“HOT AIR” TALK.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXII, Issue 8924, 18 September 1907, Page 1

“HOT AIR” TALK.

There are some directions of activity in which England should he quite satisfied to allow America to pass her. Slang is one of them. The resources of American slang arc bewildering. While wo merely call slang to our aid, the Americans have expanded it into a language. Eor instance, an American export asked to defend slang did so in the following terms ; —‘ ‘ The wise guys who can sling the King’s English to a fairy frozzlo ain’t necessarily the candy kids now. It’s the gezabo with the picturesque language that hands out the conversation most folks consider all to the maraschino, and there’s a reason : Slang’s the cheese now, and it makes talking beer and skittles for all of ns. An ordinary man can cook up and hand out in a minute a bunch of intelligible talk that would take a Webster two hours fto dope out. ’ ’ According to this gentleman Disraeli tired himself unnecessarily when he said of Gladstone that ho was “a sophisticated rhetorician inebriated by the exuberance of his , own verbosity. ” Ho should have said, “when Gladstone talks ho hands himself a lemon,” or ‘‘the old man gets Jagged in Ills own grammar.” A ‘‘mndder,” ‘‘a slick article on a hard bottom,” ‘‘the also raus,” 11 the nover-could-aud-uever-would, ’’ are racecourse terms. “It is hotter to ho an ‘is now’ than a ‘lias wasser, ’” wrote Mr Elbert Hubbard, “and as for a‘not yet but sooner,’ ho always was one.” In substitutes for “my wife,” America is rich. When “Chuck” Connors, the “Mayor” of New York Chinatown, who sometimes appears before a va ndevillo audience, wished to intimate one night that Mrs Connors did not wish him to perform, he came forward and whispered dramatically, “Say. boys, me old rag tells me to quit, and I quit!” As the writer in the Daily Express to whom wo ~are indebted for these specimens, remarks, there is a pleasing air of domesticity about “my old rag.” If Mr Connors had called his wife his “bunch of skirt” or ins “kitchen canary, ’ ’ he would have been understood just as well. The slang of to-day—“hot-air” talk, they call it—will probably ho dead du ten years, hut it will he succeeded by some thing just as bad, if not worse.