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VIII

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

THE FUNCTION OF SLANG

T is characteristic of the interest which science

unworthy of consideration that philologists no longer speak of slang in contemptuous terms. Perhaps, indeed, it was not the scholar, but the amateur philologist, the mere literary man, who affected to despise slang. To the trained investigator into the mutations of language and into the transformations of the vocabulary, no word is too humble for respectful consideration; and it is from the lowly, often, that the most valuable lessons are learned. But until recently few men of letters ever mentioned slang except in disparagement and with a wish for its prompt extirpation. Even professed students of speech, like Trench and Alford (now sadly shorn of their former authority), are abundant in declarations of abhorrent hostility. De Quincey, priding himself on his independence and on his iconoclasm, was almost alone in saying a good word for slang.

There is this excuse for the earlier author who treated slang with contumely, that the differentiation of slang from cant was not complete in his day. Cant is the dialect of a class, often used correctly enough, as far as grammar is concerned, but often also unintelligible to those who do not belong to the class or who are not acquainted with its usages. Slang was at first the cant of thieves, and this seems to have been its only meaning until well into the present century. In 'Redgauntlet,' for example, published in 1824, Scott speaks of the "thieves' Latin called slang." Sometime during the middle of the century slang seems to have lost this narrow limitation, and to have come to signify a word or a phrase used with a meaning not recognized in polite letters, either because it had just been invented, or because it had passed out of memory. While cant, therefore, was a language within a language, so to speak, and not to be understanded of the people, slang was a collection of colloquialisms gathered from all sources, and all bearing alike the bend sinister of illegitimacy.

Certain of its words were unquestionably of very vulgar origin, being survivals of the "thieves' Latin" Scott wrote about. Among these are pal and cove, words not yet admitted to the best society. Others were merely arbitrary misapplications of words of good repute, such as the

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