[Footnote 1: Some of the isolated districts in the Kentucky mountains reveal dialects with some important differences in vocabulary and construction. These are shown most strikingly in some of the ballads of that region which have been collected by William Aspinwall Bradley, and by Howard Brockway. Rural schools and the breakdown of complete isolation will probably in time eliminate this divergence.]
The most important stabilizing influence of print, however, is its fixation of meanings. It makes possible their maintenance uncorrupted and unmodified over wide stretches in which there are phonetic variations. These variant articulations in different parts of a large country where the same language is spoken, would, if unchecked, eventually modify the sense of words. Print largely prevents this from happening. One can read newspapers published in Maine, California, Virginia, and Iowa, without noticing any significant, or, in many cases, even slight differences in vocabulary or construction. There are, of course, local idioms, but these persist in conversation, rather than in print, save where they are caught up and exploited for literary purposes by a Bret Harte, a Mark Twain, or an O. Henry.
Counter-tendencies toward differentiation. While the standard language does become fixed and stable, there are, in the daily life of different social groups, varying actual languages. Every class, or profession, every social group, whether of interest, or occupation, has its slight individuality in articulation or vocabulary. We still observe that members of a family talk alike; sometimes households have literally their own household words. And on different economic and social levels, in different sports, intellectual, professional, and business pursuits, we notice slightly different "actual" languages. These partly overlap. The society lady, the business man, the musician, the professor of literature, the mechanic, have specializations of vocabulary and construction, but there is, for each of them, a great common linguistic area. Every individual's speech is a resultant of the various groups with whom he associates. He is affected in his speech habits most predominantly, of course, by his most regular associates, professional and social. In consequence we still mark out a man, as much as anything, by the kind of language he speaks. The mechanic and the man of letters are not likely to be mistaken for each other, if overheard in a street car. Many literary and dramatic characters are memorable for their speech habits. Such types are successful when they do hit upon really significant linguistic peculiarities. Their frequent failures lie in making the language of a particular social type artificially stable. No one ever talks quite as the conventional stage policeman, stage professor, and stage Englishman talk.
These actual variations in the language, as it is used by various groups who are brought up under the same standard language, operate to prevent complete stabilization of language. Such variations are remarkably influential, considering the conservative influences upon language of the repeated and continuous suggestion made by the printed page. The language is, in the first place, being continually enriched through increments of new words and modifications of old ones, from the special vocabularies of trades, professions, sciences, and sports. Through some accidental appositeness to some contemporaneous situation, these may become generally current. A recent and familiar example is the term "camouflage," which from its technical sense of protective coloration has become a universally understood name for moral and intellectual pretense. The vocabulary of baseball has by this time already given to the language words that show promise of attaining eventual legitimacy. An increasingly large source of enrichment of the native tongue comes from the "spontaneous generation" of slang, which, starting in the linguistic whimsicality of one individual, gets caught up in conversation, and finds its ultimate way into the language. Important instruments, certainly in the United States, in spreading such neologisms are the humorous and sporting pages of the newspapers, in which places they not infrequently originate.[1] Whether a current slang expression will persist, or perish (as do thousands initiated every year), depends on accidents of contemporary circumstances. If the expression happens to set off aptly a contemporary situation, it may become very widespread until that situation, such as a political campaign, is over. But it may, like the metaphor of a poet, have some universal application. "Log-rolling," "graft," "bluff," have come into the language to stay. Roosevelt's "pussy-foot," and "Ananias Club" are, perhaps, remembered, but show less promise of permanency. "Movies" has already ceased to be a neologism, its ready adoption illustrating a point already mentioned, namely, that a variation that facilitates speech (as "movies" does in comparison with "moving pictures," or "motion pictures ") has a high potentiality of acceptance.
[Footnote 1: H. L. Mencken in his suggestive book, The American Language, sees in this upshoot of phrases indigenous to the soil and the temper of the American people, and of grammatical constructions also, symptoms of the increasing divergence of the American from the English language. That there are a large number of special expressions exclusively used in the United States, and parts of the United States, that are not found in use in England, goes without saying. Everyone knows that the Englishman says "lift" where we say "elevator," "shop," where we are likely to say "store." There are significant differences to be found even in the casual expressions of American and English newspapers. But it is doubtful whether the divergence can go very far, in view of the constant intercommunication, the rapidity of travel between the two countries, and the promiscuous reading of English books in America, and American books in England.]
Language as emotional and logical. Since language is primarily useful as an instrument of communication, it should ideally be a direct and clean-cut representation of experience. It should be as unambiguous, and immediate, as telegraphy, algebra, or shorthand. But language has two functions, which interfere with one another. Words not only represent logical relations; they provoke emotional responses. They not only explicitly tell; they implicitly suggest. They are not merely skeletons of thought; they are clothed with emotional values. They are not, in consequence, transitive vehicles of thought. Words should, from the standpoint of communication, be mere signals to action, which should attract attention only in so far as they are signals. They should be no more regarded as things in themselves than is the green lamp which signals a locomotive engineer to go ahead. They should be as immediate signals to action as, at a race, the "Ready, set, go" of the starter is to the runner. Yet this rarely happens in the case of words. They frequently impede or mislead action by arousing emotions irrelevant to their intellectual significance, or provoke action on the basis of emotional associations rather than on their merits, so to speak, as logical representations of ideas.
To take an example: England, as an intellectual symbol, may be said to be a name given to a small island bounded by certain latitudes and longitudes, having a certain distribution of raw materials and human beings, and a certain topography. It might just as well be represented by X for all practical purposes. Thus in the secret code of the diplomatic corps if X were agreed on as the symbol for England, it would be just as adequate and would even save time. But England (that particular sound) for a large number of individuals who have been brought up there, has become the center of deep and far-reaching emotional associations, so that its utterance in the presence of a particular listener may do much more than represent a given geographical fact. It may be associated with all that he loves, and all that he remembers with affection; it may suggest landscapes that are dear to him, a familiar street and house, a particular set of friends, and a cherished historical tradition of heroic names and storied places. It may arouse such ardor and devotion as Henley expresses in his famous England, my England:
"What have I done for you,
England, my England,
What is there I would not do,
England, my own?
With your glorious eyes austere,
As the Lord were walking near,
Whispering terrible things and dear,
As the song on your bugles blown,
England—
Round the world on your bugles blown!"
Words thus become powerful provocatives of emotion. They become loaded with all the energies that are aroused by the love, the hate, the anger, the pugnacity, the sympathy, for the persons, objects, ideas, associated with them. People may be set off to action by words (just as a bull is set off by a red rag), although the words may be as little freighted with meaning as they are deeply weighted with emotion.
Poets and literary men in general exploit these emotional values that cling to words. Indeed, in epithets suggesting illimitable vistas, inexpressible sorrows, and dim-remembered joys, lies half the charm of poetry.