THE NECESSITY OF SLANG.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 11875, 23 April 1904, Page 6

THE NECESSITY OF SLANG.

Mr Andrew Lang has recently delivered himself of a weighty invective against American rlang. He has been reading Mr George Ade's book 'Tables in Slang," and is indignant at being told that its picturesque jargon, so incomprehensible to him. is nothing more than what every American child learns with its alphabet. It is certainly open to doubt whether even the trans-Atkntio "enfant prodigue" could pass an examination in such recondite terms as "a rube town," "do a Steve Brodie," "a cinch," pr "a rooter." But then every British boy is not fully versed in the language of "Wee McGregor," and }<et Mr Lang would probably not refuse hie meed of praise for that most delightful piece of humour. And certainly the leaVned critic's imagination seems at fault when he professes to be puzzled by such picturesque phrafes as "pneumatic sneakers , ' for rubber-heeled shoes, or "clothes made from a steamer rug" as a description of an English globe-trotttr's tweeds. 'Tables in Slang" is no doubt something of an un-weedc-d garden. Yet if not in the fertile fielda of slang, where is the language to grow its new shoots? Slang, in fact, is the only branch of language that is a living organism. The good English of to-day was the slang of yesterday; and the colloquialisms of to-day may be the literary diction of to-morrow. Mr Lang, perhaps, fails to realise it for the same reason that the ancients did not know they weTe ancient. Many of the expressions Mr Lang, and purkts like him, would condenmn unsparingly, have complete analogies in accepted speech. "Cheek," no doubt, is vulgar; yet "effrontery" is of precisely analogous origin. "Bike" is a vulgar and "'cycle" a colloquial abbreviation of bicycle; yet "cab" is gocd English for cabriolet. "Push" is an atrocity; yet "mob" shortened from "mobile vulgus" is based on an identical metaphor. And if we object so strongly to "rep." for "representative" in football parlance, why did we admit "miss" for "mistress" into good English speech? "Rep.," by the way, is one of the abbreviations Dean Swift anathematised in "The Tatler" in 1710; it has not yet been admitted into dignified composition, but most of the other words he protested agains£ are current English: "Mob," "bully," "sham," and "banter," for example. Caprice rather than principle seems to determine whether an expression shall or shall not be admitted into the decent society of words that are respectable. 'To jump oa a man," if not slang, ie at least exclusively colloquial; yet "insult" has precisely that meaning, "to leap upon." "Savvy," • from Spanish, for "comprehension," is excluded ; "yet "ignoramus," from Latin, for its opposite, is excellent English ; both are obviously of slang origin. I\lr Lang objects to "getting on hie curves," a metaphor fronf bassball; but Shakespeare "has made "bias" from bowb, a clastic. Oae might multiply examples indefinitely. We could scarcely dispense with such words as "salary" (the soldier's "salt-money"), "musing" (carrying one's snout in the air), or *yen the colloquial "nincompoop" (pon compos mentis). The only reliable ttet to apply to slang, apparently, is the one we apply in the last resort to idiom. Slang may be just as gcod as literary Eng'.ish, even aa bad grammar is essentially jest as good as , good grammar; in either case the "badness" depends upon its atsociation with persons. One accepts the slang of the huntsman, but not of his groom; of the actor, but not of the scene-shifter; of the squatter, but not of the roustabout. The most serious objection to clang ie that it ie "the lazy man* diakei"; its use tends to discourage nice distinctions of meaning and accurate differentiations of c-spressioa.