At his caprice it becomes giving "the frozen face" or even "the marble heart." In the same way one may hear a garrulous person spoken of as "talking to beat the band," an obvious metaphor; or, later, "to beat the cars."
The only parallel to this in England is the "rhyming slang" of the costers, and the thieves' "patter." There a railway guard may be facetiously termed a "Christmas card," and then abbreviated to "card" alone, thence to permutations not easily traced. But English slang is, for the most part, confined to the "masses," and is an incomprehensible jargon to all else save those who make an especial study of the subject. One may sit behind a bus driver from the Bank to Fulham, and understand hardly a sentence of his colloquies and gibes at the passing fraternity, but though the language of the trolley conductor of Chicago is as racy and spirited, it needs less translation. The American will, it is true, be enigmatic at times; you must put two and two together. You must reduce his trope to its lowest terms, but common sense will simplify it. It is not an empirical, arbitrary wit depending upon a music-hall song for its origin. I was riding on a Broadway car one day when a semi-intoxicated individual got on, and muttered unintelligibly, "Put me off at Brphclwknd Street, please." I turned to the conductor and asked, "What did he want?" The official smiled. "You can search me!" he said, in denial of any possession of apprehension.
Slang in America, then, is expression on trial; if it fits a hitherto unfurnished want it achieves a certain acceptance. But it is a frothy compound, and the bubbles break when the necessity of the hour is past, so that much of it is evanescent. Some of the older inventions remain, such as "bunco" and "lynch" and "chestnut," but whole phrases lose their snap like uncorked champagne, though they give their stimulant at the proper timely moment. Like the eggs of the codfish, one survives and matures, while a million perish. The "observed of all observers" (Ophelia's delicate slang, observe) was, yesterday, in New York "the main Guy," a term whose appositeness would be easily understood in London, where the fall of the Gunpowder Plot is still celebrated. Later, in Chicago, according to George Ade, a modern authority, it became the "main squeeze," and another permutation rendered the phrase useless. It is this facility of change that makes most slang spoil in crossing the Atlantic. On the other side, English slang is of so esoteric an origin and reference, that no Yankee can translate or adopt it. It is drop-forged and rigid, an empiric use of words to express humour. What Englishman, indeed, could trace the derivation of "balmy on the crumpet" as meaning what the American would term "dotty" or "bug-house," unless he was actually present at the music hall where it was first invented?
We have at least three native languages to learn--the colloquial, the literary prose, and the separate vocabulary of poetry. In America slang makes a fourth, and it has come to be that we feel it as incongruous to use slang on the printed page as it is to use "said he" or "she replied with a smile" in conversation, and, except for a few poets, such words as "haply," "welkin," or "beauteous" in prose. Yet Stevenson himself, the purist who avoids foreign words, uses Scotch which nearly approaches slang, for there is little difference between words of an unwritten dialect and slang, such as "scrannel" and "widdershins"; while Wilkie Collins writes "wyte," "wanion," "kittle," "gar," and "collop" in with English sentences, as doubtless many questionable words of today will be honoured in the future.
Slang, the illegitimate sister of Poetry, makes with her a common cause against the utilitarian economy of Prose. Both stand for lavish luxuriance in trope and involution, for floriation and adornment of thought. It is their boast to make two words grow where but one grew before. Both garb themselves in metaphor, and the only complaint of the captious can be that whereas Poetry follows the accepted style, Slang dresses her thought to suit herself in fantastic and bizarre caprices--that her whims are unstable and too often in bad taste.
But this odium given to slang by superficial minds is undeserved. In other days, before the language was crystallized into the verbiage and idiom of the doctrinaire, prose, too, was untrammelled. A cursory glance at the Elizabethan poets discloses a kinship with the rebellious fancies of our modern common colloquial talk. For gargarism, scarab, quodling, puckfist, scroyle, foist, pumpion, trindle-tale, comrogue, pigsbones, and ding-dong, we may now read chump, scab, chaw, yap, fake, bloke, pal, bad-actor, and so on. "She's a delicate dab-chick!" says Ben Jonson; "she had all the component parts of a peach," says George Ade.
It will be seen that slang has two characteristics--humour and force. Brevity is not always the soul of wit, for today we find amusement in the euphuisms that, in the sixteenth century were taken in all seriousness. The circumlocutions will drop speedily out of use, but the more apt and adequate neologisms tend to improve literary style. For every hundred times slang attributes a new meaning to an old word, it creates once or twice a new word for an old meaning. Many hybrids will grow, some flower and a few seed. So it is with slang.
There is a "gentleman's slang," as Thackeray said, and there is the impossible kind; but of the bulk of the American product, the worst to be said of it usually is that it is homely and extravagant. None the less is it a picturesque element that spices the language with enthusiasm. It is antiseptic and prevents the decay of virility. Literary style is but an individual, glorified slang. It is not impossible for the artist; it went to its extreme in the abandon of Ben Jonson, Webster, and Beaumont and Fletcher, but, as your Cockney would say, "It does take a bit of doin'" nowadays.
The Charms of Imperfection
For a long time I have held a stubborn belief that I should admire and aim at perfection. I admitted its impossibility, of course; I attributed my friends' failure to achieve it as a charming evidence of their humanity, but it seemed to me to be a thing most properly to be desired. And yet, upon thinking it over, I was often astonished by the discovery that most of my delights were caused by a divergence from this ideal. "A sweete disorder in the dress kindleth in cloathes a wantonness!"