SLANG OR IDIOM ?

Evening Star, Issue 4159, 26 June 1876, Page 3

SLANG OR IDIOM ?

A review in ' Scribner' for April of Mi«s Alcott's last book, contains the following in ' regard to "slang" :-Miss Alcott has been so especially condemned in England on this score, that it almost becomes necessary that her fellow-countrymen should make her cause, a matter for international protest. For much of the criticism is based on that extraordinary theory of our British cousins, that it is they alone who are entitled, as Parson Hugh says, "to make fritters of English." One would think that a child of 100 years old might be entitled to some voice in arranging his own vocabularly; but the theory seems still to prevail in some quarters that all new Americanisms, however indispensable, are slang, and all new Anglicisms, however uncouth, are classic. A good anecdote has lately crossed the ocean, of an American girl who was playing croquet in England last summer. " What a horrid scratch !" said she, indignantly, when her mallet failed its duty, and she missed her shot. "Oh, my dear!" said an English cousiu, " you should not use such slang expressions." "What should I have said?" anked the American. "You might have said," replied the English maiden, after canvassing her vocabulary for a perfectly unexceptional phrase; "you might have said, " What a beastly fluke!"