AS TO SUPER-SLANG.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1114, 29 April 1911, Page 9

AS TO SUPER-SLANG.

Our Englishman of the timc-honourct cheekboard suit, double-peaked cap, ant drooping tawny Moustache, woulc muuraliy be puss/Acd (says an America! exchange) to read of an angry mai who "has 'got Co the point where, ; thermometer slipped down the back o his neck v.ouid go oil' like a cap pistol.' The JOiigiislnnan's first impulse would b< to protest .against the assumption tha any clinical thermometer of/ standarc niake could really explode; but he miglii check himself in time to remark thai this must be a specimen of our verj interesting American slang. If, how eyer, you mention slang to Mr. Seivol Ford, from whose Chronicles of Torch) we have ventured to quote, a wistfu expression that has in it more of sor row than anger comes over his face To Mr. Kurd the language in which Ik has embalmed the "Weltiniscbauiig" o Shorty M'Ciiho is not slanj,', but tin l;iii!:tn'.::o of t.o-uxirroiv; or. if you in si;:, c.-illiim it .-:).■;:<•.:, t ho - hiii'/ir.igo o I he mi-i'iiphor. slang, 'i'h'-io >■, !ht mil:,-:, of cho ir.itio:

and the professions which every ono of us uses every day in the week without the least thought of doing violence to Liiulloy Hurray and Dr. Gcnung. Kvery little while a bit of technical slang—it may be actor's slang or horseman's or lighting man's—is thrown by chance into general circulation. The man- in tho street seizes upon it and in turn becomes obsessed with it; so does his oliico boy, his maid-servant, and his eldest son at college. Tho epidemic runs its course and leaves us, sometimes, with a new word for tho lexicographers to tako account of, most often with the echo of a very bad headache. "Tip" and "blizzard" may have onco been slang and are now legitimised,, but no effort of tho imagination can visualise "kiddo" or "peach" in the company of the elect. That, however, is beside the point. It is Mr. SowelPs contention that this slang of tho street stands in comparatively loose connection with tho slang of literature. That is to say, the same relationship Which we find between the vocabulary in which Professor Smith writes his boolc on Celtic origins and tho vocabulary he employs when he asks his wife to pass tho butter exists between the i, slang of the streets and tho slang of Chimmio Fadden or Shorty M'Cabe. •

jlr. Ford believes that nine-tenths of tho vocabulary that goes to make up the language of to-morrow is tho artificial creation of tiie writers who make it their medium. This will be cheering news to ■ the literary worker who finds lus powers circumscribed by the ordinary rules of rhetoric. If such a person has ever been tempted to envy the worker in slang his ability to talk tho "real" language of- the masses, he now has his consolation. The high-charged metaphor of the stage and the popular shortstory is no more "real" than the most polished bit of dialoguo in Pinero or Mrs. Wharton. It is tho function of the language of to-morrow to supply a novelty in every line and a jolt in every sentence. 'But it is plain that you cannot look for such inventive fertility in tho ordinary, office boy of commerce. Tile rule for easy reading and difficult writing holds much more true for Chuck Connors than for Robert Louis Stevenson. If any ono imagines that slang flows from the pen of its makers like persuasion from the tongue of the commercial traveller, he is at liberty to believe it.

It is the exemplification of this important truth that Mr. Ford produces his -weekly stint of Manbattanese slang in his library at Hackcnsack. It may have been while he was looking out over the Orange Mountains that Mr. Ford evolved a theory which he advances just for what it is worth. Tho theory is that Shakespeare wrote chiefly in slang. Without insisting upon any further resemblance between himself and the former hack writer for the Globe Theatre at Southward, Mr. Ford suggests that in both instances wo find an'attempt at pleasing the populace by taking their every-day coiloquialisms and giving thorn back in literature refined and developed to a very high' degree. In "Hamlet," as in the language of tomorrow, tho imagination runs amuck. Tho masses like verbal orgiesj if you can delude them into believing that they are the creators of the vernacular they listen to, so much the better..