CHAPTER I. 
PARENTAGE OF THE JARGON. 
Jargon is the speech of necessity. It is like its mother in that it 
knows not the law by which it is rigidly governed. 
A jargon is a speech of chips and fragments seized wherever found 
and used to such end as may be accomplished by brute force of sheer 
insistence. Because its origin lies in the need of simple men for the 
communication of a selection of their most simple ideas a jargon is 
rude, it is vivid, it is picturesque. Not only does it avail to show us 
to what lowest terms a superior speech may be reduced and yet serve 
as language, but it affords us a valuable insight into the machinery 
and method of the language of the more primal type which stands 
as the party of the second part in every such speech. 
For each jargon has grown into being as the speech of the marches, 
the language of the borderland. 
By this we do not mean the bilingual zone which exists along 
political boundary lines where empires of two speech families come 
together and evade the sentry and the customs officer in a friendly 
smuggling. Where a jargon arises and attains currency there must 
be a marked distinction in the cultural and in the intellectual planes 
of the two languages which march together. This speech osmosis 
is most active in the case where the relatively inferior man of the 
superior speech and culture is brought in small numbers into contact 
with larger masses of folk of the lower development but of more 
consistent average attainment to the maximum of that development. 
In other words, we are to note that the savage maintains much the 
higher average; no member of such a community falls so far short as 
to be regarded as ignorant by his fellows. Under usual social condi- 
tions this contrast of two cultures out of which jargon tends most 
readily to come into being is most commonly attained by the contact 
of our sailors with the savage or imperfectly civilized communities. 
In such cases it is well to bear in mind the classic of the scrivener— 
it is the party of the first part who doth grant, assign and convey; it 
is the party of the second part who most doth have and hold. { Our 
sailor party of the first part is of the unlettered class, he has no ) illu- 
sions about the niceties of language, his speech is not nice at all. An 
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