WHAT IS SLANG? 135 



written speech, the more careful writers brand it with inverted com- 

 mas, the barbarian earmarks which attest its social inferiority. Occa- 

 sionally a bold writer like Mr. Howells breaks down these barriers 

 which convention has set up and gives a polite slang expression the 

 stamp of his approval and authority. In this way these social outcasts, 

 the pariahs of our literary speech, are now and then elevated to the 

 dignity and rank of good society, and finally establish themselves in 

 standard English. 



Of these two classes of slang serving some useful end as feeders to 

 the vocabulary and idiom of our language by which its wasting energy 

 is to be repaired, the first embraces those archaic phrases and terms 

 which are revived after long disuse and again brought into service. 

 Eestored after several generations of neglect, they now appear to be 

 entirely new coinages and are only received as other probationers. The 

 second class is composed of absolutely new words and expressions, fre- 

 quently the product of a happy invention and, generally, racy and force- 

 ful. As instances of the first class may be mentioned to fire, in the 

 sense to expel forcibly or dismiss, bloody in the sense of very, deck in 

 the sense pack of cards and similar historic Elizabethan revivals. 

 Such locutions have a good literary pedigree, now and then boasting 

 the authority of Shakespearean usage. But this is not always apparent 

 and such long-obsolete phrases are, therefore, accounted mere parvenus. 

 For example, in King Henry VI. we read : 



Whiles he thought to steal the single ten, 



The king was slily fingered from the deck.— 3 Pr., v. 1. 



and again in Shakespeare's 144th sonnet : 



Till my good angel fire my bad one out. 



The vulgar bloody, more common in England than in America, is an 

 inheritance from the classic age of Dryden, who even uses the coarse 

 phrase ' bloody drunk ' in his Prologue to ' Southerne's Disappoint- 

 ment/ Swift furnishes a slight variation from this in ' bloody sick/ 

 occurring in his ' Poisoning of Curll.' The more fruitful province of 

 polite slang is the second class which is made up of the clever produc- 

 tions of the present age. It is from the best of these coinages, above 

 all, that the worn-out energies of our vocabulary and idiom are repaired. 

 These raw recruits of slang are severely disciplined and tested by hard 

 preliminary service. If in this test an individual slang expression 

 proves useful and is seen to fill an actual need, it is admitted eventu- 

 ally into the fellowship of standard English. But if, on the other 

 hand, its utility is not established, it is relegated to the limbo of useless 

 inventions where oblivion soon engulfs it. 



Let us now review a few specimens of the best type of our modern 

 slang. But perhaps it is safer simply to mention the alleged slang 



