with bad spelling by Mr. Ring W. Lardner. Here, however, the case is
altered; it is not the falseness of Mr. Lardner's spelling that is
the amusing feature of it, but the truth of it. When he writes, "dear
friend, Al, I would of rote sooner," etc., he is truer to actual
sound and intonation than the lexicon. The mode is excellent. But
the imitations will soon debase it into such bad coin that it will
fail to pass current. In England, however, the humour of bad spelling
does not and has never, I believe, flourished. Bad spelling is only
used in England as an attempt to reproduce phonetically a dialect; it
is not intended that the spelling itself should be thought funny, but
the dialect that it represents. 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