SLANG LORE.

Te Aroha News, Volume VIII, Issue 485, 2 July 1890, Page 6

SLANG LORE.

America has furnished us with scores of picturesque expressions—such as ‘ handing in one’s checks,’ ‘going one better,’ * laying a man out cold,’ *to play it low,’ on somebody, ‘ painting the town red,’ ‘to boss the show,’ and soon, which will probably become part and parcel of the ‘American’ literary language in time. It was the Latin of the masses that developed into the literary language of the modern Italian, the Frenchman, the Spaniard ; and with us what is slang in one age is frequently not so in another. The vocabulary of thieves is a special and really technical one, devised for specific purposes; but much of it, like that of tramps, costermongers, &c., has passed into the speech of the lower classes and has sometimes drifted upwards. The Jew (especially in London), the gipsy, and the sailor are responsible for the introduction of many foreign words ; the school and the university have furnished their share; but the bulk of the real slang words or expressions spring out of the tendency which seems to be at the bottom of the making of languages —the extension of the name of a particular object so as to embrace others, or the restriction of a classname to some particular object and the formation on well-established models of new phrases which are only slang so long as they are not taken into the literary language. The huge number of synonyms for money illustrates remarkably well the variety of sources from which our slang words are recruited, and the remarkable oppoaiteness of some of them. We mav talk of our money in scores of ways, among which are for instance, ‘the actual,’ ‘the needful,' or the ‘wherewithal:’ ‘beans,’ ‘blunt,’ ‘tin,’ or ‘brass;’ ‘chips,’ ‘dibs,’ or ‘pieces;’ ‘dust,’ ‘chink,’ or shot;’ ‘shekels,’ * spondulics,’ or ‘dollars;’ ‘stamps,’ ‘feathers,’ or palm-oil,’ which last is such an obviously appropriate name for it that ‘ shin-plaster ’ seems feeble by comparison, and the young but widely popular • oof,’ * oof-bird,’ and ‘ oof-tish,’ imbecile and insane.