strikes on a new sordid metaphor for any incident in the beaten
round of drunkenness, lubricity, and debt, can set his fancy
rolling through the music-halls, and thence into the street, secure
of applause and a numerous sodden discipleship. Of the same lazy
stamp, albeit more amiable in effect, are the thought-saying
contrivances whereby one word is retained to do the work of many.
For the language of social intercourse ease is the first requisite;
the average talker, who would be hard put to it if he were called
on to describe or to define, must constantly be furnished with the
materials of emphasis, wherewith to drive home his likes and
dislikes. Why should he alienate himself from the sympathy of his
fellows by affecting a singularity in the expression of his
emotions? What he craves is not accuracy, but immediacy of
expression, lest the tide of talk should flow past him, leaving him
engaged in a belated analysis. Thus the word of the day is on all
lips, and what was "vastly fine" last century is "awfully jolly"
now; the meaning is the same, the expression equally inappropriate.
Oaths have their brief periods of ascendency, and philology can
boast its fashion-plates. The tyrant Fashion, who wields for whip
the fear of solitude, is shepherd to the flock of common talkers,
as they run hither and thither pursuing, not self-expression, the
prize of letters, but unanimity and self-obliteration, the marks of
good breeding. Like those famous modern poets who are censured by
the author of Paradise Lost, the talkers of slang are "carried away
by custom, to express many things otherwise, and for the most part
worse than else they would have exprest them." The poverty of
their vocabulary makes appeal to the brotherly sympathy of a
partial and like-minded auditor, who can fill out their paltry
conventional sketches from his own experience of the same events.
Within the limits of a single school, or workshop, or social