ABOUT SLANG.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 7133, 25 June 1901, Page 2

ABOUT SLANG.

AN ECCENTRIC AND INTERESTING ESSAY. An eccentric but interesting essay, entitled "A Defence of Slang," is published by "G.K.C." in the "Speaker." The writer says: — "In the nineteenth century the aristocrats have upset entirely their one solitary utility. It is their business to be flaunting and: arrogant ; but they flaunt unobtrusively, ami tbedr attempts at arrogance are depressing. Their chief duty hitherto has been the development of variety, vivacity, and .fulness of life ; oligarchy was the world* first experiment in liberty. But now they have adopted the opposite ideal of 'good form,' -which may be defined, as Puritanism without religion. Good form has sent them all dotto black like the stroke of a funeral beiL They engage, . like Mr Gilbert's curates, w. a war of mildness, a positive competition of obscurity. In old times the lords of the earth sought above dH tilings to be distinguished from each other; with that object they erected outrageous images on their Ihelmeta, and painted preposterous colours on their shields. They wished to make it entirely clear that a Norfolk was as different, Bay, from am Argyll, as a ■white lion from a black pig. But to-dtey: their ideal is precisely t<b.e one, and if a Norfolk and wn Argyll were dressed so much' (jlike that they were mistaken, for each other they would both go home dancing with joy. "The consequences of this are inevitable. The aristocracy must lose their function of standing to the world for th© idiea of variety, experiment, and colour, and we must find these .th&nge in some other class. To ask -whether we shall find them in the middle class would be. to jest upon, sacred mattens. The only conclusion, therefore, is that it is to certain sections of the lower class, chiefly, for example, to omnibus conductors, witli their rich and rococo mod© of thought, that we must look for gui'danoe towards liberty and light. " The talk of the upper strata of the educated cksses is about the most shapeless, aimless, and hopeless literary product that the "world" hfcs ever seen. OleVly im 'this again the upper classes have degenerated." Yre have ample evidence that the' old leaders of .feudal war cofdjd speak on occasion with: a certain natural symbolism and eloquence th«t they had not gained from 'books. They could not wiite three legible letters, but they could sometime® speak literature. Douglas, when h* hurled the heart of Bruce in front of him m his last battle, cried out, 'Pass first, great heart, as thou wert ever wont.' A Spanish nobleman, when oommaroded by the king to receive «, high-placed and notorious traitor, said, ' I will receive him in all obedience, and burn down my house afterwards.' This is literature without culture; it is the speech of men convinced that have to assert- proudly the poetry of life. " Anyone, 'however, who should seek for ■such pearls in the conversation of a young man of modern Belgravia would have much sorrow in his life. The fashionable slang is hardly even a language ; ib is like the formless cries of animals, dimly indicating certain broad, well-understood states of mind. 'Bored,' 'cut up,' 'jolly,' 'rotten, and so on are like the words of some tribe of savages, whose vocabulary has only twenty of them. If a man of fashion wished to protest against some solecism in another man of fashion,' his utterance would be a mere string of set phrases, as lifeless as a string of dead fish. But an ominbus conductor (being filled with the Muse) would burst out into a solid literary .effort. 'You're a gentleman, aren't yer . . . yer boots is a lot brighter than yer «J . . . there's precious little of yer, and that's clothes . . . that's right, put yer cigar in yer. mouth, 'cos I can't see y«T be'ind it ... take it out ageo. <Ao yer ; you're young for smpkin', but , I've sent for yer mother . . . Goin'? Oh, don't run away. I won't 'arm yer. I've got a good 'art, I 'aye . . . Down with, cruelty to animals, I say,' and so on. It is evident that this mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and almost artificial sense. Keats never put into a sonnet so iraany remote metaphors a.« a cof'bsr puts into a curse ; his speech is '"". long allegory, like Spenser's 'Faerie Q.icene.' "I do not imagine that it is necessary to demonstrate that this poetic allusiveuess is the characteristic of true slang. Such an expression as ' Keep your hair on ' is posi'tiy'ely Meredithian in its perverse and mysterious manner of expressing an idea. The Anuerioans have" a well-known expression about 'swelled' head' as a description of self-approval, and the other day I heard ft remarkable fantasia upon this air. An , American said that after the Obiinese war. the Japanese wanted ' to put on their hats •with a shoe-horn.' This is a monument of the true nature of sla»g, wihicli consists in getting further and further away from.yi;he ; original conception, in treating it V»i>rß ; and. more as an assumption. It 5s rather like the literary doctrine of the Symbolists. "The real reason of this great development of eloquence among the lower ordters again brings us ba-ek to the oasei of the aristocracy in earlier times. The lower classes live in a' state of war, a war of words. Their readiness is the product of the same fiery in'divjdtralism as the readiness of the eld fighting oligarchs-. Any cabman lias to be ready with his tongue, as any gentleman of the last century had to b 3 ready with his sword. It is unfortunate that the poetry whiob 1 is developed by this process should* be purely a grotesque poetry. But as the higher orders of society have entirely abdicated their right to speak with a heroic eloquence, rt is no wondter that the language rihould develop by itself ih.the direction of a rowdy eloquence. The .essential paint is that somebody must be at -work adding new symbols and new circumlocutions to a language." .