It adds piquancy to
conversation, as a mushroom does to a sauce. But it is no better
than a toadstool, odious to the sense and poisonous to the
intellect, when it spawns itself all over the talk of men and
youths capable of talking, as it sometimes does. As we hear flash
phraseology, it is commonly the dishwater from the washings of
English dandyism, school-boy or full-grown, wrung out of a
three-volume novel which had sopped it up, or decanted from the
pictured urn of Mr. Verdant Green, and diluted to suit the provincial
climate.
--The young fellow called John spoke up sharply and said, it was
"rum" to hear me "pitchin' into fellers" for "goin' it in the slang
line," when I used all the flash words myself just when I pleased.
--I replied with my usual forbearance.--Certainly, to give up the
algebraic symbol, because A or B is often a cover for ideal
nihility, would be unwise. I have heard a child laboring to
express a certain condition, involving a hitherto undescribed
sensation (as it supposed,) all of which could have been
sufficiently explained by the participle--BORED. I have seen a
country-clergyman, with a one-story intellect and a one-horse
vocabulary, who has consumed his valuable time (and mine) freely,
in developing an opinion of a brother-minister's discourse which
would have been abundantly characterized by a peach-down-lipped
sophomore in the one word--SLOW.
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