slight technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism, in the
common turn of speech that you employ, and in a moment you have
shaken off the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are
addressing a select audience of ticket-holders with closed doors.
A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct physical sense
given to a word that genteel parlance authorises readily enough in
its metaphorical sense, and at a touch you have blown the roof off
the drawing-room of the villa, and have set its obscure inhabitants
wriggling in the unaccustomed sun. In choosing a sense for your
words you choose also an audience for them.

To one word, then, there are many meanings, according as it falls
in the sentence, according as its successive ties and associations
are broken or renewed. And here, seeing that the stupidest of all
possible meanings is very commonly the slang meaning, it will be
well to treat briefly of slang. For slang, in the looser
acceptation of the term, is of two kinds, differing, and indeed
diametrically opposite, in origin and worth. Sometimes it is the
technical diction that has perforce been coined to name the
operations, incidents, and habits of some way of life that society
despises or deliberately elects to disregard. This sort of slang,
which often invents names for what would otherwise go nameless, is
vivid, accurate, and necessary, an addition of wealth to the
world's dictionaries and of compass to the world's range of
thought. Society, mistily conscious of the sympathy that lightens
in any habitual name, seems to have become aware, by one of those
wonderful processes of chary instinct which serve the great,
vulnerable, timid organism in lieu of a brain, that to accept of
the pickpocket his names for the mysteries of his trade is to
accept also a new moral stand-point and outlook on the question of