American Language (111 page)

Everyone, including even the metaphysician in his study and the eremite in his cell, has a large vocabulary of slang, but the vocabulary of the vulgar is likely to be larger than that of the cultured, and it is harder worked. Its content may be divided into two categories: (
a
) old words, whether used singly or in combination, that have been put to new uses, usually metaphorical, and (
b
) new words that have not yet been admitted to the standard vocabulary. Examples of the first type are
rubberneck
, for a gaping and prying person, and
iceberg
, for a cold woman; examples of the second are
hoosegow, flim-flam, blurb, bazoo
and
blah
. There is a constant movement of slang terms into accepted usage.
Nice
, as an adjective of all work, signifying anything satisfactory, was once in slang use only, and the purists denounced it,
⁷
but today no one would question “a
nice
day,” “a
nice
time,” or “a
nice
hotel.” The French word
tête
has been a sound name for the human head for many centuries, but its origin was in
testa
, meaning a pot, a favorite slang word of the soldiers of the decaying Roman Empire, exactly analogous to our
block, nut
and
bean
. The verb-phrase
to hold up
is now perfectly good American,
but so recently as 1901 the late Brander Matthews was sneering at it as slang. In the same way many other verb-phrases,
e.g
.,
to cave in, to fill the bill
and
to fly off the handle
, once viewed askance, have gradually worked their way to a relatively high level of the standard speech. On some indeterminate tomorrow
to stick up
and
to take for a ride
may follow them. “Even the greatest purist,” says Robert Lynd, “does not object today to the inclusion of the word
bogus
in a literary English vocabulary, though a hundred years ago
bogus
was an American slang word meaning an apparatus for coining false money.
Carpetbagger
and
bunkum
are other American slang words that have naturalized themselves in English speech, and
mob
is an example of English slang that was once as vulgar as
incog
or
photo.
”
⁸
Sometimes a word comes in below the salt, gradually wins respectability, and then drops to the level of slang, and is worked to death. An example is offered by
strenuous
. It was first used by John Marston, the dramatist, in 1599, and apparently he invented it, as he invented
puffy, chilblained, spurious
and
clumsy
. As strange as it may seem to us today, all these words were frowned on by the purists of the time as uncouth and vulgar, and Ben Jonson attacked them with violence in his “Poetaster,” written in 1601. In particular, Ben was upset by
strenuous
. But it made its way despite him, and during the next three centuries it was used by a multitude of impeccable authors, including Milton, Swift, Burke, Hazlitt, and Macaulay. And then Theodore Roosevelt invented and announced the Strenuous Life, the adjective struck the American fancy and passed into slang, and in a little while it was so horribly threadbare that all persons of careful speech sickened of it, and to this day it bears the ridiculous connotation that hangs about most slang, and is seldom used seriously.

All neologisms, of course, are not slang. At about the time the word
hoosegow
, derived from the Spanish, came into American slang use, the word
rodeo
, also Spanish, came into the standard vocabulary. The distinction between the two is not hard to make out.
Hoosegow
was really not needed. We had plenty of words to designate a jail, and they were old and good words.
Hoosegow
came in simply because there was something arresting and outlandish about it — and the users of slang have a great liking for pungent novelties.
Rodeo
, on the other hand, designated something for which there was no other word in American — something, indeed, of which the generality of Americans had just become aware — and so it was accepted at once. Many neologisms have been the deliberate inventions of quite serious men,
e.g., gas, kodak, vaseline. Scientist
was concocted in 1840 by William Whewell, professor of moral theology and casuistical divinity at Cambridge.
Ampere
was proposed solemnly by the Electric Congress which met in Paris in 1881, and was taken into all civilized languages instantly.
Radio
was suggested for wireless telegrams by an international convention held in Berlin in 1906, and was extended to wireless broadcasts in the United States about 1920, though the English prefer
wireless
in the latter sense. But such words as these were never slang; they came into general and respectable use at once, along with
argon, x-ray, carburetor, stratosphere, bacillus
, and many another of the sort. These words were all sorely needed; it was impossible to convey the ideas behind them without them, save by clumsy circumlocutions. It is one of the functions of slang, also, to serve a short cut, but it is seldom if ever really necessary. Instead, as W. D. Whitney once said, it is only a wanton product of “the exuberance of mental activity, and the natural delight of language-making.”
⁹
This mental activity, of course, is the function of a relatively small class. “The unconscious genius of the people,” said Paul Shorey, “no more invents slang than it invents epics. It is coined in the sweat of their brow by smart writers who, as they would say, are
out for the coin
.”
¹⁰
Or, if not out for the coin, then at least out for notice,
kudos
, admiration, or maybe simply for satisfaction of the “natural delight of language-making.” Some of the best slang emerges from the argot of college students, but everyone who has observed the process of its gestation knows that the general run of students have nothing to do with the matter, save maybe to provide an eager welcome for the novelties set before them. College slang is actually made by the campus wits, just as general slang is made by the wits of the newspapers and theaters. The
idea of calling an engagement-ring a
handcuff
did not occur to the young gentlemen of Harvard by mass inspiration; it occurred to a certain definite one of them, probably after long and deliberate cogitation, and he gave it to the rest and to his country.

Toward the end of 1933 W. J. Funk of the Funk and Wagnalls Company, publishers of the Standard Dictionary and the
Literary Digest
, undertook to supply the newspapers with the names of the ten most fecund makers of the American slang then current. He nominated T. A. (Tad) Dorgan, the cartoonist; Sime Silverman, editor of the theatrical weekly,
Variety
; Gene Buck, the song writer; Damon Runyon, the sports writer; Walter Winchell and Arthur (Bugs) Baer, newspaper columnists; George Ade, Ring Lardner and Gelett Burgess.
¹¹
He should have added Jack Conway and Johnny O’Connor of the staff of
Variety
; James Gleason, author of “Is Zat So?”; Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist; Johnny Stanley and Johnny Lyman, Broadway figures; Wilson Mizner and Milt Gross. Conway, who died in 1928, is credited with the invention of
palooka
(a third-rater),
belly-laugh, Arab
(for Jew),
S.A
. (sex appeal),
high-hat, pushover, boloney
(for buncombe, later adopted by Alfred E. Smith),
headache
(wife), and the verbs
to scram, to click
(meaning to succeed), and
to laugh that off
.
¹²
Winchell, if he did not actually invent
whoopee
, at least gave it the popularity it enjoyed,
c
. 1930.
¹³
He is also the father of
Chicagorilla, Joosh
(for Jewish),
pash
(for passion) and
shafts
(for legs), and he has devised a great many nonce words and phrases, some of them euphemistic and others far from it,
e.g.
, for married:
welded, sealed, lohengrined, merged
and
middle-aisled
; for divorced:
Reno-vated
; for contemplating divorce:
telling it to a judge, soured, curdled, in husband trouble, this-and-that-way
, and
on the verge
; for in love:
on the merge, on fire, uh-huh, that way, cupiding, Adam-and-Eveing
, and
man-and-womaning it
; for expecting young:
infanticipating, baby-bound
and
storked
. I add a few other characteristic specimens of his art:
go-ghetto, debutramp, phffft, foofff
(a pest),
Wildeman
(a homosexual),
heheheh
(a mocking laugh),
Hard-Times Square
(Times Square),
blessed-event
(the birth of young),
the Hardened Artery
(Broadway),
radiodor
(a radio announcer),
moom-pitcher
(moving picture),
girl-mad, Park Rowgue
(a newspaper reporter) and
intelligentlemen
. Most of these, of course, had only their brief days, but a few promise to survive. Dorgan, who died in 1929, was the begetter of
apple-sauce, twenty-three, skiddoo,
¹⁴
ball-and-chain
(for wife),
cake-eater, dumb Dora, dumbell
(for stupid person),
nobody home
, and
you said it
. He also gave the world, “Yes, we have no bananas,” though he did not write the song, and he seems to have originated
the cat’s pajamas
, which was followed by a long series of similar superlatives.
¹⁵
The sports writers, of course, are all assiduous makers of slang, and many of
their inventions are taken into the general vocabulary. Thus, those who specialize in boxing have contributed, in recent years,
kayo, cauliflower-ear, prelim, shadow-boxing, slug-fest, title-holder, punch-drunk,
¹⁶
brother-act, punk, to side-step
and
to go the limit
;
¹⁷
those who cover baseball have made many additions to the list of baseball terms given in
Chapter V
;
¹⁸
and those who follow the golf tournaments have given currency to
birdie, fore, par, bunker, divot, fairway, to tee off, stance
, and
onesome, twosome, threesome
and so on — some of them received into the standard speech, but the majority lingering in the twilight of slang.
¹⁹

George Philip Krapp attempts to distinguish between slang and sound idiom by setting up the doctrine that the former is “more
expressive than the situation demands.” “It is,” he says, “a kind of hyperesthesia in the use of language.
To laugh in your sleeve
is idiom because it arises out of a natural situation; it is a metaphor derived from the picture of one raising his sleeve to his face to hide a smile, a metaphor which arose naturally enough in early periods when sleeves were long and flowing; but
to talk through your hat
is slang, not only because it is new, but also because it is a grotesque exaggeration of the truth.”
²⁰
The theory, unluckily, is combated by many plain facts.
To hand it to him, to get away with it
and even
to hand him a lemon
are certainly not metaphors that transcend the practicable and probable, and yet all are undoubtedly slang. On the other hand, there is palpable exaggeration in such phrases as “he is not worth the powder it would take to kill him,” in such adjectives as
breakbone
(fever), and in such compounds as
fire-eater
, and yet it would be absurd to dismiss them as slang. Between
blockhead
and
bonehead
there is little to choose, but the former is sound English, whereas the latter is American slang. So with many familiar similes,
e.g., like greased lightning, as scarce as hen’s teeth:
they are grotesque hyperboles, but hardly slang.

The true distinction, in so far as any distinction exists at all, is that indicated by Whitney, Bradley, Sechrist and McKnight. Slang originates in the effort of ingenious individuals to make the language more pungent and picturesque — to increase the store of terse and striking words, to widen the boundaries of metaphor, and to provide a vocabulary for new shades of difference in meaning. As Dr. Otto Jespersen has pointed out,
²¹
this is also the aim of poets (as, indeed, it is of prose writers), but they are restrained by consideration of taste and decorum, and also, not infrequently, by historical or logical considerations. The maker of slang is under no such limitations: he is free to confect his neologism by any process that can be grasped by his customers, and out of any materials available, whether native or foreign. He may adopt any of the traditional devices of metaphor. Making an attribute do duty for the whole gives him
stiff
for corpse,
flat-foot
for policeman,
smoke-eater
for fireman,
skirt
for woman,
lunger
for consumptive, and
yes-man
for sycophant. Hidden resemblances give him
morgue
for a newspaper’s file of clippings,
bean
for head, and
sinker
for a doughnut. The substitution of far-fetched figures for literal description gives him
glad-rags
for fine clothing,
bonehead
for ignoramus,
booze-foundry
for saloon, and
cart-wheel
for dollar, and the contrary resort to a brutal literalness gives him
kill-joy, low-life
and
hand-out
. He makes abbreviations with a free hand —
beaut
for beauty,
gas
for gasoline, and so on. He makes bold avail of composition, as in
attaboy
and
whatdyecallem
, and of onomatopoeia, as in
biff, zowie, honky-tonk
and
wow
. He enriches the ancient counters of speech with picturesque synonyms, as in
guy, gink, duck, bird
and
bozo
for fellow. He transfers proper names to common usage, as in
ostermoor
for mattress, and then sometimes gives them remote figurative significances, as in
ostermoors
for whiskers. Above all, he enriches the vocabulary of action with many new verbs and verb-phrases,
e.g., to burp, to neck, to gang, to frame up, to hit the pipe, to give him the works
, and so on. If, by the fortunes that condition language-making, his neologism acquires a special and limited meaning, not served by any existing locution, it enters into sound idiom and is presently wholly legitimatized; if, on the contrary, it is adopted by the populace as a counter-word and employed with such banal imitativeness that it soon loses any definite significance whatever, then it remains slang and is avoided by the finical. An example of the former process is afforded by
tommy-rot
. It first appeared as English school-boy slang, but its obvious utility soon brought it into good usage. In one of Jerome K. Jerome’s books, “Paul Kelver,” there is the following dialogue: