattle, scorch, get, start, etc., or instead of you adjectives are devised. Feeling is so intense and massive, and psychic processes are so rapid, forcible, and undeveloped that the pithiness of some of those expressions makes them brilliant and creative works of genius, and after securing an apprenticeship are sure of adoption. Their very lawlessness helps to keep speech from rigidity and desiccation, and they hit off nearly every essential phrase of adolescent life and experience.
Conventional modes of speech do not satisfy the adolescent, so that he is often either reticent or slangy. Walt Whitman[12] says that slang is "an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism and to express itself illimitably, which in the highest walks produces poets and poems"; and again, "Daring as it is to say so, in the growth of language it is certain that the retrospect of slang from the start would be the recalling from their nebulous condition of all that is poetical in the stores of human utterance." Lowell[13] says, "There is death in the dictionary, 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." Lounsbury asserts that "slang is an effort on the part of the users of language to say something more vividly, strongly, concisely than the language existing permits it to be said. It is the source from which the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed." Conradi adds in substance that weak or vicious slang is too feeble to survive, and what is vital enough to live fills a need. The final authority is the people, and it is better to teach youth to discriminate between good and bad slang rather than to forbid it entirely. Emerson calls it language in the making, its crude, vital, material. It is often an effective school of moral description, a palliative for profanity, and expresses the natural craving for superlatives. Faults are hit off and condemned with the curtness sententiousness of proverbs devised by youth to sanctify itself and correct its own faults. The pedagogue objects that it violates good form and established usage, but why should the habits of hundreds of years ago control when they can not satisfy the needs of youth, which requires a lingua franca of its own, often called "slanguage"? Most high school and college youth of both sexes have two distinct styles, that of the classroom which is as unnatural as the etiquette of a royal drawing-room reception or a formal call, and the other, that of their own breezy, free, natural life. Often these two have no relation to or effect upon each other, and often the latter is at times put by with good resolves to speak as purely and therefore as self-consciously as they knew, with petty fines for every slang expression. But very few, and these generally husky boys, boldly try to assert their own rude but vigorous vernacular in the field of school requirements.
These simple studies in this vast field demonstrate little or nothing, but they suggest very much. Slang commonly expresses a moral judgment and falls into ethical categories. It usually concerns ideas, sentiment, and will, has a psychic content, and is never, like the language of the school, a mere picture of objects of sense or a description of acts. To restate it in correct English would be a course in ethics, courtesy, taste, logical predication and opposition, honesty, self-possession, modesty, and just the ideal and non-presentative mental content that youth most needs, and which the sensuous presentation methods of teaching have neglected. Those who see in speech nothing but form condemn it because it is vulgar. Youth has been left to meet these high needs alone, and the prevalence of these crude forms is an indictment of the delinquency of pedagogues in not teaching their pupils to develop and use their intellect properly. Their pith and meatiness are a standing illustration of the need of condensation for intellectual objects that later growth analyzes. These expressions also illustrate the law that the higher and larger the spiritual content, the grosser must be the illustration in which it is first couched. Further studies now in progress will, I believe, make this still clearer.
Again, we see in the above, outcrops of the strong pubescent instinct to enlarge the vocabulary in two ways. One is to affect foreign equivalents. This at first suggests an appetency for another language like the dog-Latin gibberish of children. It is one of the motives that prompts many to study Latin or French, but it has little depth, for it turns out, on closer study, to be only the affectation of superiority and the love of mystifying others. The other is a very different impulse to widen the vernacular. To pause to learn several foreign equivalents of things of sense may be anti-educational if it limits the expansion of thought in our own tongue. The two are, in fact, often inversely related to each other. In giving a foreign synonym when the mind seeks a new native word, the pedagogue does not deal fairly. In this irradiation into the mother tongue, sometimes experience with the sentiment or feeling, act, fact, or object precedes, and then a name for it is demanded, or conversely the sound, size, oddness or jingle of the word is first attractive and the meaning comes later. The latter needs the recognition and utilization which the former already has. Lists of favorite words should be wrought out for spelling and writing and their meanings illustrated, for these have often the charm of novelty as on the frontier of knowledge and enlarge the mental horizon like new discoveries. We must not starve this voracious new appetite "for words as instruments of thought."
Interest in story-telling rises till twelve or thirteen, and thereafter falls off perhaps rather suddenly, partly because youth is now more interested in receiving than in giving. As in the drawing curve we saw a characteristic age when the child loses pleasure in creating as its power of appreciating pictures rapidly arises, so now, as the reading curve rises, auditory receptivity makes way for the visual method shown in the rise of the reading curve with augmented zest for book-method of acquisition. Darkness or twilight enhances the story interest in children, for it eliminates the distraction of sense and encourages the imagination to unfold its pinions, but the youthful fancy is less bat-like and can take its boldest flights in broad daylight. A camp-fire, or an open hearth with tales of animals, ghosts, heroism, and adventure can teach virtue, and vocabulary, style, and substance in their native unity.
The pubescent reading passion is partly the cause and partly an effect of the new zest in and docility to the adult world and also of the fact that the receptive are now and here so immeasurably in advance of the creative powers. Now the individual transcends his own experience and learns to profit by that of others. There is now evolved a penumbral region in the soul more or less beyond the reach of all school methods, a world of glimpses and hints, and the work here is that of the prospector and not of the careful miner. It is the age of skipping and sampling, of pressing the keys lightly. What is acquired is not examinable but only suggestive. Perhaps nothing read now fails to leave its mark. It can not be orally reproduced at call, but on emergency it is at hand for use. As Augustine said of God, so the child might say of most of his mental content in these psychic areas, "If you ask me, I do not know; but if you do not ask me, I know very well"—a case analogous to the typical girl who exclaimed to her teacher, "I can do and understand this perfectly if you only won't explain it." That is why examinations in English, if not impossible, as Goldwin Smith and Oxford hold, are very liable to be harmful, and recitations and critical notes an impertinence, and always in danger of causing arrest of this exquisite romantic function in which literature comes in the closest relation to life, keeping the heart warm, reënforcing all its good motives, preforming choices, and universalizing its sympathies.