Linguistic Discussions, 



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If our language had come from the upper Seine we should have had 

 jardin and not garden as the Normans called it, 'dndjarret instead of 

 the Norman garret. One moral of all this is that we should be care- 

 ful in giving a French pronunciation to English words, to make sure 

 fii-st and foremost, and not put a French coat on a lay figure of Nor- 

 man extraction. 



It is remarkable how the wear and tear of centuries have changed 

 the appearance of the sonorous words of Latin to their modern 

 dress. Thus mea domine of the Latin in the Italian comes to be inia 

 donna, then contracted still more to one word as madoma ; in the 

 French it dwindles to madame, and in the English is successively 

 madam, ma'm, mum and mem, and with a sign of affirmation is re- 

 duced to the single letter m, as yes'm. 



In French while the eye sees a goodly framework of letters reminding 

 one of the old Latin, yet the number of silent letters makes the word 

 as pronounced a very feeble representative of its original. Thus the 

 original adjective septimus is seen in the modern French as septieme, 

 but in its pronunciation, set-yem, an old Roman would hear no 

 familiar sound to tell him what the speaker intended to say. 



SLANG. 



The eastern reader of Mark Twain's account of a California miner's 

 attempt to make known his wishes to a clergyman for his services at 

 the funeral of a comrade, would suppose that the curious slang em- 

 ployed by the miner was the product of the Pacific coast. It is nearly 

 all of it, however, of English origin and older than this century. 

 Thus the slang of one age reappears in another and sometimes works 

 its way up to become good usage. A large class of uncouth words, such as 

 disgruntled, bamboozle, obstropalous, flabbergasted and skimshaunter, 

 that have been regarded by many as the outcome of Yankee humor are 

 all words that have been used as slang in England for an indefinite 

 number of generations. Gospel shop is thieves' slang for church, and 

 the parson they have dubbed indifferently, snub-devil, devil-catcher, 

 devil-driver, and tickle-text, while the parish clerk is known as the 

 amen -curler. 



In 1811 the revised edition of Grose's slang dictionary defines the 

 vford gouge as follows : *'to squeeze out a man's eye with the thumb ; a 

 cruel practice used by the Bostonians in America." And there may be 

 Englishmen still living who suppose that is yet a popular amusement 

 in Beacon street. The phrase '*to get one's back up," which I heard 

 for the first time about thirteen years ago, is at least as old as the present 

 century, and probably as old as the domestication of the cat. Fogg 



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