But the effect, on the whole, is
tiresome. A little dose of the humour of Lancashire or Somerset or
Yorkshire pronunciation may be all right, but a whole page of it
looks like the gibbering of chimpanzees set down on paper.
In America also we run perpetually to the (supposed) humour of
slang, a form not used in England. If we were to analyse what we
mean by slang I think it would be found to consist of the introduction
of new metaphors or new forms of language of a metaphorical character,
strained almost to the breaking point. Sometimes we do it with a
single word. When some genius discovers that a "hat" is really only
"a lid" placed on top of a human being, straightway the word "lid"
goes rippling over the continent. Similarly a woman becomes a
"skirt," and so on ad infinitum.
These words presently either disappear or else retain a permanent
place, being slang no longer. No doubt half our words, if not all of
them, were once slang. Even within our own memory we can see the
whole process carried through; "cinch" once sounded funny; it is now
standard American-English. But other slang is made up of descriptive
phrases. At the best, these slang phrases are--at least we think they
are--extremely funny. But they are funniest when newly coined, and it
takes a master hand to coin them well. For a supreme example of wild
vagaries of language used for humour, one might take O.
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