The illustration will serve our turn. It points to a class of phrases which are indigenous to various localities of the land, in which the native thought finds appropriate, bold, and picturesque utterance. And these in time become incorporate into the universal tongue. Of them is the large family of political phrases. These are coined in moments of intense excitement, struck out at white heat, or, to follow our leading metaphor, like the speakers who use them, come upon the stump in their shirt-sleeves. Every campaign gives us a new horde. Some die out at once; others felicitously tickle the public ear and ring far and wide. They "speak for Buncombe," are Barn-Burners, Old Hunkers, Hard Shells, Soft Shells, Log-Rollers, Pipe-Layers, Woolly Heads, Silver Grays, Locofocos, Fire-Eaters, Adamantines, Free Soilers, Freedom Shriekers, Border Ruffians. They spring from a bon-mot or a retort. The log-cabin and hard-cider watchwords were born of a taunt, like the "Gueux" of the Netherlands. The once famous phrase, Gerrymandering, some of our readers may remember. Governor Elbridge Gerry contrived, by a curious arrangement of districts in Massachusetts, to transfer the balance of power to his own party. One of his opponents, poring over the map of the Commonwealth, was struck by the odd look of the geographical lines which thus were drawn, curving in and out among the towns and counties. "It looks," said he, "like a Salamander." "Looks like a Gerry-mander!" ejaculated another; and the term stuck long and closely.
Now and then you have the aristocratic and democratic sides of an idea in use at the same time. Those who style themselves "Gentlemen of the Press" are known to the rest of mankind as "Dead Heads,"--being, for paying purposes, literally, capita mortua.
So, too, our colleges are provided, over and above the various dead languages of their classic curriculum, with the two tongues. The one serves the young gentlemen, especially in their Sophomoric maturity, with appropriate expressions for their literary exercises and public flights. The other is for their common talk, tells who "flunked" and was "deaded," who "fished" with the tutor, who "cut" prayers, and who was "digging" at home. Each college, from imperial Harvard and lordly Yale to the freshest Western "Institution," whose three professors fondly cultivate the same number of aspiring Alumni, has its particular dialect with its quadrennial changes. The just budded Freshmen of the class of '64 could hardly without help decipher "The Rebelliad," which in the Consulship of Plancus Kirkland was the epic of the day. The good old gentlemen who come up to eat Commencement dinners and to sing with quavery voices the annual psalm thereafter, are bewildered in the mazes of the college-speech of their grandsons. Whence come these phrases few can tell. Like witty Dr. S------'s "quotation," which never was anything else, they started in life as sayings, springing full-grown, like Pallas Athene, from the laboring brain of some Olympic Sophister. Here in the quiet of our study in the country, we wonder if the boys continue as in our day to "create a shout," instead of "making a call," upon their lady acquaintances,--if they still use "ponies,"--if they "group," and get, as we did, "parietals" and "publics" for the same.
The police courts contribute their quota. Baggage-smashing, dog-smudging, ring-dropping, watch-stuffing, the patent-safe men, the confidence men, garroters, shysters, policy-dealers, mock-auction Peter Funks, bogus-ticket swindlers, are all terms which have more or less outgrown the bounds of their Alsatia of Thieves' Latin and are known of men.
Even the pulpit, with its staid decorums, has its idioms, which it cannot quite keep to itself. We hear in the religious world of "professors," and "monthly concerts," (which mean praying, and not psalmody,) of "sensation-preaching," (which takes the place of the "painful" preaching of old times,) of "platform-speakers," of "revival-preachers," of "broad pulpits," and "Churches of the Future," of the "Eclipse of Faith" and the "Suspense of Faith," of "liberal" Christians, (with no reference to the contribution-plates,) of "subjective" and "objective" sermons, "Spurgeonisms," and "businessmen's meetings." And we can never think without a smile of that gifted genius, whoever he was, who described a certain public exercise as "the most eloquent prayer ever addressed to a Boston audience." He surely created a new and striking idiom.
The boys do, as Young America should, their share. And the sayings of street urchins endure with singular tenacity. Like their sports, which follow laws of their own, uninfluenced by meteorological considerations, tending to the sedentary games of marbles in the cold, chilly spring, and bursting into base-and foot-ball in the midsummer solstice, strict tradition hands down from boy to boy the well-worn talk. There are still "busters," as in our young days, and the ardent youth upon floating cakes of ice "run bendolas" or "kittly-benders," or simply "benders." In different latitudes the phrase varies,--one-half of it going to Plymouth Colony, and the other abiding in Massachusetts Bay. And this tendency to dismember a word is curiously shown in that savory fish which the Indian christened "scup-paug." Eastward he swims as "scup," while at the Manhattan end of the Sound he is fried as "porgie." And apropos of him, let us note a curious instance of the tenacity of associated ideas. The street boys of our day and early home were wont to term the hetairai of the public walks "scup." The young Athenians applied to the classic courtesans the epithet of [Greek: saperdion], the name of a small fish very abundant in the Black Sea. Here now is a bit of slang which may fairly be warranted to keep fresh in any climate.
But boy-talk is always lively and pointed; not at all precise, but very prone to prosopopeia; ever breaking out of the bounds of legitimate speech to invent new terms of its own. Dr. Busby addresses Brown, Jr., as Brown Secundus, and speaks to him of his "young companions." Brown himself talks of "the chaps," or "the fellows," who in turn know Brown only as Tom Thumb. The power of nicknaming is a school-boy gift, which no discouragement of parents and guardians can crush out, and which displays thoroughly the idiomatic faculty. For a man's name was once his, the distinctive mark by which the world got at his identity. Long, Short, White, Black, Greathead, Longshanks, etc., told what a person in the eyes of men the owner presented. The hereditary or aristocratic process has killed this entirely. Men no longer make their names; even the poor foundlings, like Oliver Twist, are christened alphabetically by some Bumble the Beadle. But the nickname restores his lost rights, and takes the man at once out of the ignoble vulgus to give him identity. We recognize this gift and are proud of our nicknames, when we can get them to suit us. Only the sharp judgment of our peers reverses our own heraldry and sticks a surname like a burr upon us. The nickname is the idiom of nomenclature. The sponsorial appellation is generally meaningless, fished piously out of Scripture or profanely out of plays and novels, or given with an eye to future legacies, or for some equally insufficient reason apart from the name itself. So that the gentleman who named his children One, Two, and Three, was only reducing to its lowest term the prevailing practice. But the nickname abides. It has its hold in affection. When the "old boys" come together in Gore Hall at their semi-centennial Commencement, or the "Puds" or "Pores" get together after long absence, it is not to inquire what has become of the Rev. Dr. Heavysterne or his Honor Littleton Coke, but it is, "Who knows where Hockey Jones is?" and "Did Dandy Glover really die in India?" and "Let us go and call upon Old Sykes" or "Old Roots" or "Old Conic-Sections,"--thus meaning to designate Professor----, LL.D., A.A.S., F.R.S., etc. A college president who had no nickname would prove himself, ipso facto, unfit for his post. It is only dreadfully affected people who talk of "Tully"; the sensible all cling to the familiar "Chick-Pea" or Cicero, by which the wart-faced orator was distinguished. For it is not the boys only, but all American men, who love nicknames, the idioms of nomenclature. The first thing which is done, after a nominating convention has made its platform and balloted for its candidates, is to discover or invent a nickname: Old Hickory, Tippecanoe, The Little Giant, The Little Magician, The Mill-Boy of the Slashes, Honest John, Harry of the West, Black Dan, Old Buck, Old Rough and Ready. A "good name" is a tower of strength and many votes.
And not only with candidates for office, the spots on whose "white garments" are eagerly sought for and labelled, but in the names of places and classes the principle prevails, the democratic or Saxon tongue gets the advantage. Thus, we have for our states, cities, and ships-of-war the title of fondness which drives out the legal title of ceremony. Are we not "Yankees" to the world, though to the diplomatists "citizens of the United States of America"? We have a Union made up upon the map of Maine, New Hampshire, etc., to California; we have another in the newspapers, composed of the Lumber State, the Granite State, the Green-Mountain State, the Nutmeg State, the Empire State, the Keystone State, the Blue Hen, the Old Dominion, of Hoosiers, Crackers, Suckers, Badgers, Wolverines, the Palmetto State, and Eldorado. We have the Crescent City, the Quaker City, the Empire City, the Forest City, the Monumental City, the City of Magnificent Distances. We hear of Old Ironsides sent to the Mediterranean to relieve the Old Tea-Wagon, ordered home. Everywhere there obtains the Papal principle of taking a new title upon succeeding to any primacy. The Norman imposed his laws upon England; the courts, the parish-registers, the Acts of Parliament were all his; but to this day there are districts of the Saxon Island where the postman and census-taker inquire in vain for Adam Smith and Benjamin Brown, but must perforce seek out Bullhead and Bandyshins. So indomitable is the Saxon.
We have not done yet with our national idioms. In the seaboard towns nautical phrases make tarry the talk of the people. "Where be you a-cruising to?" asks one Nantucket matron of her gossip. "Sniver-dinner, I'm going to Egypt; Seth B. has brought a letter from Turkey-wowner to Old Nancy." "Dressed-to-death-and-drawers-empty, don't you see we're goin' to have a squall? You had better take in your stu'n'-sails." The good woman was dressed up, intending, "as soon as ever dinner was over," to go, not to the land of the Pharaohs, but to the negro-quarter of the town, with a letter which "Seth B." (her son, thus identified by his middle letter) had brought home from Talcahuana.
For the rural idioms we refer the reader to the late Sylvester Judd's "Margaret" and "Richard Edney," and to the Jack Downing Letters.